I’m JJ Virgin, Ph. D. dropout, sorry mom, turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I’m a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe, but I’m driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions.

Digging for answers and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can. And that’s why I created the Well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we’ll talk about what’s working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism, to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness.

Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100.

You’ve been lied to your whole life about what’s actually healthy. That granola bar you think’s a good snack? It’s a sugar bomb in disguise. And that green juice you chug for the nutrients? Green sugar water that goes straight to your waistline. Even seemingly safe staples like yogurt, oatmeal, and popcorn could be sabotaging your health without you realizing it.

So I’m going to share the worst food imposters that the industry is trying to pass off as nutritious. If you’ve been eating any of these under the delusion that they’re healthy, watching this could be the wake up call that saves your life. First up, green drinks. These, honestly, are fruit juice in disguise.

Many green drinks contain a lot of fruit because otherwise they taste too green. There was a 2015 systematic review and meta analysis that was published in the British Medical journal, like big journal that showed that each additional serving of fruit juice each day can increase your risk of developing type 2 diabetes by about seven percent.

That was after they adjusted for body fat and other factors. And that’s because you’re getting this big fructose hit. Think about when you’re drinking fruit juice, you basically unwrap the fruit and took out the fiber and slammed yourself with the sugar. So don’t think the green drinks are Here’s the challenge with the green drinks and I have two right here and I’m gonna show you options.

So this one I love to pick on. This is Naked’s Green Machine because here it says, flavored blend of five juices partially from concentrated with added ingredients and other natural flavors, no sugar added. You would think this looks great. It says Green Machine, but here’s the deal. When you go look over here, Guess what?

The first ingredient is apple juice. By the way, apple juice is higher in fructose than any other fruit. Apple juice concentrate, um, is going to give you more fructose. It’s like just a fructose bomb. So this says the first one’s apple juice, the next one mango, the third one Pineapple. The fourth one, banana.

The fifth one, kiwi. And then we get into the veggies. So here we have in this one bottle, 270 calories. And you know how much sugar is in here? 53 grams. More than a soda. Now I like evolution. Fresh, and they’ve got a greens, essential greens that actually has lemon or lime, which is fine and no fruit. This one, however, is not that.

This one still has 35 grams of sugar in it in this tiny little 11 fluid ounce bottle. Because again, when you flip it over and you look at the ingredients, the first ingredient is apple, orange, mango, pineapple, and then we get into the others. Because you know what? Straight greens don’t taste very good.

That’s the reality. Um, but again, you can look for essential greens. Look for a green drink that is made with greens. And if they use any fruit, it’s lemon or limes because they got no fructose in them. Here’s some other options. Here’s bloom, which you can use one of the dried greens powders. So this one is great.

Bloom. And then the other thing is doing a lemon drink. I love this. I’m totally hooked on this Suja Lemon Lub. It’s lemon, stevia, and cayenne. And it is great for lowering blood sugar response to the meal. And the cayenne’s a little metabolic booster. So there it is. Toss the green drinks unless they’re really just greens.

All right, next up, is fruit on the bottom yogurt. These are sundaes in disguise. According to a 2014 report from the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, Yoplait original yogurt contains 26 grams of sugar per serving. That’s more than 6, 000 teaspoons of sugar, which surpasses the American Heart Association’s recommendation for women’s total daily consumption.

So let’s look at this. Let’s go through, shall we, and see how much sugar are in these. So, wee is Yoplait, by the way. They just made it fancy and put it into glass. And this little wee yogurt here, wee, And by the way, they’ve made it really, really hard to read. This one has 19 grams of sugar, 14 grams of added sugar.

So, there’s wheat, there’s noosa, blueberry noosa made with wild blueberries, and they call it finest yogurt. This thing has 10 grams, total 18 grams of sugar, 10 grams of added sugar. And then finally, just the store bought Publix fruit on the bottom here has 29 grams of sugar including 22 grams of added sugar in this little tiny cup.

Contrast that. for either, if you do eat dairy, getting just a greek style yogurt. And check out this plain greek style yogurt. It has five grams of sugar with no added sugar in it. Or I will use Siggy’s coconut yogurt with extra protein, and it’s got four grams of sugar. So easy swaps, and you know what you can do instead?

You All you need to do instead is take some fruit and put it on top. Then you won’t get that syrupy, fruity, loaded with sugar stuff that literally turned your yogurt, your good thing, into a sundae. Next step! Sweetened instant oatmeal. So there’s all sorts of bad on this one. First of all, it got extra sugar in it.

So let’s just look. We’ve got Quaker Oats Instant Oatmeal. Instant, you know, the problem with instant, it also means the fiber just went way down. So here we have three grams of fiber. We have 14 grams of sugar, which is 14 grams. of added sugar. So 180 calories here. What about Bob’s? Because I really like Bob’s.

