MONDAY, Aug. 19, 2024 (HealthDay News) -- "Stealth" foods are sneaking saturated fat and added sugars into even the strictest diets, a new study shows.

Most saturated fats and added sugars come from well-known sources – soft drinks, cheese, pizza, ice cream, cakes and pies.

But even supposedly healthy foods like chicken breast and seafood or condiments like salad dressings and ketchup contain hidden amounts of saturated fats and sugars, researchers reported recently in the journal Nutrients.

Such popular and generally healthy sources make it difficult for people to limit fat and sugar to the recommended 10% of daily calories, researchers said.

“Chicken breast is promoted as a lower saturated fat food, but it still has a little bit of saturated fat,” said lead researcher Christopher Taylor, director of medical dietetics at Ohio State University. “It is helpful to know how foods with smaller amounts also slowly add saturated fat in a stealthy way into the diet.”

“Being able to meet less than 10% is to identify the big contributors, but also to be able to see where saturated fat and added sugar may still exist in other food choices,” Taylor added. “It doesn’t make them poor choices – it’s about being aware of how the morning latte may be contributing.”

For the study, researchers analyzed data on more than 36,000 U.S. adults who participated in a federal nutrition survey between 2005 and 2018.

Results showed that saturated constituted at least 12% of a day’s calories, on average, while added sugars made up 14% to 16% of daily calories.

Overall, the top sources of saturated fat were cheese, pizza, ice cream and eggs. Leading sources of added sugar were soft drinks, tea, fruit drinks, and cakes and pies.

Less-obvious “stealth” sources of saturated fat included cold cuts, non-dairy creamers, fried potatoes and whole milk, researchers found.

Meanwhile, added sugars in people’s diets came from ketchup, cereal bars, energy drinks and yeast breads.

Different groups were subject to higher levels of saturated fat and sugar from different stealth sources, researchers found.

For example, Black people had the greatest contribution to saturated fat from chicken, and Asian people got most of their saturated fat from nuts and seeds.

Black and Asian people also got a lot more saturated fat from fish and seafood than other groups, researchers noted.

Dietary recommendations tend to focus on obviously unhealthy choices like pizza and ice cream, researchers noted.

The team now is creating an app that will help people assess specific “nutrients of concern” in even supposedly healthy foods, so that they can make smarter dietary choices.

“There are the foods that are higher in saturated fat and added sugar that are consumed frequently, and they get targeted, but there’s also that smaller cumulative effect of things that are generally perceived as healthy, but they’re all contributing just a little bit,” Taylor said. “And then when you top it off with some of those higher sources, it ends up taking you over the threshold for that 10% of the day’s calories. “

“We’re trying to hit the sweet spot of capturing the big front-seat items, but also understanding those things that are stealthy contributors,” Taylor concluded.

More information

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has more on the dietary recommendations for Americans.

SOURCE: Ohio State University, news release, Aug. 15, 2024