Navigating the Grocery Store

When it comes to purchasing good food to eat, it’s easy to let the temptations of little indulgences take over. We all want to eat well – for health and longevity – but deciding what to buy can be a real challenge!

There is a lot of misinformation out there, and a lot of differing views as to what works when it comes to food choices and eating. So I did a survey of the literature and picked out several books, audio programs, and videos to identify the most sensible choices. I then compiled 12 rules of thumb (some borrowed, some derived) that have made an enormous difference to my overall health, energy level, clarity of mind, and self-confidence.

Here are 12 (functional) rules of thumb for navigating the grocery store:

1. Get the majority of your calories from organic veggies and fruits. Food grown industrially (in chemically fertilized soils) is very low in nutrition and can take as much as 5 times the volume to satisfy your body’s needs for trace minerals and essential nutrient combinations. Buy food specifically for the nutrient density, with the fewest number of environmental toxins.
2. Eat only free range meats grown on organic farms. Essential fatty acids found in animal fats are critical to avoiding diseases such as Cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and so on. But the fats of animals who eat grains grown in chemically-fertilized soils lack these beneficial properties. Plus, the hormones used in beef and chicken production have been causally linked to a myriad of epigenetic diseases.
3. Don’t eat any refined sugars, especially high-fructose corn syrup. If you get more than 10% of your calories from any combination of sugar molecules, you are actively feeding the cancer cells that already exist in your body and putting a huge undue strain on your immune system to cope with them. High-fructose corn syrup can be more addictive than cocaine or heroine (especially in children), and is a leading cause of behavioral problems in both children and inmates. In adults, alcohol and refined sugars are the leading causes of adult onset (type-II) diabetes and have been linked to child abuse.
4. Never buy anything that has more than 5 ingredients. This includes foods bought in the deli. Statistically, this simple rule will help you to steer clear of pretty much everything harmful in the grocery store.
5. If a food product makes a health claim, don’t buy it. Healthy food does not need to make claims.
6. Never purchase anything fortified. Fortified foods are fortified because the nutrients have been taken out of them. This includes baby formula (see Failure to Thrive). For example, white flour is typically fortified with iron. That means all the natural, biologically available iron was taken out of it during processing. Fortified foods are not really food.
7. Treat processed foods like condiments, not foods. Two great examples of processed foods are bread and pasteurized milk. Bread was the first processed food, technically speaking. It was a good way to get the essential fatty acids that we used to get from animal fats, but then bakers started to chemically alter it by bleaching the flour. Bleaching removes color and nutrients. When you pasteurize milk, you destroy the molecules that help your body to fight off disease and replace them with molecules that are not digestible by humans. Plus, if the MCM6 gene is expressed in you like it is in most of the world’s population, you will have trouble digesting the lactose and other molecules found in milk anyway.
8. Do not make your food purchases based on nutritionist bias. While having all the right nutrients in your diet is important, if you do not consume them in the combinations found in nature your body is not equipped to deal with them. Nutrients in food work synergistically, and nutritionism (as a philosophy) overlooks this fact. A diet of corn and beans works well, covering the fats, carbohydrates, and proteins needed by humans to thrive. But if you replace the corn with fortified flour products, the same nutrients are found in the diet but the health of the eater is significantly poorer.
9. Really old recipes are usually the best. Traditional recipes from before 1900 are generally the healthiest, and hardest to find. Nonetheless, they are worth looking into. Aside from being interesting to cook, they usually taste really good.
10. If you can’t buy an ingredient on its own from the same store, don’t buy products that contain it. If you can’t pronounce something on an ingredient list, the same rule applies. Chemicals are not food.
11. Only heat oils that can be heated. Olive oil is good for cooking, but flax oil is not. Heated flax oil becomes linseed oil, the same stuff used to make your furniture shiny. Linseed oil is toxic to humans.
12. Don’t eat trans-fatty acids to lose weight. Even though trans-fats are produced in the body and can be found in some foods naturally, it is actually a poison. The human body can only process a microscopic amount of trans-fat safely, and produces a myriad of toxins from excesses of it. Plus, your body may try to store it as fat like it does with other toxins.

The Basics of Weight Management

It’s hard to talk about food these days without the subject of weight-loss coming up. Keep in mind that extra calories are stored as fat, and the way to reduce your fat reserves is to burn more calories in a day than you take in. But it doesn’t take that much exercise to stay healthy (just 20 minutes a day) if you are making wise food choices. Plus, being too thin is just as bad as being overweight.

Most North Americans try to avoid eating fat and end up satisfying their cravings for nutrients missing from their diets by eating fortified foods stuffed with sugar. Typically, they get 25% of their calories from refined sugars. Therein lays the cause of overweight: Your body will continue to feel hungry until you have topped up sufficiently on the nutrients your diet is short on. Therefore, the key to staying at your healthiest weight is to only ever eat until you are 80% full, stick to nutrient-dense foods, and keep sugars to just10% of your total calories.

Utilizing Sources of Food Information

Below is a list of my sources. You’ll note that there are a couple of fad diets on the list. After looking at the science of how the body processes food and utilizes it, my opinion is that none of the popular diet programs I looked at were worthwhile on their own. There were a few good ideas in them, but for the most part they tended to dwell on limited subsets of information. I chose to include them on my list because they do offer some useful information, but I would only recommend them in conjunction with at least three others.

In fact, if I was to offer one more rule of thumb it’s this: Avoid Following Fad Diets. Just listen to what they have to say, and compare it to the 12 rules of thumb. If the diet encourages you to break the rules listed above, or pushes you to use supplements of any kind, you know it’s a dud.

Here they are:

1. Nancy Clark’s Sports Nutrition Guidebook – 4th Edition
2. The Zone: A Dietary Road Map to Lose Weight Permanently : Reset Your Genetic Code : Prevent Disease : Achieve Maximum Physical Performance
3. Andrew Weil, M.D. – Eating Well for Optimum Health
4. The Fast Track One-Day Detox Diet: Boost metabolism, get rid of fattening toxins, safely lose up to 8 pounds overnight and keep them off for good
5. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
6. Free Videos: Jerry Brunetti – Food as Medicine Part 1, Part 2.
7. The Metabolic Typing Diet: Customize Your Diet to Your Own Unique Body Chemistry
8. Nutrition & Behavior by Dr. Russell Blaylock
9. Free Videos: Supermarket Secrets Part 1, Part 2.

Three More Gems

In many cultures, people buy food not for appearance but for flavor. This is a really good policy to take with you to the grocery store. Flavor is nature’s way of telling you that something is good (or not good) for you. If a food lacks flavor, it probably lacks nutrients as well.

One current fad is centered on Omega-3 fatty acids. These molecules are important because they are used to by the body to build brains, and are not produced in the body. This doesn’t mean you should eat brains (organ meats are generally not a good idea), but it does mean you need to include them in your diet. The typical North American consumes a ratio of 1:20 Omega 3 to Omega 6.That’s not good – 50% of them will get Alzheimer’s! To maintain healthy cognitive abilities, humans need a ratio closer to 1:3. The easiest way to to achieve this is to read the food label. The higher the Omega 3 content in relation to the Omega 6, the better. Just don’t overdo it.

An excellent resource for looking into the nutritional value of foods is: NutritionData.com. I personally like it because it goes far beyond what any government or government-sponsored organization will tell you about food, and it has several features that help users make smart food choices.

Happy eating!