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Show Notes
In this episode, we will talk about the unconscious beliefs you have about what food you should buy and eat, as well as how you might have ended up with them.
I encourage you to question these beliefs and start making informed and, more importantly, intentional decisions when you are shopping for food.
I will also give you three simple principles about what your shopping cart should look like and easy-to-follow guidelines on how to choose the food items you buy.
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Transcript
Welcome to Episode number three of Nourishing Wins: “ Unlearning how you were [twat] taught to shop for food”
In this episode, I want to talk about the way you got to know what you know about food. I also want to offer new, simple ways to think about your food choices that will help you make smarter decisions when at the supermarket.
I noticed that for quite a lot of the people I talk to, it is news to learn that processed foods are not good for their health or for losing weight. “But they are low in fat”, “But it says they contain no sugar” “These biscuits must be good – they are rich in fiber and in proteins”
I confess I was surprised at the beginning because I assumed they knew they were not ideal for health or losing weight but they chose to consume them knowingly.
So I wondered, where do people get their information about food from? How do they THINK about what they buy ? What are their criteria?
In general, when you are on your way to buy something, the more information you receive that helps you make a choice between the different alternatives, the easier it is for you. Let’s say you want to buy an air conditioner – initially you don’t know what the criteria should be in order to select the best one so you are grateful when a salesperson walks you through the things you should consider: how many rooms do you want it to serve? Do you want it to produce heat as well? Do you want it to be visible or built-in to the wall?
The same happens with food items when you look around the different ailes at the supermarket. Behind each packaging, there is a salesperson trying to tell you the criteria you should consider: low fat, no-sugar, no preparation needed..
So one of the places where we learn about food is the supermarket and the teachers are the food brands and the big food corporations.
Of course, there is no salesperson behind the raw bell peppers, or the aubergines or the leeks. There is no information pushed to you to determine you to pick those whole foods.
Think about it: have you seen marketing on whole rice packages informing you that it contains more fiber and nutrients than the white one because its bran and germ have not been removed? There is no messaging educating you about the microbiome and the health benefits of polyphenol content in raw fruits and vegetables. And there is no messaging about blueberries, strawberries, mushrooms, chillies, apples, pears, avocados, broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, onions, garlic that they have fat-fighting properties and they actually do help you keep your weight in check, as scientific studies show.
So I encourage you to think about WHY you choose the items that you put in your shopping cart. You might have made the choice long ago and you are just restocking the same foods over and over again.
Or you might let the marketing on the packages of food inform you about what you should eat. They have studied you in great detail – they know what words you respond to, they even know what you don’t consciously know about yourself.
You also need to be aware that most packaged foods in supermarkets are designed to be very palatable, not satienting and addictive so that you come back for more.
So if the answer is “I like the foods that I buy, I like their taste” – don’t stop here. You might be the victim of food designed in “Taste Labs” to make you buy it over and over again.
What is the big reason why you buy food? To stop hunger? To feel better?
Although food is supposed to stop hunger, nothing wrong with that – having only this purpose in mind is not enough for staying in good health and avoiding gaining weight. The problem is, in today’s world, most foods – especially the convenient ones- are deprived of the nutrients that your body needs, they are mostly empty calories.
The answer should be “To give my body what it needs to be in good health”
You might think that you don’t know – you don’t know in detail what your body needs and it should not be that hard. Yes, it is unfortunate that most items in our food supply are not properly feeding us and that we face the risk of disease and excess weight if we trust food corporations to tell us what to eat.
But eating healthily can actually be achieved by following some basic, easy to remember principles.
I will share them with you in a second but let’s think about something else before.
Supermarket Food that is ready or almost-ready to consume, is also carefully thought of in order to make a profit. So the ingredients used will most likely be cheap, low quality and poor in nutrients, making the food not actually good value for money.
Unfortunately, it is also the case with most restaurant food.
There is another place where we have picked up information about what we should eat and this is the culture in which we were born and raised. While this is not as damaging as the teachings of the food corporations, part of the traditional dishes might not be adapted to our times, either because we are not as physically active as we used to be or because animal products were of better quality and less frequent than today. People used to work the fields or do manual labor that needed a lot of energy, so eating high-calorie food made sense back then because the energy output was also high. If you are sitting at your desk, in your car and on your coach all day, then I’ll let you imagine the difference in energy requirements.
