Healthy Grocery Shopping

Today, I’d like to share with you on how to keep healthy eating simple. It starts at the grocery store. In my opinion, one of the most important things we can do for our health and our bodies is to reduce and avoid processed foods. Our body’s health is essentially based upon the health of our cells. As we know, what we eat plays a large role in the health of our cells. Here’s how I keep grocery shopping healthy and simple by avoiding processed foods. Feel free to use these strategies.

Fill your cart with fresh foods

Rule #1: If it’s in your house you will eat it. The grocery store is your first line of defense. Keep the processed foods out of your cart and you’ve pretty much already won. Fill your cart with fresh foods. This is a no brainer but there’s a couple ways to do this well. Buy in-season produce, buy lots of veggies for snacks, meals and side dishes and ideally buy produce that utilized the best farming practices. Save eating the less healthy food for when you’re at dinner or social events.

If it’s not fresh, check the ingredients

I do this a lot in the grocery store, especially if I am buying a new product. I will compare the ingredient list of multiple brands of the same product. I look (mainly) for two things from the winning item: words I can pronounce and the shortest ingredient list. This process usually takes 30 seconds to a minute.

What about frozen foods?

There are a lot of highly processed frozen foods choices. However, there are actually a lot of healthy frozen foods as well. Frozen foods play an important role in your house because they don’t expire and they can provide a quick meal.

Vegetables that are flash frozen actually hold more nutrients than a lot of the “fresh” produce because they are frozen right after being picked capturing all of the great nutrients. The fresh produce is usually making a long journey to the store before we buy it and they lose a lot of the nutrients along the way. This is why it’s best to buy in-season fresh produce like we talked about above and Wegmans usually does a good job bringing it in from local farms.

Frozen foods that aren’t produce should be tested with the same ingredient-list strategy we discussed in the prior paragraph.

These are not bullet-proof strategies but are simple ways to make sure you are bringing home a majority of quality food to help keep your health a priority!

You got this!
– Nick

*It should be noted I am not a registered dietician and I am not recommending what you should eat