Trade Your Favorite Vices for Healthier Versions
If you enjoy a daily vice, such as coffee, sweets or even cigarettes, consider switching out your usual brand for a healthier version. Often, what’s bad about your favorite product isn’t the product itself; it’s the additives required to create the product, such as the high fructose corn syrup in candy or the carcinogenic smoke in cigarettes.
This week, give a healthier option a try. Food companies are working hard to develop new versions of your favorite products that provide all of the flavor and benefits without any of the unhealthy additives.
Coffee Drinkers
Coffee is the favorite legal drug of many adults. Although coffee includes many health benefits, such as increased focus and endurance as well as a potential reduced risk of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, drinking too much coffee causes jitters, nerves, and irritability.
In addition, people who prefer their coffee with sugar and cream often take in an extra 100-200 calories per cup. If you prefer flavored coffee beverages like Starbucks’ White Chocolate Mocha, you’re drinking 600-800 calories – as much as a typical meal! Considering that people often drink multiple cups, keeping caffeine levels high to prevent the eventual crash, coffee quickly becomes an unhealthy, fattening beverage.
What’s the best way to get your coffee fix while minimizing the caloric intake and the caffeine jitters? Look for an organic, dark roast. Organic roasts ensure you have a coffee grown and produced without additives, pesticides or chemicals, while dark roasts are the highest in health-enriching antioxidants. Try different brands until you find one that is so flavorful that you can drink it black; after all, although there are many health benefits of coffee, there are very few health benefits of drinking two packets of sugar per cup! Many organic coffee retailers are solving this problem by engineering smooth, flavorful, delicious coffees that taste great black and goes down smooth.
Cigarette Smokers
Smokers are well aware of the health hazards of their daily cigarette habit. However, electronic cigarettes, or ecigs, provide the nicotine rush without the dangerous smoke that is so closely linked to lung cancer, emphysema, and other diseases.
Electronic cigarettes contain no smoke; instead, these cigarettes quickly heat liquid nicotine, creating a breathable vapor that provides the benefit of cigarettes without the unhealthy smoke. Electronic cigarettes are good choices for anyone who wants a healthier smoking experience, as well as anyone who wants to smoke in a car or at home without polluting the general area with cigarette fumes. Unlike cigarettes, ecigs do not leave a lingering smoke residue on furniture or clothing, nor do they expose family, friends, or pets to dangerous secondhand smoke. Many people have used ecigs to limit their exposure to carcinogens or even as a step in the road to quitting smoking.
If you have already given ecigs a try, Victoryecigs.com is running a promotion in which you can trade one of your ecigs for one of theirs. Make sure to read up on the environmental benefits of the Victory brand, and make the switch to electronic cigarettes for both your health and the health of those around you.
Sweet Teeth
If you have a notorious sweet tooth, you probably can’t imagine getting through the day without your sugar fix. A single cookie or candy bar isn’t necessarily bad, but people with serious sweet teeth find themselves eating a cookie, a piece of cake, or a scoop of ice cream after every meal – plus an extra one at 2 p.m. for a snack.
The other problem with sweets is that store brands are often packed with additives and filler. Yes, there is the much-maligned high fructose corn syrup, but many popular snacks and desserts also contain artificial colors, artificial flavors, and even non-food items like wax. Sweets require a lot of processed, unnatural ingredients to stay fresh and moist for months on a grocery store shelf, and those are as bad for your body as the fats and sugars.
If sweets are your vice, switch to healthier alternatives like UNREAL candy bars or organic gummy bears. These healthy candies are made without artificial flavors, binders or any of the other processed ingredients of other candies, so they taste sweeter with less sugar. They also have fewer calories than their processed equivalents, but that doesn’t mean you should eat more of them to make up the difference! Do your sweet tooth a favor and give natural, organic candy products a try.
These aren’t the only healthier versions of unhealthy products. People who enjoy crunchy snacks can switch to baked or popped versions of their favorite chips; if you’re a hamburger and French fry addict, you can recreate your favorite meal by hand-baking your fries and cooking hamburgers on a grease-free grill. It’s the little things that improve your health – and in this case, you are able to improve your life while still enjoying your favorite treats.
What are your favorite healthy alternatives? Have you tried ecigs or UNREAL candy bars? Let us know in the comments.
Guest post by Becky W.
