Shop Smart

It should come as no surprise that the United States is the world’s leading nation for obesity – we don’t know how to pick the foods we eat!  The food industry has capitalized on convenience over nutrition, and now more than ever, families have taken to choosing the convenience of pre-made, processed foods over the traditional home-made meal.  Consumers have fallen prey to the lure of decadent-looking images and ten-minute prep times emblazoned on box dinners, so much so that the actual content of their mealtime choices is completely disregarded.  To be expected, this has resulted in a significant decline in overall health.   

Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way.  A conscious effort to make educated and healthful choices when perusing the aisles of your local supermarket offers a simple, straightforward remedy.  Here are several tips to consider that should get you started:

Have a plan.  You’re much less likely to be tempted by clever packaging when you have a list and are actively seeking out what’s on it. 

Shop the perimeter.  The best thing you can do for your body is to keep it fueled with the freshest ingredients.  Fresh fruits and veggies and unprocessed meats and dairy are nutritional powerhouses, and always located along the perimeter of every grocery store.  What’s more – what you see is what you is what you get.  There’s no need to sift through ingredient listings to know what it is you’ll be eating. 

Avoid processed foods.  This means avoiding the center aisles almost altogether.  The nutritional value of any given food declines the more it’s processed.  Processing involves exposing whole, raw foods to extreme conditions completely foreign and unnatural to them.  For example, vegetables may be heated to exceedingly high temperatures for sanitation purposes.  And while this does kill any potentially harmful bacteria, it also strips the produce of its nutrients. 

It may be helpful to consider the effect desert temperatures would have on your body if you were exposed to them for prolonged periods of time.  Our bodies aren’t built to withstand such arid temperatures, and would become weak as a result.  Likewise, most raw foods aren’t capable of enduring radical deviations from their normal living conditions, and lose their vitality if they are. 

Check nutrition labels.  There’s no sense in buying a ton of food that doesn’t have any nutritional value.  Food is meant to nourish our bodies and well-being; that purpose is defeated if we don’t take that simple fact into account.   

Read over ingredient listings.  Do you know what it is you’re going to be eating?  Make sure you do by reading through the ingredients.  This is especially important when selecting processed foods.  While inadvisable to consume large quantities on a regular basis, it’s unreasonable to expect that processed foods will be completely eliminated from your diet.  Therefore, it’s important to know what exactly has been into them. 

If you can’t pronounce it, DON’T EAT IT.  You wouldn’t eat something unrecognizable off the floor, would you?  The same applies here.  Just because something’s edible, doesn’t mean you should eat it.