It’s gluten free. This is naturally flavored brown sugar and maple. Of course, we know naturally means nothing. So in here we have seven grams of fiber. And we have 10 grams of sugar, 9 grams are added. Contrast that, and by the way what’s cool here is nothing artificial in either of these, so at least we have that going for it.

So no artificial nothing, but lots of extra sugars. And the other challenge with these things is you’re not going to get the fiber you would get from something that’s more slow cooking, right? So what’s the easy thing to do here? Use the real stuff. I always look for one that’s gluten free, and oats don’t have gluten, but they are processed in plants with gluten, so that’s why you want gluten free.

But here we have no added sugars and five grams of fiber, so you can get more fiber. You’re not going to get the sugar. And, you know, the other issue with a lot of these ones is that they have artificial additives, like the colors and flavors, and they’ll cross contaminate with gluten, gluten again. Oats are gluten free, but they’re in these facilities that have gluten containing grains with them, so they will get contaminated with them.

If you love the sweet, use some allulose. If you like the cinnamon, You can just add some in. If you want some fruit, don’t go dried. Go with something like blueberries on top, right? And we don’t want to do the quick oats. We want to do the oats that take a while to cook because they’re going to have more fiber.

The quick oats are higher glycemic, right? They’ve been refined. They’ve lowered the fiber. Then they have a bigger blood sugar hit because they took instant oatmeal and they just. Cut it down. They’ve made the surface area smaller, which means it digests a lot quicker. That is not good for you. That is not what we want.

We do not want things that are easily digestible, right? We want to make your body work for it. There was a 2015 systematic review in the British Journal of Nutrition that looked at different types of processed oats and their impact on blood sugar and they measured this with the glycemic index and they looked at that 72 different tests from various studies and here’s what they found.

Steel cut oats and large flake oats have a low to medium glycemic index. That means a low impact on your blood sugar. Quick cooking oats and instant oatmeal has a high GI and raises your blood sugar more than these lower processed oats. Smaller oat particles and more processed oats tend to increase blood sugar more due to the changes in the swabs.

in the starch. So what do you do? Use the real stuff. And one of the things that I love, and we’ll put the, uh, put this in the show notes, are overnight oats. Such an easy thing to do. Take steel cut oats, use your favorite type of milk, whether it’s coconut or flax or whatever the one is you tend to do. You can add in some protein powder to pump it up, and maybe some nuts, a couple blueberries, and you’ve got an amazing easy breakfast with fiber, no sugar added, and some protein too.

Next up, microwave popcorn. Full disclosure, I love popcorn. We were playing the what would you have for your last meal game here at the house one night. It was supposed to be a judgment free zone and um, I will tell you that I got pounced on when I said okay, my last meal is going to be popcorn with a lot of butter.

However, I’ll tell you how I would do popcorn if I was eating it, but the reality is I don’t do popcorn because it’s a massive trigger food for me. So what’s the deal with Microwave popcorn. Well, so many things can be an issue here. First of all, a lot of the microwave popcorn have artificial flavorings and additives to make them taste better and smell better.

So what could that be? Artificial butter flavorings. Those can contain something called diacetyl, and that is a compound that’s been linked to respiratory issues when inhaled in large amounts. I think you probably, I remember that whole thing with the, popcorn bags and I’m talking about this. The other one are trans fats.

Some of these microwave popcorn brands use partially hydrogenated oils for that butterly, buttery flavor and texture. And then of course those can increase your risk of heart disease and other health problems. And then chemical coatings because the bags themselves are often lined with something called perfluoroactonic acid, um, PFOA, or perfluoctane sulfonate, PFOS.

Bad news. You know what? Here’s the deal. If you can’t pronounce it, you should not be ingesting it. And if it’s in the bag, it’s in you. And these chemicals that are preventing the popcorn from sticking and promoting heating are also creating a lot of problems, a lot of adverse health effects, including hormone disruption and potential carcinogenicity.

Now the other one is they have a lot of sodium. They’re heavily salted and it’s not sea salt. And there’s also a risk of aflatoxins because one of the issues with corn is it can be a very moldy crop and aflatoxins are these toxic compounds that are produced by certain molds. They’re found in peanuts and corns especially and they have been linked to cancer and liver damage in a suppressed immune system.

And then finally, like I was saying before, Popcorn is my drug of choice. It is my trigger food. And I know I’m not alone here because I go to the movies. I see those people with the endless buckets. There’s like, why would you have to have an endless bucket of popcorn if it wasn’t a trigger food for people?

And what do we know? Consuming those endless buckets of popcorn can lead to excessive calorie intake and potential weight gain. In fact, there was a study, 2005 clinical trial, that was published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, and they involved 158 moviegoers who were either given a medium or large container of fresh or stale free popcorn.

Average age of participants, 28. 7 years, 57. 5 percent were male. And after the movie, the researchers measured their popcorn consumption and their perceived taste. Now the moviegoers with the fresh popcorn consumed 45 percent more when they were served in the large containers than the medium ones. And even with stale popcorn, participants ate 33.

