Shopping at the grocery store is not easy these days, so healthy chef Pete lays out how to be successful. With some lesser known tricks and suggestions your shopping, will be faster and healthier and your body will be leaner after following his advice.
The grocery store; arguably the lynchpin of our modern city-based economy has long been the place to buy food for those supposedly “healthier home-cooked meals”. They have also become a place for food giants to bombard the population with crap packaged in colorful packages loaded with unhealthy chemicals but still labeled as food. Ingenious marketing and mislabeling has made it even harder for people looking to do some clean shopping and buy only real, nutritious food. What can you do?
For starters, there are stores that do their best to provide only clean foods and exclude products containing unnecessary additives. Stores such as Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods (to name a couple) and many of your local natural food stores and farmer’s markets make it easy to find real foods. However, if you are limited in your grocery store selection, here are some basic tips to help keep your shopping cart clean.
1. Rule of thumb - stay to the perimeter of the store.
The perimeter of the store (the produce, dairy and meat sections) is where they keep all the foods that need to be regularly restocked (meaning the food there is fresh). These sections of the store should take care of 90% of your shopping list. The center of the store is where they keep the processed stuff that can sit on the shelf and not die for months/ years. The bulk of additives and misleading messages are located here. The less processed, the better – more food made FROM plants, not IN plants.
2. Learn how to read a label.
When you do have to venture into the middle aisles of the store (for essential staples like spices, rice, flours, etc.) make sure you know how to read the label and identify what’s in the box. A long list of things you can’t pronounce or never heard of in the ingredient list probably isn’t a good thing. Avoid the words hydrogenated ____ oil, high fructose corn syrup and be extra mindful to read the ingredients in items with terms like low-carb, low-fat, no MSG and “diet” on the packaging.
3. Frozen foods – the good, the bad and the ugly.
The freezer section contains great, convenient food options, but also harbors things that you shouldn’t even consider as an option. Frozen fruits, veggies and fish/poultry are perfect for quick dinners, shakes and all sorts of other fast foods. Just make sure there aren’t any added sugars or preservatives. Avoid processed dinners. By industry standards, these "foods" have to be able to be thawed/refrozen up to seven times and are loaded with chemicals and preservatives to maintain shelf life.
4. Fiber is king.
When shopping for carbohydrate or grain staples, look at the fiber content. The more fiber, the better (i.e. brown rice, whole wheat pasta, breads with 4-6 g of fiber per slice, etc).
5. Seasonings, sauces and condiments are not all created equal.
Sauces and condiments are a quick way to turn a healthy meal into a meal with far too many calories in all the wrong places. If you cook like Paula Dean and add butter and mayonnaise to everything, you will end up shaped like Paula Dean. Some recipes require sauces or dressings, but a basic and conservative use of dried/fresh spices and herbs (pepper, basil, etc.), non-hydrogenated oil and vinegar dressings and salsa (the ultimate condiment) should make 95% of your food tasty enough without compromising the cleanliness of the meal.
Hopefully this little cheat sheet will give you a leg up next time you enter the urban jungle that we call the grocery store. You have to extra careful these days to pick the right “healthy” food. Who would have thought?
Peter Bauman – Peter is a chef first and personal trainer second. With a background in the biological sciences and degree in psychology, Peter knows how to make food that tastes great and keeps you lean and healthy. On the personal training side Peter takes clients from where they are to where they want to be quickly and effectively.