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Attention all grocery shoppers! With interest in
alternative medicine growing, more consumers are being
lured into purchasing products that display the latest
health trends. Low cholesterol! Low in fat! Source of
Omega 3 fatty Acids! I recently took a trip down the
mundane lanes of several large grocery chains to put
their more impressive looking products to the test.
Just as I suspected the marketing gurus are up to their
usual tricks: selling poor quality foods disguised as
the healthy catch of the day. Bottom line: if you don’t
read the labels, you will be duped. Read on to find out
how you can make better shopping decisions.
Once
upon a time I visited a grocery store. I had to start
with the drink Sunny Delight, exulted for its vitamin C
content and referred to as ‘sunlight in a bottle’. In
one 8oz bottle, I found 7 teaspoons of high fructose
corn syrup (the untouchable class of sugars), trace
amounts of juice concentrates, ascorbic acid (processed
vitamin C), food starch-modified, canola oil, cellulose
gum, xanthan gum, sodium hexametaphosphate (hexa
what?!), sodium benzoate and artificial colorings.
Well, I’m not so sure about sunlight in a bottle but
perhaps it belongs where the sun doesn’t shine!
Next
I dropped by the granola bar section. My eyes caught
the Nature Valley Chewy Nut Bars with their enviro-green
captions reading ‘100% whole grains’. Must be healthy,
right? I put on my bifocals and zoomed in to the fine
print. Amongst the tedious list of ingredients I found
seven different forms of refined sugar! And to top that
off it contains cottonseed oil, notorious for its
position as most heavily sprayed crop. To boot this oil
was hydrogenated and therefore contained trans
fats. Trans fats are so unhealthy for your heart they
are being legally phased out in New York City. I
reached into my pocket for my comfort granola food from
the health food store which simply contained the
following: oats, raisins, honey, hemp, almonds, brown
rice, cranberries and flaxseed.
Next
I headed for the cereal section and picked off two boxes
whose captions read like the ‘crème de la crème’. First
the Whole Grain Oatmeal Crisp sounded fabulous! But
alas, it contained artificial flavorings, corn syrup for
sugar and a couple of poor quality oils. Yikes! The
other box read ‘Whole Grains Fibre Cereal’. And true
enough it contained enough fibre to move a boulder. I
wondered if the fibre, being the colons natural cleaning
brush, would help scrape out all the colouring, guar
gum, calcium carbonate (that is chalk), poor quality
oils, and the preservatives it contained. This is not
part of any nutritious breakfast in my books! Then
there was Vector Cereal with its ‘22 vitamins and
minerals’ claim on the front. Sounds impressive! What
they don’t tell you is that these don’t come from the
nutritious value of the food itself but merely from
added low quality and imbalanced artificial vitamins and
minerals. And of course it has the honorary simulated
flavoring, refined sugars, colouring and low grade oils.
So I
turned to the salad dressing section. Surely President’s
Choice wouldn’t disappoint. The bottle read ‘Low in
Saturated Fats’, and ‘Low in Cholesterol’. I was in
dressing heaven! Just then, Mr. Reality Check passed by
and knocked me off cloud 9 and I landed on the painful
truth. First ingredient sugar (not encouraging)
followed by soy bean oil (not the cold pressed olive oil
I was hoping for), xanthum gum, polysorbate 60 (sorry…
what was that!?), tartrazine (a colouring banned in
several European countries) and guar gum. Geez, has
anyone heard of just plain old oil and vinegar?!
So
how about the increasingly popular Activa Yogurt
containing healthy gut bacteria called acidophilus.
This yogurt contained several modified milk contents
(why modify perfection?), sugar, cornstarch, more corn
starch and gelatin. No thanks, I will stick to my Pine
Hedge Farms yogurt from the health food store which
contains simply whole organic milk and live bacterial
culture. Keep it simple, keep it clean!
What
can you learn from this traumatizing experience? Don’t
read ingredients because they are too disturbing? Cross
your fingers, eat anything, and hope for the best? Do a
daily intensive herbal bowel and liver cleanse? Well,
those are some options but how about the following basic
eight rules:
1.
READ
INGREDIENTS
and disregard the large print. Most of the captions on
food items don’t represent any real benefit to your
health and are simply marketing.
2.
BUY ONLY PRODUCTS WITH INGREDIENTS
YOU RECOGNIZE.
If there are words that you are not familiar with,
cannot pronounce, or you are pretty sure didn’t grow in
the Garden of Eden, give it a miss. These extraneous
ingredients are rarely for your health but rather to
make the item more attractive to you and/or to
compensate for poor quality. Chemicals can make your
food smoother, mix better, drip slower, shine brighter,
smell better, fly further, jump higher! Most of these
are preservatives, colourings and flavourings.
3.
AVOID SUGAR LADEN PRODUCTS.
If sugar is in the top 3 ingredients, give it a miss.
Become familiar with the many forms of refined sugars.
The most common words to look for are sugar, corn syrup,
high fructose corn syrup, glucose, fructose and
malodextrin. Good quality products are naturally
sweetened with whole foods such as dates, unpasturized
honey, unrefined cane juice and the like.
4.
If
you see the word HYDROGENATED run for your life!
The best quality foods will contain cold pressed virgin
oils and this will be indicated on the label. Most oils
are damaged with high heat and put through an
unbelievable amount of processing. In the end, not only
do you lose all the benefits oils can offer but you are
exposed to the ill health effects of rancid, damaged and
nutrient void oils. Most grocery products contain poor
quality cottonseed, soy and/or corn oil. You might be
surprised how much you consume every day. To keep it
simple stick with products that use cold pressed oils
and/or olive oil.
5.
LIMIT PRODUCTS WITH INGREDIENTS ON
THEM.
Buy 70% of your produce in its natural whole foods
forms. You don’t need ingredients for fruits,
vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts and seeds. No
labels, no worry!
6.
Purchase foods from health food
stores and/or specialty health sections of grocery
stores.
You
have to wonder what having a special health section says
about the rest of the grocery store isles.
7.
AVOID FORTIFIED PRODUCTS.
Although it seems good to buy something with added
nutrients this simply reflects that basic nutritional
standards cannot be met by the contents as a stand
alone. They are also usually fortified using an
imbalanced and incomplete variety of poor quality and
poorly assimilated nutrients.
The
sad reality is that little is sacred when it comes to
most processed food items in grocery store chains.
Furthermore, most chronic health problems come from
foods laden with sugars, rancid and toxic oils,
artificial chemicals, binders, fillers, upper downers
and all arounders! Healthier foods may cost more but
they are much more filling and sustaining because of the
high quality and well absorbed nutrients they provide to
the body.
Happy shopping! |