Tips and tricks to avoid getting fooled at the grocery store
The grocery store is a remarkable place. Where else can you find organic root vegetables, frozen chicken strips, and gluten-free rice crackers all in the same place? While there is a wide range of material to be sold for all of your shopping needs, the choices you make have consequences. What you choose to buy will inevitably effect your body, and your wallet. Here are a few tips on how you can avoid being mislead.
Learning how to properly read food labels at the grocery store can help you become a more efficient shopper.
One crucial way to avert the pitfalls of unhealthy shopping includes the ability to read food labels properly. The designs, colors, and ingredients of a label are all carefully chosen by manufacturers and advertisers get you to purchase their product. Being able to properly read a label, and understanding exactly what you are buying is a vital tool to help your trips to the grocery store become more efficient.
A common misconception involving food labels occurs through serving sizes. Sometimes labels, like the ones found on a 750mL carton of juice for example, will show you that the product has 25 per cent of your daily carbohydrates. It is a common mistake to look at the nutritional value of a product without considering the serving size. Surprisingly, the 25 per cent value could refer to only 100mL of the entire carton. While these numbers may be exaggerated, it is in fact a reality that serving sizes often mislead consumers into thinking a product has a healthier nutritional value.
Another crucial issue regarding the mislabelling of food involves – you guessed it – the ingredients list. Everybody knows that ingredients are listed from most to least, right? How can this be harmful? Let’s say you are looking at a delicious, pre-packaged cheesecake with a cherry glaze topping. Yum. You look at the ingredients and the first one listed is wheat flour. That’s good, right? That doesn’t sound too bad. This is where the ingredients list shines, becoming sneaky and deceptive. It may appear that sugar is not most prominent ingredient, however, the list does not account for all the different kinds of sugars present in the product. Corn syrup, malt syrup, invert sugar, and glucose are just a few examples of the different kinds of sugars available. This means that manufacturers can divide different these sources of sugar into smaller portions, in order to bump the word ‘sugar’ down on the ingredient list – even though it is the used the most!
These are a few tips to help you enhance your grocery shopping experience. It is important to recognize that food labels can be extremely deceptive, and half the battle is knowing the dangers that lie therein.