Shopping For Healthy Living - April 2024
How to make shopping the big box stores easier.
With so much out there on what to buy and where to shop and even what is “healthy”, taking a trip to the market can be a daunting task.
Let’s take some time today to break down the typical market and how to navigate it and leave with the healthiest cart possible!
The grocery store is a landmine for disease. Everywhere you turn you’re hit with “fat free”, “Heart Healthy”, “gluten free” and more trigger sayings to encourage you to buy their product. Little does the mainstream buyer know, these are unregulated sayings and used freely by the industry to entice you to buy more. Be cautious and aim for WHOLE foods, where you can pronounce and recognize all the ingredients.
Fun Fact: Most foods placed in the inner aisles are filled with corn and soy, the top farmed crops in America. Many of these products have them added as a syrup or filler, hidden from the general consumer by a chemical names like citric acid, dextrose and maltodextrin (plus so many more).
Next time you hit the market, take these 5 tips with you.
Top 5 Shopping Tips for a Healthy Cart
- Shop the periphery. Have you ever noticed that the outside of the supermarket is where the least processed food lives. The fruits and veggies and the fresh meats are usually around the outside of the market. So, the more you avoid the inner aisles, the highly processed foods your cart will be healthier!
- Look for locally sourced items. Local is not only better because you’re supporting a local farmer, the local economy, and the local environment. BUT you are also getting products that are ripened naturally. When products (fruits and veggies) are shipped from far away, they are picked unripe and either ripened with gas or along the way. Neither option allows the product to become ripe naturally while still soaking up nutrients from the soil making the final product as nutritious as possible.
- Buy ingredients. This idea keeps you buying whole real foods and not processed prepackaged foods. Processed foods can be anything from chopped apples, ground flour or chemically engineered foods, injected with chemicals for flavor and preservation. We want to try and buy food found as close to as it presents itself in nature as possible. When we buy highly processed foods it is void of nutrition and fiber. The labs put “nutrition” back in with man-made vitamins and minerals, “natural flavors” (hidden way to list chemicals) and top it off with preservatives so it lasts a long time on the shelf. Avoid prepackaged foods as much as possible.
- Read the labels. Reading a nutrition label can be confusing. But let’s make it simple. Look for sodium, added sugars, trans/saturated fats and then jump down to ingredients. If the ingredients are not a list of real foods and instead list things you’re not sure what they are…. Do not buy. Natural flavors and colors are also a way to hide things they “derive” from natural sources.
- Buy organic when possible. There have been many studies, lawsuits, and general agreeance that consuming pesticides is extremely harmful to our health. So of course buying your entire cart organic is of course ideal. But that can get really expensive. So let me share with you the EWG Dirty Dozen list. It is a list of 12 items that are the “dirtiest” (meaning highest levels of pesticide use and contamination in picked produce). If you can always buy these items organic (or plant in your garden!) you can avoid the heaviest doses of pesticides in the produce aisle. Two items I always buy organic that are not on this list are wheat products (flour and bread) and sugar. The EWG updates this list annually and also releases a Clean 15 list for the produce that uses the least amount of pesticides.
We are literally what we eat. Our bodies take the food (or chemically processed, “enriched food”) and digest it into the molecules that rebuild our bodies. If we feed our bodies unnatural chemicals or additives found in processed prepackaged foods, our bodies will have to rebuild with what it can leach from that and then process the remaining foreign substances to be excreted. What it can’t package and get rid of, it will treat as a damaged or foreign cell, leading to disease if not handled appropriately.
Whether your shopping Whole Foods, Safeway or Costco, follow these tips to make your cart the cleanest and healthiest. Total health begins with what we put in our bodies and is followed by what we DO with our bodies.
Join the battle against disease and sarcopenia, eat clean and lift heavy!
