Good health starts with the food you put in the shopping cart.
It is getting harder and harder to shop for good health, but easier and easier to shop for poor health, unfortunately. The FDA approves toxins, claiming they are safe, the labeling rules keep changing so you don’t really know what you are getting, and the price of healthy foods has skyrocketed.
While it’s getting more difficult to eat well, there are a few things to keep in mind as you walk the aisles in the grocery store.
Eat Real Food
Put more real food and less processed food in your cart. The processed foods are where the toxins are so the less of them you eat, the healthier you will be. In the long run, the real foods are less expensive.
Include your health bill with your food bill because the better your food, the fewer doctor visits and medication you will need.
Get The Real Healthy Fats
We have been taught for decades now that saturated fat will clog your arteries and to avoid fats that are solid at room temperature.
First, fats that are solid at room temperature are liquid at body temperature, so they aren’t going to clog anything.
The saturated fats are found in animal foods and fats like butter and beef tallow and also in coconut and palm oils. They are the most stable of all the fats and do not go rancid easily. The animal fats also contain important fat soluble vitamins that plant fats do not contain.
Add butter, ghee, beef tallow, coconut oil, MCT oil, and olive oil to your cart and walk on by the vegetable and seed oils like soy, corn, cottonseed, canola, sunflower, safflower, grapeseed, and peanut oils.
Avocado oil is not the best option, but you can use it so long as it is pure avocado oil and not mixed with a vegetable oil. If you experience any health issues, this would be a good fat to cut out of the diet.
Look Out For Added Iron
Iron is added to a lot of foods, especially breakfast cereal. You can find it in ingredient labels as iron oxide or ferrous sulphate or ferrous fumarate, but it could also be hiding in “artificial colors.”
Iron makes us age faster and it’s very difficult to get rid of. We recycle iron in the body and 99% of the iron we need daily comes from this recycled iron. We only need to get 1% of our iron requirement from food. Blood donation is the most reliable way to offload iron. This is why menstruating women have fewer health issues, like cardiovascular disease, than men.
Always read the ingredients and if you see the words, iron, ferrous, or color, put the item back on the shelf and move along.
Ditch Non-Caloric Sweeteners
We’ve been told that our weight is all about calories in vs calories out, so if we use sweeteners that don’t contain any calories, we can lose weight or prevent weight gain.
That is not true and real sugar is not the spawn of satan.
There is no evidence that these non-caloric sweeteners help you lose weight or keep weight off. In fact, they might do the opposite because they trick the brain. When the brain senses sweet, it is expecting calories. If the calories don’t come, the brain doesn’t think it’s been fed so it increases hunger and cravings, causing you to eat more.
None of the non-caloric sweeteners are healthy, particularly the artificial ones like aspartame and sucralose. You are much better off eating real sugar and even better off eating honey, maple syrup, and fruit.
The FDA has recorded over 92 symptoms from aspartame use including headaches, memory and learning problems, depression, anxiety, and seizures.
Get food items containing real sugar, honey, or maple syrup. They will taste better and make your brain happy.
For more information on navigating the grocery store, you can pick up my new book Nutrition Navigator: Grocery Shopping For Optimal Health at nutritionnavigatorbook.com or Amazon.