What Nutrition Mistakes Are You Making?

With so many food options available, being overwhelmed is understandable

We get it: Nutrition information can be overwhelming. What’s banned one year is praised the next, and labels can be misleading. So we’ve compiled this list of five common nutritional faux pas and included tips to help steer your right:

1. You’re still boiling your veggies. When you boil foods rich in water-soluble vitamins (like the Bs, C, folate), you leave most of the good stuff in the water. Drain the veggies, dump the vitamins. In fact, a Danish study found boiled broccoli retained only 45 percent to 64 percent of its vitamin C after just five minutes of boiling. Steamed broccoli kept 83 percent to 100 percent. So steam (or microwave) those vegetables.
2. You don’t shake your soy milk. Calcium in soy milk is good for your bones—it’s why you buy it in the first place. But unlike calcium in cow’s milk, which is naturally suspended throughout the liquid, most of the calcium in soy milk settles at the bottom of the carton. One study discovered soy milk delivered only 25 percent to 79 percent of the promised calcium. Give the carton a good shake every time you pour a glass of soy milk.
3. You put your bread in the fridge. You’re trying to keep that loaf fresh longer—and with the price of groceries, we don’t blame you—but placing bread in the refrigerator, where it loses moisture and gets hard, actually makes it go stale faster. If you plan to eat bread within a couple of days, place it in an airtight container or a zip-top plastic bag and store it at room temperature. For a longer-term solution, wrap the loaf in foil or plastic and place it in the freezer; freezing temperatures slow staling.
4. You use ground turkey instead of ground beef to cut back on fat. This is the right idea, if your ground turkey is made from the right cut of meat. Turkey breast is lean, with just a half gram ofsaturated fat. But dark turkey meat has 3 grams of saturated fat—which is more than the 2.5 grams found in ground beef. Some ground turkey contains both breast and dark meat. Check the label carefully.
5. You always choose sorbet over ice cream. Sorbet (frozen, sweetened fruit juice) may be light on fat, but it does have calories, mostly from added sugar. Ice cream has much-needed protein andcalcium (half a cup contains 2 grams to 4 grams of protein and 80 milligrams to 130 milligrams of calcium). And since the sugar content in sorbet and ice cream is about the same, a scoop of ice cream every now and again won’t kill you.