This is a tough post to keep fairly short. Our food has a lot of contaminants, and you can find out all you ever wanted to know about them from books and websites. Produce, dairy and meat have enough concerns to be their own post, so I am going to limit this discussion to the middle aisles of the grocery store.
Note: Spend as little time in the middle aisles as possible, and make these items only a small portion of your total groceries.What to avoid
There are many directions you can go with what you want to cut out based on food sensitivities, health conditions, diets and your kids' needs. A lot of this is a balancing act with what's ideal and what's affordable. I'd love to cut out all GMOs, but we aren't exactly certain which brands have banned them, and most non-GMO verified products are pricey.
Here are a few basics you can (and should) cut out now.
1. Artificial sweeteners: aspartame, sucralose, acesulfame potassium, neotame, saccharrin.
2.Artificial colors: most artificial colors are made from coal tar and have been banned in many other countries. You may be surprised at what has artificial colors. This is any red 40, yellow 5, etc.
3. Olestra: a fat substitute found in a lot of light or low-fat chips.
4. BHA and BHT: preservatives to prevent food from becoming rancid and smelling bad that are reasonably considered to be carcinogens. Found in many boxed cereals and snack foods.
5. Fully hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated vegetable oils: common sources of trans fats.
6. Monoglyceride and diglyceride: made in the same way as hydrogenated oils and may contain trans-fatty acids, but they fall outside the FDA labeling requirements for trans fats.
7. TBHQ: found in a lot of snack foods. This is a form of butane, and the side effects of even just 1 to 4 grams are pretty scary. The FDA has set a limit allowing up to 0.02% of the total oils in food to be TBHQ, which it considers "safe." I feel better avoiding this ingredient completely.
The old adage of buying foods that have only ingredients you can pronounce is a good rule when it comes to packaged food. Anything that sounds like a chemical probably is, and it's probably not good for you.
Scan the labels for fat, sugar and salt
Once you've scanned labels for the above offenders, also look at how high in the ingredient list sugar is listed. The earlier it appears, the more of it there is. Scan the sodium percentage to see if you can reasonably fit that food in your daily diet. Finally, take a look at the amount of saturated fat and trans fat.
If you're looking at a snack food, and those numbers are high, put it back and find something else.
So how do I shop like this quickly?
Here's me at the grocery store. My oldest is running up and down the aisles because she's bored. My youngest is doing his glass-shattering scream because he doesn't want to be confined in the cart. If I put him down to stop the screaming, he starts to pull everything off the shelves. I then smile politely as elderly shoppers comment on my stellar parenting skills.
Sound familiar? So how do you read labels and make good choices amid this chaos?
1. Go to a grocery store with samples. I'm kind of joking here, but if the kids have food in their mouths, they can't bug you too much, right?
2. Make a list of what you need and limit your in-store research to only those items. Maybe this time you just want to look at barbecue sauce and chips. Next time, you can look at pasta and cereal.
3. Do some ingredient research and make a list of what you want to avoid. If you have a no-no list running through your head, it's easier to pick up on those things as you scan the ingredient list. I also have a fairly extensive list in my phone of ingredients to avoid that I'll refer to if I'm looking at something new.
4. Look at percentages. Adding up milligrams of sodium or grams of sugar while wrangling kids is far too confusing, but you can quickly determine what 33% of your daily sodium means to you.
This is probably enough for one day. Is there anything you would add to the list?
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