Top 10 Tips for Healthy Food Shopping

1.  The Golden Rule of food shopping: Don’t shop on an empty stomach.  Your cravings will be in high gear and it will be more difficult to resist buying tempting foods.

2. Shop the perimeter of the store first.  There you will usually find: the produce section full of fresh fruits and vegetables; the deli and fish section where you can get low fat meats, cheeses and fresh/frozen fish; and the dairy and refrigerated meat section where you can find low fat hamburger/turkey and low fat dairy products, and the aisles where you can find frozen (unsweetened) fruits and vegetables.

3. Don’t be fooled by the claims on the front of the label (that’s marketing people!) always read the back of the label.  You would be very suprised to find how many products claim to be “healthy”, “light”, “reduced fat” or “whole wheat” are actually barely (and sometimes not at all) meeting that standard.

4. Be aware of serving size.  If the calories in a product are 50 per serving but the serving is teaspoon and you would normally eat 1/2 cup of it that’s 24 servings. Guess what? It’s still a high calorie food.

5. Buy in Bulk.  Typically the healthiest foods are never on sale and are more expensive than their higher fat, higher sugar or higher calorie versions.  Stock up when your staples are on sale, use coupons and invest in a membership to Sam’s Club or BJ’s.

6. Watch the sugar.  Read the ingredients and look at the label. If a product has more than 10g of sugar per serving don’t buy it.  Sugar goes by many codenames: high fructose corn syrup, sucrose, mannitol and many more. (Hint: lots of sugars end in “ose.”)

7. Make portion control easy.  You don’t have to give up your favorite foods.  Buying single sized servings of the foods you crave and know you will likely eat more than one serving of is a smart idea.  Instead of buying a half-gallon of ice cream buy a pint of the low-fat version (or frozen yogurt).  Buy single serving bags of chips or 100 calorie packs of your favorite treats.

8. Avoid “Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil” and shortening at all costs!  This nasty cholesterol-raising, artery-clogging trans fat appears in pretty much all packaged snack foods and commercial bakery products (cookies, chips, crackers, etc).  Manufacturers have changed the molecular structure of a perfectly healthy oil through the process of hydrogenation in order to give their products a longer shelf life so they can produce more and make more money.  Their greed to make more money is poisoning us and reducing our shelf life.  Also don’t believe it when a product states it has “Zero Trans Fats.”  The FDA allows manufacturers to label items containing “less than 0.5g” of trans fats per serving as containing no trans fats.  If you eat 5 servings of a product labeled “trans fat free” that actually has 0.4g of trans fat per serving then you just unknowingly ingested 2g of trans fat.  It doesn’t sound like much but what if this was just one thing you ate in a typical day? What if all the products you bought were trans fat free and you had them at every meal, every day?

9. Experiment with spices, marinades, and various flavorings.  To make healthy eating a permanent part of your life it’s vital that you enjoy the foods you are eating or you will not stick with it.  When making lean turkey burgers or hamburgers experiment by using different spices such as garlic powder, steak seasoning or any of the Mrs. Dash or other salt-free seasonings.  There are a million ways you can make chicken – marinate the chicken breasts overnight in terriyaki, lemon pepper, buffalo sauce or hickory bbq sauce for lots of flavor.  Desire something sweet? Use splenda, stevia, sugar free syrup, sugar free jam or some fat free cool whip in your recipes.

10.  My last piece of advice – always read the ingredients list.  The shorter the list is the better.  If you recognize most of the ingredients, even better. Ingredients are listed in the order of abundance from most to least.  The first 2 or 3 ingredients are the ones making up the majority of the product so make sure they are all natural.