| | Nutritious
Shopping It
is important to buy nutritious foods at the grocery store and not buy the high
fat, high calorie products that are often on sale.
The
following list will help make your shopping experience a nutritious one! - Plan
ahead and make a grocery list. Planning ahead is important.
It will help you avoid the marketing tactics the supermarket uses to entice people
to purchase unnecessary or high-priced items.
- Learn
how to read labels. The labels will tell you the nutrient
composition of the food. Look for calories per serving, grams of protein per serving,
grams of fat per serving, and grams of carbohydrates per serving. See 'Label Lingo'
below.
- Eat
something before you go shopping. Hunger reduces your resistance
to buy foods that are low in nutritious content, over-priced, and unnecessary.
- Choose
minimally processed foods. As a general rule, fresh foods
are more nutritious than processed foods. Many dietary deficiencies result from
eating too much processed foods.
- Increase
awareness of the fat, cholesterol and sugar content in food. The
levels of fat, cholesterol and sugar are often higher than you think. Read the
labels so you will know what you are eating
- Leave
children at home. If you can find a babysitter, do not take
your children with you to the grocery store. Shopping with children can result
in unnecessary food purchases. These purchases are often sugary treats with low
nutritious value.
Label
Lingo
- Wheat
Flour does not mean whole wheat flour. Wheat flour probably contains primarily
refined flour which is not as nutritious as whole wheat flour.
- Products
that are labeled as 'low in cholesterol' might be high in fat, salt or other undesirable
ingredients.
- Fruit
beverages are better if they are 100% fruit juice. If a product is labeled as
a fruit beverage, it may only have 10% fruit juice. The higher percentage of fruit
juice, the more nutritious the beverage is.
- Natural
foods are not always more nutritious than other foods. When considering natural
foods, look to see how fresh they are, and try to buy ones that are minimally
processed.
- Sugar
free or sugar less means a food contains no table sugar but it can contain other
sugars such as honey or corn syrup.
- Know the different types of
sugar. A food is likely to be high in sugar if one of the following names appears
first or second in the list of ingredients: brown sugar, corn sweetener, corn
syrup, dextrose, fructose, fruit juice concentrate, glucose, high-fructose corn
syrup, honey, invert sugar, lactose, maltose, malt syrup, molasses, raw sugar,
sucrose, syrup, and table sugar.
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