Grocery Shopping
As I was reading this month’s feature article, “Personalized Nutrition: Fine-Tuning the Dinner Plate,” on page 12, I kept thinking that, regardless of our nutritional journey, we still find ourselves at the grocery store searching for foods that support better health. And this is no easy task.
I’ve always been an ingredient checker, and I’ve noticed how much things have changed over the years. Back in the day, cereals like Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies didn’t have any sugar—we actually added it if we so desired. Now, those two cereals, along with almost every other one, come with refined sugar (or some other sweetener) already added.
Condiments like ketchup and chili sauce used to be pretty basic, with no bad ingredients to speak of. Not so anymore! I don’t know when they started sneaking in “our friend” high-fructose corn syrup, but it came as a shock to me one day when I tasted the chili sauce and thought, “Hmmm, that tastes sickly sweet.” When I looked at the ingredients, there it was. The good news is that some health food stores carry ketchup and chili brands with healthier ingredients that are quite tasty.
Produce and meat are also challenges. I usually opt for organic, which means no pesticides, but not necessarily nutrient-dense, and often, rather tasteless. Sometimes I pick a vegetable or fruit from the “clean fifteen” list when I can’t find the organic variety. The produce on this list has the lowest pesticide load, and that changes from year to year.
Buying meat is like walking through a minefield—added hormones, steroids, antibiotics, vaccines and misleading packaging. Beef, for example, may have “grass-fed” on the package, which could be true because the cattle may have been pastured at some point, but this is not the same as “grass-finished,” and it’s not easy to find the latter.
Shopping for healthy food can be exhausting, although a little less so if one has proximity to, and can afford, natural grocery stores. I’ve learned that my only recourse is to shop “natural” when possible, and be vigilant about checking ingredients, reading packages, and paying attention to the latest “dirty dozen” and clean fifteen in my quest for a healthier diet.
