As you go about your diet plan, one thing that you might  start to debate is which is worse – salty or sugary foods?  You’re making sure to watch how much dietary  fat you consume and are keeping your calories in check, but if you are going to  give in and cheat a little, which foods are the worst to cheat with?

Which foods are going to have the most damage to your weight  loss efforts?

Let’s take a look at some of the important things that you  need to know with regards to the salt versus sugar debate.

The Sugar Factor

One of the biggest issues with high sugar foods is the fact  that they will spike your blood glucose levels, which will only cause your  insulin levels to increase.  As this occurs and insulin floods into your system, it’s going to cause all those  excess calories that you just ate to be taken right up by the body and  transported to your body fat stores.

This then means that you’ll be storing fat faster than ever  and once all the sugar is removed from the blood, you’re going to experience a  blood sugar low, which is just going to drive you to eat more calories.

This endless cycle will drive up your calorie intake,  causing a rapid rate of body fat gain.

In addition to that, sugar provides no nutritional value to  the body so you won’t be reaping any benefits from having these foods as part  of your plan.

The Salt Factor

Moving on, now we come to the salt factor.  One big problem with eating salt rich foods  is the fact that once you start, it’s hard to stop. Foods that are very salty  will trigger cravings so you may end up consuming a much larger number of
calories than you otherwise would have.

Salt rich foods are also going to potentially increase your  blood pressure, so could set you up for some health problems down the  road.  In addition to that, high salt  foods will cause water retention in the body, so as far as maintaining your lean  look goes, they are not going to work in your favor.

The good news is that salt itself doesn’t provide any  calories like sugar does, but this doesn’t mean that the foods containing the  salt don’t.  in many cases salty foods can contain just as many calories and often more fat than a high sugar food would.

But salt is not always necessarily a bad thing and you can actually read another great blog post about it over on Dave’s blog here.

Why Salt is Not Always a Bad Thing by Dave Ruel

So all in all, there really isn’t one ‘better’ option  here.  High sugar and high salt foods can  both do very serious damage to any well-meaning diet plan and throw you off  track entirely. If you want the absolute best results possible, you would be  far better off focusing on foods that come in their most natural state possible  as then they will be low in salt and sugar naturally.

Which do you struggle with more? Salty snacks or sugar snacks?