How to choose our food?
Even if you really want to be good and choose what’s best for you, it’s not always easy to know what that is. Supermarkets are packed with endless possibilities in each category, and it’s hard to know what’s the right one for us.
The simple guide for grocery shopping is brought to you with the assistance of the wonderful Naturopath, Hadar Navon, my health mentor.
1. Nature knows best!
The first rule for a healthy supermarket run; choose foods in their natural, raw state, and make them the main part of your cart. Start your shopping at the fruit and vegetable section, whole grains, and legumes. The more you’ll have them in reach in your house, the more you’ll eat them, and the cleaner and healthier your eating habits will become.
Odds are you’ll feel this change also in your pocket! Processed packed foods usually cost more. Instead of merely paying for the nutrients you’re choosing, you’ll even pay for branding and packaging.
So your losing money and health, and also you will be creating more waste of unnecessary packaging.
Simple reasoning, right?
2. More ingredients=less health
When there are a few options for the same product, it’s usually a safe bet to choose the one with a shorter list of ingredients. Why is that?
In most cases, the list of ingredients will become longer due to unhealthy or even synthetic additives to our food. Preservers, sweeteners, emulsifiers, artificial fragrances and flavors, artificial coloring, and more…
Soy milk is a good example. It should only contain soy, water, and salt. But it often includes ten ingredients and more, sugar, oil, emulsifiers, flavoring, and other additives, which add nothing to our health.
This means that even when we opt for what we think is a healthier option, it might contain unnecessary, unhealthy ingredients. If the list is too long for you to have the patience to read through, choose a different item.
3. Enriched food=poor food
Enriched food, or in the professional term, functional food, is a concept you’ll see a lot. The milk is enriched in calcium, bread, snacks, and cereal in minerals and vitamins. But the truth is, more often than not, this means the food itself is low in nutrients and health benefits.
The main reason to enrich food is to make up for intense processing that affected the natural nutritional value. And since it’s usually in everyday foods, those are added in the ingredient list and highlighted advantages, stressing the importance of daily consumption for marketing value. The industrial food companies re-add those nutrients, synthetically, from unclear sources, in unknown quality. Do they absorb in the same way or hold the same benefits? That’s impossible to find out. So stick to naturally rich food and avoid enriched copycats.
4. Sugar free?
We often know what we do not want in our food, especially if we have any allergies, dietary restrictions, or preferences. Sugar-free is a popular request, but can we know for sure if that’s the case? The food industry gave sugar many nicknames, Making it very hard to tell if it’s in our food or not. Dextrose, fructose, Galactose, Glucose, Lactose, Maltose, and Sucrose are only a few names. If you’re not interested in memorizing over 50 titles, it’ll be pretty challenging to make sure there is no sugar.
And where there’s no sugar, sweeteners come to the rescue! If the package states sugar-free, it doesn’t mean it’s unsweetened, as it might be sweetened with artificial sweeteners.
So flip the item around and check the label. Sucralose, Saccharin, Sorbitol, Xylitol, or any other names ending in OL?
What might not contain sugar in its natural name can be renamed or contain sugar in a synthetic form. What can you do? Stick to rule number 2 and opt for short ingredient lists that you can identify or at least have the patience to read through and google.
5. Whole!!!
The variety of foods also allow for healthier, higher-quality options. When available, prefer a “whole” product; whole grain, whole wheat, whole rice… whole foods are higher in fibers and B vitamins. They keep us full longer, promote better digestion, and have a higher value. You’d be surprised to learn how many options there are in any supermarket. It’s no longer super expensive or can only be found in hippy yappy health stores. They are a less processed version of the un-whole foods.
