Nutrition Nuggets Surprising Health Facts About Food

No, all nuts are not created equal. Candy coated snacks aren't necessarily disastrous nutritional choices. And surprise milk labeled "low fat" can contain more butterfat than buttermilk. Confused? Don't be. Just take your reading glasses to the grocery store (so you won't miss the fine print on the labels). And take a gander at the following food facts because most of the time, you just can't judge the health value of a food by its label, looks, or reputation. You simply have to know. Roasted chestnuts make great diet snacks, with less than 5 percent of their calories from fat. Macadamia nuts, on the other hand, deliver 95 percent of calories in fat albeit most is monounsaturated. Oil popped popcorn can be 45 percent fat, even if it's not buttered! Caramel coated popcorn (usually air popped) gets only 7 percent of its calories from fat. Spinach is considered a good source of iron, but less than 2 percent of it is bioavailable; that means up to 98 percent of the iron in the plant cannot be readily absorbed by the body. By drinking orange juice with your meals, you can boost your body's absorption of iron from plant foods by as much as 400 percent, because vitamin C, which is abundant in oranges, enhances iron's bioavailability. Red peppers have almost 1½ times more vitamin C than green and almost 11 times as many carotenoids, which your body converts to vitamin A. Chasing an iron rich dinner with a cup of coffee or tea can reduce your body's absorption of the mineral by 40 to X5 percent. The culprit, apparently, is the tannin in tea and coffee, which binds iron. In terms of vitamin C content, oranges pale in comparison to black currants. One half cup of black currants has almost 1½ a times the vitamin C of an orange. Ounce for ounce, cauliflower also has more vitamin C than oranges. In fact, just 1 cup of cauliflower delivers more than your daily requirement. Pink or ruby red grapefruit contains up to 26 times more carotenoids than the white variety. Tofu, a high-protein soybean curd, actually contains more than half of its calories in fat. The good news is that, unlike animal protein, which can be high in saturated fat and cholesterol, tofu is mostly monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fat with no cholesterol. Not all pork products are as fatty as you might think; lean pork tenderloin gets only 26 percent of its calories from fat. Not all turkey products are as lean as you might think. While skinless turkey breast has less than 5 percent fat calories, turkey bologna and franks can contain up to 70 percent of their calories in fat. A 3½ounce serving of roast venison has fewer calories and fewer calories from fat than roasted skinless chicken breast. Trimming visible fat from meat and skinning poultry can cut the saturated fat content by more than one half; inter estingly, however, it has very little effect on the cholesterol content. Shellfish are generally high in cholesterol but surprisingly low in saturated fat; four large raw shrimp, for example, tip the scale with 152 milligrams of cholesterol but a scant! of a gram of saturated fat. Even though it sounds rich, buttermilk has less fat per serving than 1 percent low fat milk. Two percent low fat milk is 2 percent fat by weight, but actually contains 35 percent of calories from fat; 1 percent low-fat milk is about 23 percent fat calories. Less than 5 percent of the calories in skim milk come from fat. An ounce of fudge has about half the fat of a I ounce brownie.