The Food Game: Know the ingredients

So let’s begin the “Food Game.”  First, you should focus only on what you can control.  This does not include eating out at restaurants.  When dining out, you should use your best judgement.  It is nearly impossible to know what all ingredients comprise a meal in an average restaurant.

So eating healthy all begins in the grocery store.  This, you can control.  When purchasing items, read the “nutrition facts” label.  Below are a few rules I keep in mind:

1. Avoid foods with ingredients that include words the average human can not pronounce
2. Look for the word “whole” when buying grains such as “Whole Wheat”
3. Avoid bleached or enriched flours
4. and buy products that do not have sugar in the first three ingredients

If there are ingredients you can not pronounce, the food has been processed, manufactured or mass produced.  More than likely, one of the “words unable to be spoken” is a preservative, artificial flavoring, or something that gives the food color.  Pick up another can of beans and compare.  I have always found an alternative to getting the one with all of the chemicals sitting near by.

“Whole” grains is important and often a mistaken ingredient.  If the word “whole” is not in front of the grain, it has been broken down and stripped of it’s nutritional value.  Bleached and enriched products are also stripped of their nutritional value through the process of bleaching and enriching.

And lastly, if sugar is in the top three ingredients (as ingredients are listed in the order of their volume), it is not a good choice.  Sugars can come in many forms:

• high fructose corn syrup
• brown rice syrup
• have fructose, glucose in their names
• dextrose

There are basically two types of sugars.  One is a naturally occurring sugar found in nature (like Stevia, cane sugar, agave nectar, etc.) and the other is one that has been created by us humans to make food processing easier (commonly called refined sugars and include the bulleted items above).  For further reading on sugar, you can read “Is Sugar Toxic?”  Sugar alone is a blog by itself.  Most foods have enough naturally occurring sugars that they do not need any additional.

So the next time you are in the grocery store spend a little extra time…it is worth it.

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