High fat?
Low sugar?
No additives?
High protein?
Honestly I don't know, I don't think anyone does, and for that reason as far as I'm concerned there are very few unhealthy foods out there. In my opinion most foods in appropriate quantities are acceptable.
Except for soft drinks, they're just evil
What I can advise you on is whether or not the consumption of a certain type of food is likely to be beneficial in achieving your goal.
An example:
A client interested in improving body composition recently asked why we asked her to keep fruit intake to a minimum. I thought maybe there might be others who are interested, so here it goes.
If you've read previous posts then you are probably aware of the impact of insulin sensitivity and fat loss. Basically the less sugar that goes into your system the more insulin sensitive you become, and therefore the more fat you should lose. This is a simplistic view of the process but if you would like more info then click here.
Take this common example, look at the nutritional information of an apple, it is almost entirely composed of carbohydrate, and so yes even though it is low in fat and it's got lots of vitamins in it, that doesn't mean it's good for losing weight.
In fact a large apple has 23 grams of sugar in it, that's almost as much as a Cadbury's Creme Egg (25grams).
They're the facts. If you are on a low carbohydrate diet, because you're reducing insulin resistance, keeping fruit intake to minimum makes sense. But there is so much more to fruit than just sugar.
Let's take the same apple; over half of the sugars in the apple are fructose. Good news! Fructose doesn't require insulin to get absorbed by your muscles. This means that no matter how much fructose you eat, you will never lose insulin sensitivity. Perfect.
Not quite, as always there's a catch.
Above is how the cell manages the glucose you eat in the absence of fructose.
As you can see, at the top of the crudely drawn diagram glucose in the blood is being transported into the cell due to the presence of insulin. After which it is being metabolised and producing energy. Great news.
However when fructose is present, it slows down the metabolism of glucose or even reverses it, leaving the glucose to sit in the blood. While the fructose is being dealt with, increasing insulin pressure means glucose has nowhere to go other than into fat tissue.
Not good.
Fructose metabolism also directly increases the release of fats into the blood, which means even more fat tissue.
Even worse.
This all sounds pretty awful, but the good news is that from the amount of sugar in an apple, the effects are going to be small. In fact you may not even notice. What you may notice is that it is that your fat loss is not as good as it should be.
So, to make it as easy as possible to lose fat, moderate the fruit.
Where you will find a significant effect is in soft drinks. They contain a huge amount of high fructose corn syrup, which as you can guess from the name, contains a lot of fructose.
So, we've come full circle. As I said, soft drinks are evil.
Refs
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