If you think eating healthy means buying all organic and exotic fruits or mixing up smoothies with strange powders and eating raw kelp, I’m here to help.
Say you type in a google search term “healthy foods.” You’ll come up with results for lists of particular foods to eat. I don’t recommend basing your changes on these lists. More often then not, they are trendy lists. That’s why there are so many of them. The business of food is huge and ads and promotion of certain types flood the market. I even saw one that touts cinnamon buns as a health food. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to tell you cinnamon buns are healthy. I hope you keep reading anyway.
This is a guideline of general places to start with small easy changes that will also be easy on your pocketbook. Here are some tips to keep it simple and inexpensive.
First place to start is the grocery store. Actually, this will be the focus. Eating out is a whole different animal. I will stress this, it may be obvious, but DO NOT GO TO FAST FOOD RESTAURANTS not even for yogurt, salad or oatmeal. Even these supposed health foods are corrupted by fast food methods, plus, this only aids in tempting you to just get one burger or one taco or fries. Seriously, as far as eating out goes, if you just stay away from fast food you’ll be doing wonders for yourself.
In the grocery store, the first thing to start with is the label. I’m not advising you look for “organic” or “all natural.” (In fact, “all natural” is about as informative as saying about a song: “it’s made of notes,” seriously.) You don’t need to read the nutrition facts either, ignore the calories, ignore the fat content – they are often deceptive and overall don’t really mean much to your health. If you do look at the nutrition, you’ll begin to notice the serving size is probably a 1/4th of what you’d actually eat in a sitting. They do this for the benefit of the people that are scanning the nutrition facts, smaller servings means smaller calorie count and lower levels of fat and sodium. It’s a trick to make you think it’s good for you. (That said, nutrition facts might be useful if you want to check for vitamins and minerals.)
The part of the label you should be reading is the ingredients. Seriously, read the ingredients. A good tip would be “if it has more then 5 ingredients, leave it on the shelf” however, for the majority of you, this makes life difficult. You’ll begin to find there really isn’t much in the way of items on the shelves that has less then 12. So what you’ll want to do to make things even easier, is to look for certain bad ingredients and leave items with that listed on the shelf. The top five ingredients to stay away from:
1. high fructose corn syrup – yes, the corn syrup people say it’s exactly the same as cane sugar, but it’s really not. This topic deserves it’s own article.
2. partially hydroginated oil – especially soy bean oil.
3. artificial sweeteners – aspertame, sucralose, neotame, acesufame potassium and saccharin. Many are branded as Nutrasweet, Sweet and Low, and Splenda. Stevia is non-sugar but natural and acceptable.
4. ingredients that start with the words “hydrolized,” “autolyzed” or “disodium.”
5. mono- and diglycerides – they are chains of fat, that do not occur in nature, generally found in bread products.
If you refuse to purchase products, or very limited amounts of products with those above ingredients, you’ll have cut down on empty calories and frankly, damaging foods.
As a general rule, if buying processed foods, the “organic” label usually doesn’t mean that much difference, aside from the price. If you can afford it, you might as well buy organic, as you’ll have in the very least deleted genetically modified organisims (GMO). On that topic, I’d highly advise limiting your GMO’s as much as possible.
Currently, there is no required labeling for products that contain GMO’s, however some products have voluntarily applied for approval from the Non-GMO organization which then allows for the Non-GMO mark to be used on their product label.
If you can’t afford to buy all organic, there are two major sources of GMO: Soy and Corn. Oh yes, and much of those weird and unpronouncable ingredients are sourced from GMO soy and corn crops. So aside from my brief list of ingredients to avoid, if you can’t pronounce it, think twice about spending your money on it. Also, with blatant products like soy milk or tortilla chips, buy the ones with the non-GMO symbol.
A final tip, is limit your dairy, even if it’s listed as organic. The reason being, dairy has high amounts of plastic leached into it. It doesn’t take a genius to know that plastic shouldn’t be a part of our diet. The reason concentrations are so high in dairy is because much plastic is used in the production and storage (yes, milk cartons are lined with plastic) and the fatty acids in dairy draw out or leach out the additives that are used in plastic that make it flexible (aka BPA).
In summary, less ingredients = better for you. Recognizable ingredients that you know actually can be grown = better for you. Non-GMO label = safer for you. Finally, eat those fresh fruits and veggies! Enjoy!