Buying food to improve well-being

Walk through your local grocery store and see where the food is displayed. Around the outer edge, you will find fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh meat, and dairy products. These food products are packaged and sold as they are grown. By looking at each item, you can see what it is about. A cabbage is a cabbage and nothing else. Organic varieties are grown largely as intended by nature. The result is a highly nutritious food loaded with vitamins, minerals and omega-3 oils, all essential for maintaining a healthy body.

Let’s move on to the frozen section where things start to mix up a bit. You’ll find frozen versions of the same fresh meats and veggies here, and they’re good nutritional choices, too. Freezing preserves almost all the nutrients in freshly picked vegetables, so since some vegetables are not available with seasonal changes, you can look for them in large freezers. Storing frozen vegetables in your freezer at home can be a very useful backup supply for when you forget to replace the fresh ones you bought.

Almost everything called grocery store food deserves a much closer look before putting it in your shopping cart. This includes freezers and center aisles filled with boxes and other creative packages. In general, you can assume that if it comes in a box and includes an ingredient list, it is a processed or manufactured food. Creative packaging can be very attractive, with photos of delicious hot foods coming out of the front of the box.

Unfortunately, many packaged foods fail the nutritional test on two fronts; They do not provide the level of nutrition that fresh foods provide and often include ingredients that may do more harm than good. People know that eating too much sugar and starch contributes to weight gain, inflammation, and other harmful effects on the body. Food manufacturers creatively include hidden sugar or starch behind unpronounceable names, which often end in “-ose,” which is a clear indication of sugar.

Don’t be fooled by the label on the front of the package, especially if it includes the word “natural.” Instead, focus on the ingredient list on the back. For example, you can choose stevia as a natural herbal sugar substitute. Conceptually, that’s a good choice. However, if the main ingredient in your stevia package is dextrose, then you are eating corn-based sugar.

Another interesting ingredient is monosodium glutamate (MSG), which is often used to enhance flavor. Many people don’t realize that ingredients like hydrolyzed or textured vegetable protein and yeast extract are loaded with MSG. Monosodium glutamate, like sugar, is listed under several alternative names. Manufacturers also use many creative and seemingly innocuous names for chemical preservatives.

If you decide to buy any of these packaged foods, learn about the ingredients manufactured and inspect the labels carefully. Better yet, shop for all your food on the outside edges of the store and only visit the center aisles for household items.