Have you felt the fitness wave lately? Gym subscriptions are on a yearly high, everyone suddenly has a fitness tracker, and bar conversations are now gym conversations.

Of course, none of it matters if you’re not eating healthy, knowing all the adverse effects of eating unhealthy food. Knowing how to avoid unhealthy food is as much a part of it as knowing which healthy foods to go for. Think you have it all figured out? These top supposed ‘health foods’ turn into the top unhealthy foods quite fast if you dig a bit deeper.

Fruit Juice

Packaged fruit juices sound like perfectly acceptable alternatives to move to when you want to detox from your excessive drinking schedules, and they sound like a good deal on paper.

In case you didn’t know, a lot of packaged juices are actually just chemicals made to replicate the taste of the fruit, along with tons of added sugar (and no, the attractive packaging, just like for everything else ever, doesn’t mean it’s better). For the know-it-alls who say that ‘duh, have fresh juice, it’s healthier’, they forget that most fruit without its fiber is nothing but sugar, as yes, sugar is a naturally occuring substance especially abundant in fruit. Just eat an apple.

Granola

No matter how the food companies market it or what percentage of healthy it says it’ll magically make you on its packaging, granola is often more harm than good to your already fledgling body health, at least if you’re as old as we are.

That’s because packaged granola is usually - in almost all cases, unless you happen to discover the three ethical granola-making corporations there are in the world - quite full of sugar, which is often disguised into euphemisms like ‘evaporated cane juice’ (seriously come on with that one). Many studies have found unhealthy amounts of sugar in packaged granola products but it can be healthy if made at home or is a low-sugar variety.

Sports Drinks

If you bother to wake up around the time the gym types are the most active, you’d spot a lot of them carrying around bottles of fancy sports drinks, much like athletes do. Despite their workouts being ridiculously low-key compared to that of an athlete, they tend to think that electrolytes (basically essential salts) and liquid sugar will afford them the same healing benefits as the athletes. And they couldn’t be more wrong.Sports drinks are immensely helpful to people who work out for a living, like bodybuilders, as they contain the salts and sugars that they consistently lose on the field on a good day of practice. For the rest of us though, these drinks contain absolutely no benefits over the regular fizzy sodas, and contain almost an equal amount of sugar. We have no use for the salts, either, as 20 seconds of planks hardly make you need them.

Agave Nectar

Studies upon studies have proven the negative effects of sugar on the human body, and the more you read up on it, the scarier it gets.

One of the sugar alternatives, aAgave nectar, has been gaining quite a bit of popularity, as sweet is still quite an awesome flavour to have in food. Unfortunately, though, studies have proven that this might be worse. While the Agave plant does have some health benefits, by the time it’s made into a syrup, it actually has around 85% of fructose (the same chemical in sugar we try to stay away from, and that only has about 50%).

Dried Fruits

We’re not sure who told health fanatics to start looking for alternatives to good ol’ fruit, but here we are.

Dried fruit is one of the food supplements that’s not just useless as an alternative, but is actually much worse than it (as far as the list of surprisingly unhealthy foods goes). As it’s dried, it contains about three times more calories than if you were just having its fruit version. Some particularly problematic varieties like banana chips contain as much as 20% more fat than regular bananas! We’d suggest just not bothering with any of the drying and directly going for the fruit itself.

Trail Mix

While it’s true that homemade trail mixes may have some health benefits, the packaged varieties are usually full of chocolates and other candy-type stuff, and may end up having upto 300 more calories than what you were intending to consume. They may be good for the intense workouts where you’re burning a lot of calories, but even then, other calorie supplements will do a better job.