Another thing that is prevalent in numerous food cultures is building a dish around meat. Meat with something on the side. And the underlying idea that meat is superior food that must be present in all meals. However, when it is so easy (and sometimes cheap) to get meat, you end up not consuming enough plants: vegetables, legumes, nuts and seeds. The meat might not be of good quality either, meaning the animals might have been fed cheap, pesticide-sprayed food, growth hormones and treated with antibiotics.
So question your underlying assumptions about what food is good for you – and think about where these beliefs come from.
Let’s now talk about the simple principles that can help you make healthier food choices.
First, your shopping cart composition:
- Fill your cart with 75%, that is 3 quarters whole foods. This means the foods are in their original form. Fruits, vegetables, pulses, mushrooms, herbs, nuts and seeds, honey, whole rice, quinoa, barley and so on. Frozen or canned goods also count. Freezing is actually a better technique in terms of nutrient preservation than canning. And, sometimes it might even be superior to fresh food if that food has traveled and been on the shelf too much.
- Fill the remaining quarter of your shopping cart with a few fermented foods: yogurt, kefir, soy paste and kimchi or other fermented vegetables PLUS some minimally processed, quality proteins such as cheese, sea food, poultry or red meat.
- If you must buy some treats, keep it to a minimum. There is nothing wrong with having some dark chocolate or dates which are very satisfying and healthy. They are much better than low-sugar biscuits which you might consume without restriction because you think they help you lose weight. Refined flour products, such as biscuits, cannot trigger weight loss. But dates (as long as you don’t over eat them) can. Dark chocolate (70% or above) is packed full of important minerals, including iron, magnesium and zinc.
Secondly, read the labels.
I have a simple rule here: if there are more than 5 ingredients, don’t buy it. For example, yogurt doesn’t need to have more than milk and lactic ferments. If you like the fruity flavored ones, just add fruits to the plain ones. The quantity of fruits in flavored yogurt is ridiculous and you also get a lot of unnecessary sugar. Some exceptions to this rule: creamed soups that might contain more than a couple vegetables and olive oil can go past the 5-ingredient mark but they could still be considered ok. For example, gazpacho – you can find it already made and it can be ok. Just be careful not to have sugar or chemical additives in the ingredient list.
Thirdly, stay away from products that are marketed as low-something, free of something or fortified with vitamins or minerals. You don’t need foods that have been deprived of part of them, such as the fat but also of those that have had micro-nutrients added to them. It is, in both cases, the sign that they have been processed too much.
For example, let’s take bread fortified with folic acid. 28 grams of wheat germ provides 78.7 mcg of folate, which equals about 20% of your daily needs. Why would you need to fortify it? The answer is simple: because in the process to make that bread the wheat was transformed so that the germ was removed so all the B vitamins it contained were lost with it. And then they had to put the B vitamins back. Isn’t it backwards? Just buy a whole cereal bread, ideally try different cereals or buckwheat for diversity of nutrients. Be aware of misleading messaging as some breads are dyed so that it gives them the brownish color of whole bread but they are not actually made from low-processed cereals. You are generally better off buying your bread at a local bakery – ask the baker how they make their bread.
Additionally, nutrients work best, not in isolation, but in the context of real food, together with other nutrients. Studies have shown time and time again that just consuming one element, such as a supplement, does not lead to the same benefits as when you eat it as part of a whole food, together with other natural ingredients. Nutrients work in synergy.
To sum up, you might have in-built beliefs about what you should eat that you have not intentionally chosen to believe. I invite you to question them and make your own decision about what food you will buy and consume.
I offered 3 straightforward principles that I hope will help you make better choices at the supermarket in terms of health and weight loss:
One: Fill your shopping cart with 3 quarters whole foods and one quarter fermented foods and quality proteins (animal-source included, unless you are vegan)
Two: Read the labels and don’t buy things that have more than 5 ingredients.
Three: Avoid foods that are marketed as either free of something, low on something or fortified with vitamins and minerals. It is a clear indication that they have been too processed and it is always better to eat foods as nature intended them.
