One question that I often get asked is, “How do I shop for healthy food?”
I’ve gone through a lot of different phases in shopping for food, and my own take on this has evolved a lot over the years. I get that it can be very confusing for people who are trying to eat healthy. How do you know what to look for? There are all kinds of labels today: Fat Free, Gluten Free, Whole Grain, Heart Healthy, All Natural. Does that mean that food is healthy and is what you should feed yourself and your family?
I don’t know if there is a clear-cut answer to that question, but I’d like to share with you some things that seem to work for me and why I shop that way.
Calorie Counting and Carbs?
When I first started to learn about healthy eating, I didn’t know a whole lot about nutrition labels and how to read them. I mostly focused on counting calories. I downloaded a phone app to help me keep track of how many calories I was eating. I quickly got tired of doing that, because I had a hard time finding out how many calories were actually in the foods that I was eating, especially when it was a home-cooked meal. At best, I was just guesstimating most of the time. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, try counting your calories for a couple weeks. At one point the thought occurred to me, “Isn’t there a difference between eating 1,000 calories of steamed vegetables and eating 1,000 calories of chicken nuggets?” At that point, I decided to give up on counting calories.
As I started reading more about nutrition, I started to look closely at the carbohydrate and protein contents of food, as well as the vitamins. Once again, I found a lot of limitations. For carbohydrates, there are all kinds of carbohydrates, and I couldn’t tell how much of the total carbohydrates in the food were coming from which ingredients. I could go on more about this, but suffice to say that I eventually found the nutrition labels on most food to be so limited and even manipulative at times (more on that later) that I stopped looking at them almost altogether.
I say almost, because there is one thing that I do look at when I’m shopping for food: the ingredients list. The ingredients list is the one and only thing that I look at on food packaging anymore. It allows me to avoid certain ingredients that I don’t like.
Dr. T. Colin Campbell served on the 1990 expert panel to standardize the food-labeling program. In his book Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition
“I was a member of the 1990 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) expert panel assigned by the FDA to standardize and simplify the food-labeling program. Two schools of thought existed on our panel. One view favored using the label to tell customers how much of each of the many nutrients is inside. The other, to which I subscribed, intended to minimize quantitative information on the label. I believed that we would serve the public best by providing some general information, like a list of ingredients, while staying away from the finer details…
Ingredients are important… But including fine-print details like the number of micrograms of niacin performs two disservices to the public that can lead to poor eating choices. First, it overwhelms consumers and causes most of them to ignore the labels entirely. Second, it implies that the nutrients included on the label (a minuscule percentage of the total known nutrients) are the only important ones—indeed, perhaps the only ones that exist.”
I couldn’t agree more. I’d also add, as I mentioned before, that the kind of food labeling that we use opens the door to manipulative marketing by the food companies. I will give you one such example.
Fat Free, but will cost you in the long run
We’ve all heard of the dangers of trans-fats. You may think that the food you are eating doesn’t have any if you looked at the nutrition label and read “Trans-fats: 0g” or perhaps it has “Fat Free” written on the front of the package. Sorry to disappoint you, but food companies are allowed to use up to 0.5 grams of trans-fats per serving and still claim that there is none in the food, even to the extent of saying that the food is Fat Free. I myself am not necessarily an advocate for fat free food, but I think it is sad that we can’t even trust the labeling on our food, something that we need to survive and be healthy. However, if you looked at the ingredient list and saw the partially hydrogenated oil, then you would know to throw it in the trash.
What Food Labels Won’t Tell You
There are, unfortunately, other major limitations to the ingredient list and nutrition label in general. It will not tell you any of the following:
- How much caffeine there is
- Whether or not the food has been irradiated
- Whether or not the food has genetically modified organisms (although if you know what to look for, you can generally get a good idea)
- Whether the plant-product was grown in nutritious or depleted soil
- Whether the animal-product was raised on its natural diet or not (some labels do)
- Natural and/or Artificial Flavors?
This all being said, I am always looking to improve the way I shop and eat. It is helpful for me to have tools available to me, especially when looking at new types of foods or ingredients. Although I prefer to eat foods with 1 or 2 ingredients in them, sometimes I’ll take a look at other options and see ingredients that I don’t recognize. At times like that, I have a book I sometimes use as a reference. It is the Consumer’s Dictionary of Consumer Additives
What You Have to Do
Betty Crocker’s Better Than Almost Anything Cake
In the end, I don’t give a lot of weight to food labels anymore. Even though they can sometimes be helpful in finding healthy foods, they can be just as easily misleading. You can have whole grain cereal or fat free yogurt that is packed with sugar. Also, you can find lots of fat free and heart healthy choices in the candy and soda aisles. You can have gluten free, but you better watch out. This gluten free “Better Than Almost Anything Cake” packs an impressive array of unhealthy ingredients that I wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole. Its got tons of everything you would try to avoid in a dessert (1/2 g trans fat, 520 calories, 21g fat, 56g sugar per serving). Also, don’t just assume that food from Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s is healthy either. In a 2009 Wall Street Journal article, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey was quoted as saying, “We sell all kinds of candy… We sell a bunch of junk.”
Please take the time to educate yourself about the basics. Force yourself to look at the ingredients on ALL the food that you buy. If you don’t recognize the ingredients, look them up. Familiarize yourself with food labeling laws. A quick google search brings up lots of results, including the USDA’s own website.
Have a question about reading nutrition labels or specific ingredients? Leave a comment here and I will do my best to answer it.
