I went to a popular "health" food store yesterday and once I moved beyond the fruit and vegetable isle, it became very hard to make healthy choices for the products I wanted to purchase. I started reading the sugar, salt, saturated fats and fiber contents, and spent a lot of time before picking some healthier alternatives. The food industry is marketing a lot of food as healthy whereby they may be packed with sugar, salt, and have a very low fiber content.
Another gimmick is the marketing of kids specific food which are loaded with sugar. Most often, the health friendly version of a food is packed with as much sugar as the popular "unhealthy" brand. In a recent article published by Dr. Mark Hyman, he states that 25% of the square footage of most stores are devoted to selling sugar products. He provides a guide for healthy food shopping in the supermarket which include the following:
Buy around perimeter of the store (that’s where the healthy stuff is)
- Don’t go down isles (that’s where most of the junk food is)
- Don’t buy food in a box
- Or with more than 5 ingredients
- Or with ingredients you can’t pronounce
- Or with a cartoon on package