6 percent more in the large containers than from the medium ones. And that shows you that significant impact, the impact of these container sizes and that like, we’ll just keep eating popcorn. I know I will. So if you’re going to do it yourself, You get organic popcorn, you pop it in coconut oil, and then you use ghee and sea salt.

If you can control yourself. I literally can’t. I’ll make that. And I am like a little piggy with that. So again, trigger food, too much healthy foods, unhealthy. All right. So I would say absolutely avoid the microwave popcorn, the movie popcorn, but probably you just need to avoid it altogether. Alright, you may not like me saying this, but the deal is dried fruit.

Consider it candy. First of all, dried fruits are a naturally rich source of fructose. Fructose, right? Because fruits contain fructose. This is natural in fruits, but eating high fructose foods can contribute to weight gain, especially visceral adiposity, insulin resistance, and a whole host of other problems.

Now, when you dry fruits, you’re getting rid of the water. So what do you have? Sugar, a concentration of it, which makes it easy for you to over consume that sugar. And then you consume too much sugar, guess what? You got a whole bunch of health risks that go along with it. So let’s talk portion control. I mean, there are some benefits with dried fruit, rich in magnesium, rich in fiber, rich in, antioxidants, but they taste like candy.

So it’s really easy to lose your mind on them. I’ve got some dried mangoes and dried apricots right here, but boy, I don’t know if you’ve tried any kind of dried pineapple. Literally candy. So there was this 2020 randomized controlled trial published in the British Journal of Nutrition that found that daily consumption of a large portion of mixed dried fruits, things like plums and figs and dates and raisins, negatively Impacted cardiometabolic health markers, heart, blood vessels, and metabolic markers in adults with increased risk.

Specifically, dried fruit increased LDL cholesterol and fasting glucose levels compared to baseline measurements. These increases suggest that dried fruit might worsen certain cardiometabolic risk factors such as bad cholesterol and blood sugar levels, which are linked to heart disease and diabetes. So what do you do instead?

You don’t eat dried fruit. You eat fresh fruit or frozen fruit. I’ll give you a couple of things. I mean, I love blueberries and blackberries. We always have them in the fridge, but my husband loves grapes. What he does is he will freeze red grapes, and then I’ll just have a couple of those. So I do freeze dried fruit, a little bit of that, frozen fruit, or fresh fruit, swap that out for that dried fruit.

And finally, coffee drinks. Oh my gosh, I still remember when I tried to convince myself that the Frappuccinos were okay because they were fat free. Frappuccinos, lattes, all of these are sugar bombs, and a lot of times they will also have dairy in them as well, which can be problematic if you have a dairy intolerance, especially since it’s things like And of course, you’ll often find artificial colors and flavorings and preservatives so that you can keep them on the shelf for a long time.

There was a 2013 observational study that was published in Physiology and Behavior that found that high calorie beverages, like sugar, sweet, and coffee drinks, contribute significantly to daily energy. But here’s what’s the problem. They don’t provide satiety. Overweight and obese women who consume high calorie beverages had higher overall daily energy intake compared to those who consumed low calorie drinks.

So let’s just go through what’s in this and I’m going to show you what else you can do. So this is Starbucks vanilla latte. And by the way, 12 ounces of this is nearly 200 calories. And 30 grams of sugar in it. Yep, and here’s a, just a double shot of energy vanilla. Same thing here, 29 grams of sugar in it.

So what can you do instead if you really love, love, love your coffee drinks? And I’m going to do a shout out to my buddy Jonathan who created this living ratio cacao calm product. So here’s what you can do. You love that iced mocha. Take a little bit of an organic cold brew and put it over ice and put in some cacao calm.

Oh my gosh, this stuff is so delicious. 25 calories for a serving, adaptogenic mushrooms, no sugar. So here’s the thing. You can still do these wonderful, yummy coffee drinks. You just aren’t going to do the process once. You’re going to save money when you do this, and you can make them therapeutic and nutritional by adding something like a chocolate adaptogenic mushroom thing.

And if you want a little yummy on top, like you go to Starbucks and you see them throwing all the whipped cream on top, try So Delicious Coco Whip, because that is an easy way to get it amazing.

Be sure to join me next time It’s time for more tools, tips, and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life to ensure you look and feel great and are built to last. Check me out on Instagram, Facebook, and my website, jjvirgin. com. And make sure to follow my podcast at subscribetojj. com so you don’t miss a single episode.

And hey, if you’re loving what you hear, don’t forget to leave a review. Your reviews make a big difference in helping me reach more incredible women just like you to spread the word about aging powerfully after 40. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll catch you on the next episode.

Hey, JJ here. And just a reminder that the Well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness, and nutritional information That’s designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for, nor does it replace, professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.

If you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional. Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid, or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes.

The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.
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