I happen to love to cook, but not always or every day of the week, so I understand not wanting to do it at all.
Maybe the dieticians are more wrong than we realize. And if there's no way to distinguish actual added sugar from what's already in the food itself, just say screw 'em.
I long ago came to the conclusion that dieticians are people who essentially don't care for food very much, and have almost no awareness of different flavors. If someone tells me I can substitute low fat yogurt for full fat sour cream in some recipe and I won't taste the difference, I can tell you they're wrong. I can taste the difference. These are the same people who named a product "I can't believe it's not butter!" because they honestly cannot tell the difference. I can.
Anyway, if your weight is where you want it to be eat what you want, what tastes good to you. Don't even bother to look at most labels, unless your weight starts climbing up and you haven't been slacking off the exercise.
Another one of my pet peeves is the demonization of salt. We actually need salt in our diet. It's important to maintain things like blood volume. It's my understanding that the body doesn't store it. Some people seem to be somewhat sensitive to salt in connection to their blood pressure. But essentially every study I've ever looked at (not that I've made a detailed study here) has lowered salt intake along with lowering weight, and then concludes that it's the salt that influenced the blood pressure. Really?
And the salt thing is just one of the many food items that is treated as either totally horrible and should never be consumed, of if you'd just consume this one other thing you'll never get cancer, or shingles, or any other disease. What's important is a balanced diet, eating a variety of foods. No one food will kill you (unless you're violently allergic to it which is a totally different scenario) and no one food will cure you of anything. Unless you're seriously deficient in some nutrient and that food has huge amounts of it. Again, something else entirely.
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