How Healthy is Your Grocery Cart?

It is difficult to know what is healthy in today's society. According to most major processed food manufacturer's advertisements, you could live to be 120 eating nothing but cereal out of a box, dried fruit 'snacks' and 'juice cocktails'. Unless you specifically buy from a store that focuses on all-natural ingredients, and really goes above and beyond the call of health (a great case in point is the Mt Capra whole food vitamins), even smart people are often completely misled. Today we look at some more common supermarket health fallacies.

Products 'free' of a bad ingredient

Just about every product on the supermarket shelves makes some sort of health claim. There are sugary gelatine lollies that are '0% fat!', cereals that are sugar free, and ice-cream that has 'no cholesterol'. These claims are technically true - but don't let them blind you to the fact that the overall product is probably not is one of the essential layers of the food pyramid.

Made with 'real' ingredients

Nobody wants to be eating fake food! But claims like 'Made with real chicken' that can found on packets of kids nuggets need to be evaluated critically. Look at the ingredients and see how far down the ingredient list the 'real' ingredient comes. Ingredients are always listed in order from most plentiful to least plentiful - so you might find that your 'real chicken' nuggets are actually 50% textured soy protein, 5% chicken.

'Flavored'

There are quite a lot of products on the supermarket shelves that piggyback on traditional recipe names, like 'guacamole', to con you into thinking they're made the same way you would do it at home. This is rarely true. Check the label … always! Even a wonderful selection of whole food multivitamins won’t save you from the dangers of 'guacamole-flavored dip'.

Zero grams of trans fats

If a product has less than 0.5g of trans fats per serving, the FDA allows manufacturers to make this claim. However, they may make serving sizes artificially small to be allowed to do so. Check the label … again!