Shopping Around for Health: Six Tips for Healthful Grocery Shopping

1. Make a list before you go
Make a list at home when you have the time to think clearly about the foods you need to healthfully fill up your fridge and shelves. At the grocery store you’re assaulted with advertising and crafty marketing techniques. Having a list and sticking to it is one of the best ways to stay on track.

2. Shop the perimeter
Most of the most healthful foods are can be found on the perimeter of the grocery store: fruits, vegetables, fish, low-fat dairy and whole wheat bread. The inside aisles can have a few great things too: beans, low-sodium peanut butter, popcorn kernels for air popping,

3. Shop on a full stomach.
You must have heard this one before but it’s true! Just like going to a restaurant hungry and over ordering, you can over do it at the store. When you’re hungry you’re ability to say no to high calories foods can decrease

4. Walk
While this tip can’t be used by all, it’s a great one. When you think about having to walk home with heavy groceries you quickly realize where you can cut corners and skip the unhealthy foods that may make your back ache on the walk home. Bonus: your getting a great little workout when you walk to and from the store!

5. Don’t be fooled by foods that look healthy
Many food manufacturers try to make a food look better for you than it really is. A perfect example is bread. There are so many varieties to choose from! Brown colored bread may say “12 Grains” on the front, but when you flip it over there is a good chance that the first ingredient is not a whole grain. When buying grain products look for the first ingredient to be “Whole (insert any grain here e.g. wheat, rye).

Another great example of food marketing deception is when a food label says “Made with natural ingredients”… This sounds so healthy! However, butter and sugar are natural ingredients and these are the basic ingredients in a chocolate chip cookie which we know is not the most healthful food.

Another trick to watch out for is when you see the words “made with”. You may have seen cereals or cereal bars that say “made with whole fruit”! So what, there could be1/16th of a strawberry per serving and the cereal could say it was made with whole fruit, and that does not mean it is good for you! Again look at the ingredients, if there are words you cannot pronounce, your best bet is to skip it.

6. Watch the Sugar
Many consumers now know to look at the ingredients list and skip a food if they see sugar as the first or second ingredient because this means that food is loaded with sugar (ingredients are listed on packages in descending order of the amount in the food product). A sneaky way around this is for the food manufacturer to add many different types of sugars so as to diffuse them through the ingredients list. Don’t be fooled!

Here are some sugar aliases:
Any word that ends in –ose like sucrose, lactose, Frucstose (as in High Fructose Corn Syrup) are sugars
Any word that has the word sugar in it