5 Helpful Nutrition Tips
Filed under: General Health, Nutrition
Continuing with the 5 Helpful Tips theme, this time we are rolling with some nutrition tips. These tips aren’t earth shattering and novel, but they are always important to keep in mind, whether you are a nutrition newbie or an experienced expert.
1. Shop the perimeter of the grocery store.
The perimeter is where you find your produce, your fish and meat, eggs and dairy, etc. It is not where you find twinkies, chips, or donuts. Make quick ventures into the middle aisles to get other items like salsa, tuna, oats and flax. Sticking to the perimeter will also allow you to avoid buying stuff you don’t need just because it is on sale or is making some ridiculous health claim, you usually don’t get suckered by produce.
2. Buy things that don’t come in a box or plastic wrapper.
This could also be increased to only buy food that you can find or make in nature. If something comes in a box, has more than 5 ingredients, or has any ingredients you can’t pronounce, it probably isn’t good for you. Stick to real whole foods that you could hunt, gather, pluck or grow, and avoid the man made food products.
3. If a food makes a heath claim, it probably sucks.
A lot of food items make health claims like no trans fat, low cholesterol, low sodium, blah blah blah. In most cases if a food has to make a health claim for you to buy it, it probably sucks. Adding 20mg of omega-3′s to milk (like Horizon did, a crappy organic monopoly) is useless, but it allows them to make a claim based on legitimate research. If you are eating real, whole, unprocessed foods then you shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not your butter contains plant sterols (which are controversial and have very little real evidence behind them).
4. Don’t live off coupons.
I know times are tough and people are looking for any way they can trim their budget, but cutting back on the items that nourish you and maintain your existence is probably not the best option. Neither is living off Ramen and Mac and Cheese. If you have room in your budget for that plasma flat screen, the HD cable package and Netflix, I think you need to reevaluate where you are spending your money. Our diet is related to our health in more ways than one, spending more time with your family and friends around the dinner table will more than make up for your loss of HBO.
5. Learn what real whole grains are.
Most people know the term whole grains, and they think they know what it is referring too. Unfortunately, the food industry has some other ideas, and fools people into purchasing crappy foods that are listed as being great sources of “whole grains”. For something to be really whole grain, it should be entirely whole grain, not just containing a small portion of whole grains. Real whole grain options are old-fashioned or steel-cut oats, amaranth, quinoa, wild rice and sprouted organic whole grain products (like Ezekiel). A great blog was written on this topic at the Precision Nutrition blog. To learn more about whole grains and more tips like this, check out Precision Nutrition.
These tips are just a small, but hopefully helpful addition to your arsenal of tools to make you a better shopper, and a better consumer of real, whole healthy foods. Good luck!
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Posted on April 10th, 2009 by Brian St. Pierre
5 Comments
April 15th, 2009 at 10:02 am
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June 1st, 2009 at 7:46 pm
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July 13th, 2011 at 8:40 pm
Your article is great, its probably something to do with my computer but for some reason i can’t open your post on chrome, this is why i had to use a different browser.
July 9th, 2013 at 9:38 pm
You really give some great tips here. Thanks for sharing this to us and keep posting. This will help people to be healthy.