Making healthy choices at the grocery store may be harder than your thought. Discover which so-called diet foods don’t deserve their position.
Fat-free! Vitamin-enriched! All-natural! Labels like these guide us through the grocery store. But products that tout nutritional advantage are often anything but good for you. The food industry is given wide leeway to promote their products, so it’s dependent on us to ferret out the importers. That means reading nutrition labels to see what ingredients items really contain. Some of the worst wrongdoer turn up in foods you least suspect. Those so-called health bars, for example, may contain protein and a few vitamins and minerals, but they’re often loaded with salt and sugar also.And the next time you reach for that low-fat peanut butter, reconsider. Frequently, the healthy peanut fat has been replaced and removed with included sugar to make up for the loss in flavor. That’s really the case for many fat-free and low-fat products.
Of course, you don’t generally have nutrition labels to guide you to the healthiest choices at the grocery store. And when you’re in the create section, every one of those greens can be overwhelming. In that case, let color be your guide.“Iceberg lettuce really has very little nutritional value. It’s generally water, so in case you’re looking to get great vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals, you need to look at darker, greener lettuces, similar to romaine and kale and spinach. The darker … a lettuce, the more nutrition it has.”
Here’s another tip: “Whole grain” and “multi grain” are not exchangeable terms. Whole grains are healthier because they contain all parts of the grain kernel. In any case, multi grain simply means the food contains more than one sort of grain.