Rice Cakes and 6 Other Foods a Nutritionist Would Never Eat [VIDEO]

Some of Them Will Surprise You … and One of Them Definitely Will Not

Rice cakes?! Huh … turns out all those cardboard-y circles we've all been shoving down our gullets for years, under the guise of snacking healthily, were for naught. According to a new Shape.com feature, rice cakes are among the handful of foods that a nutritionist says he would never eat.

Why? Because though they're often low in calories and fats, rice cakes also frequently have a high glycemic index, which means they contain the kinds of carbohydrates that make your blood sugar level shoot up (a very bad thing).

Mike Roussell, PhD, says some rice cakes have a glycemic index as high as 91 (glucose has a rating of 100), so the good news is, you don't have to feel compelled to eat them as a healthy measure.

Read: 5 Things You Should Never Feed Your Kids

Another surprise on the Shape.com list: fat-free salad dressing, or what Roussell calls "a perfect example of a good food gone bad." A simple, tasty, homemade salad dressing, for example, may include vinegar, which is good for blood sugar control) and plant oils (which are full of necessary fatty acids and antioxidants).

But when companies make their dressings fat-free, they've usually maintained the taste of the dressing by adding lots of sugar and high fructose corn syrup, along with a lot of other food manufacturing ingredients that we'd find on a lot of processed food packaging labels.

The food that tops Roussell's list of those he'd never eat will not come as a surprise to anyone, as it's a "food" that is coming under attack from a lot of sources recently: sugar-sweetened beverages.

Roussell says if there's one thing on his list that you should stop ingesting, it is soda and other sugary drinks, which are the biggest example of empty calories as they offer no nutritional benefits or the feeling of being full.

Read: WATCH: Disturbing Anti-Obesity PSA Shows Man Downing Sugar Packets

Other strikes against sugar drinks: they lower your good cholesterol level and raise your bad one (a heart disease risk), and they also mess with your body's inflammatory process, which can lead to chronic (and painful) diseases.

As good as an ice cold glass of sugary soda can taste on a very hot day, Roussell makes a compelling case for why it should, at least, be only a rare treat.

Check out the rest of Shape.com's list here, and for a healthy, easy-to-make recipe for a quick salad dressing, watch the Shape.com video below: