The secret to looking your best is to live a healthy life. If you're healthy, you'll look good in anything. So it comes as a surprise that so many people choose not to live a healthy life. And it's no secret why. As a society, we eat more than we should. Or do we?

Recently, a friend of mine recommended that I watch "That Sugar Film". It is an Australian documentary from film maker Damon Gameau. Being a health nut, I have been known on occasion to have commented on others eating too much fatty foods. However, I soon discovered that I was being somewhat unfair in my opinion. 

What I learned from "That Sugar Film" was really quite an eye opener. 

The premise of the documentary was that the long held belief that all calories were the same wasn't true. For example, a calorie of celery is regarded the same as a calorie of bacon, a calorie of cake or even a calorie of candy. But to my surprise, that wasn't the case, because calories acted differently depending on what kind of food it came from.

Long story short, a calorie of sugar was worst than a calorie of protein, fat, or fiber.

Of course, that revelation isn't exactly shocking. What is shocking is discovering how prevalent sugar is in our diet. For the most part of the last forty years, the food industry has been adding sugar to prepared and processed foods. In fact, 80% of all the food product you find in any supermarket has some kind of added sugar. And it's not just in the usual suspects, like candy, fizzy drinks, and ice cream. Added sugar is also found in so-called healthy low-fat foods.

So the orange juice you drink in the morning, and the breakfast cereal - all supposedly healthy foods - well, they are just as bad as soda and candy. But what makes those supposedly healthy food more dangerous is the fact that people eat more of it without understanding the consequences or understanding that it really isn't healthy at all.

To prove that so-called healthy low fat foods are unhealthy, Damon Gameau underwent an experiment. For a period of sixty days, Mr. Gameau was tasked with the challenge of eating his normal caloric requirement in foods that are considered healthy and low fat. To be clear, he wasn't eating more in terms of calories, nor was he binging on candy and soda. What he ate is what you would characterize as healthy, like juice, low fat yoghurt, and cereal.

SPOILER ALERT

You know where this is going. After 60 days, Mr. Gameau gained fifteen pounds eating no more in calories than what he normally eats. The only difference that caused his weight gain was the foods he ate. Unlike the natural unprocessed foods that Mr. Gameau normally eats, the added sugar in the processed so-called healthy foods made him fatter. It was shocking to see how quickly his metabolic, mental, and physical health deteriorated.

I recommend that everyone go and see this movie. It is well worth it. You will never look at so-called healthy low-fat processed food the same way again.