the contemporary shopping lifestyle

One of the simplest and most obvious - yet widely unpracticed - ways to eat healthier is to always look at the ingredients on the label.  Forget about if the front says “reduced fat” or “low sugar”, and (to an extent) forget about how many calories and how much fat is on the back label.

By now you know what you should be eating to have a healthy, balanced diet:  fruits, vegetables, lean meat, whole grains, etc.  Some of those foods are naturally high in calories and/or fat, but that doesn’t diminish their healthy impact on your body.  I have one super simple rule when checking the back of any label:  if one of the primary ingredients is something I haven’t heard of or I know isn’t healthy, I don’t eat it.  

Consider the following example.  You’re standing at the peanut butter section in your local grocery store.  You’ve read about how healthy peanut butter can be (great source of monounsaturated fat, protein, vitamin E, and more) assuming that it’s not loaded with sugar and preservatives, and that the primary ingredient is actually peanuts.  You immediately rule out regular “Jif” because you know it’s high in sugar.  Your next choices are “Reduced Fat Jif” and “Simply Jif - Reduced Sugar and Sodium”.  Which one do you chose?  I bet most people would reach for the reduced fat version:

However, take a look at each label.

The Reduced Fat:

Simply Jif:

Now, in a perfect world everyone would eat all-natural peanut butter with only one ingredient:  peanuts.  In the real world, many of us can’t afford or don’t have access to a natural foods store so we try to do the best we can with what’s on the shelf at our grocery store.

In this case, I’m looking at any ingredient before the “contains 2% or less of:” statement to make sure that at least 98% of my peanut butter is healthy.  The “Reduced Fat Jif” is loaded with corn syrup and sugar (common substitutes in ‘low fat’ items), whereas the “Simply Jif” contains only roasted peanuts and nothing else.  “Simply Jif” is the obvious -yet not so obvious - choice.

In every grocery store in the country, for every item you’re looking for, there is a healthy alternative…you just usually have to look at the back of the label to figure out what it is.