Natural, wholesome, fat-free, sugar-free, whole-grain, non-GMO, vegan, organic, gluten-free… Words, man. So many words. And they’re all used to make foods look like a “healthy” choice, even when they aren’t.
All products, even those most likely to sabotage your health and fitness, are dressed up in happy, appealing, non-threatening packaging to try to catch your eye and motivate you to take them home with you.
The primary job of any company that makes a product is to sell it, right? If a company makes something but can’t get it to move off the shelves, all is lost. It definitely motivates businesses to keep coming up with great new ideas to offer to its customers, as well as improving products they’ve already released to keep people coming back to them.
One of the unfortunate downsides to the necessity of selling though, is that companies will use sneaky marketing tactics and will do and say almost anything to make you feel great about buying their product, even if the way that they choose to entice you is misleading, confusing, or ambiguous.
Food and beverage marketing’s sole purpose is to help you feel warm and fuzzy inside about purchasing their products, as well as making them hard to resist. I sometimes feel like the practices are borderline unethical, because it’s not unusual for packaging and advertisements to use buzz words and seemingly healthy jargon to capitalize on people’s confusion or lack of knowledge about what REALLY makes a food a healthy choice.
This marketing WORKS. It can trap even the most seasoned fitness fanatic from time to time. It’s actually kind of amazing!
Although we do know a lot about health, fitness, and wellness these days, the abundance of information and conflicting theories and beliefs floating around can make it extremely difficult to decide what the best path to a healthy diet looks like for YOU.
Just because some folks out there have discovered they’re intolerant to gluten, does that mean all gluten-free products are, by nature, healthier? Does that mean that you personally should only seek out products that are gluten-free? Is an organic cookie really that much better for you than a conventional cookie filled with a majority of the same ingredients? If something is “naturally sweetened,” what does that mean exactly? If a bag of chips is labeled to be a “good source of fiber,” is it really a healthy choice?
These are only some of the questions that might fly through your head while you’re pushing your cart down the endless aisles of beautifully packaged, delicious-looking, yet nutritionally questionable foods.
Honestly, it’s a tough world out there in the supermarket. I know that I have personally gone through a lot of trial and error, education, and independent research, all the while asking a shitload of questions, to get to a place where I feel like I can really evaluate a food as being a healthy choice (or not) for ME.
If you feel lost when you’re on your weekly grocery shopping trip, you’re not alone! Companies are trying to sell you their products, whether or not they’re good for you. They’re not sold by dietitians, and the manufacturers don’t care whether or not they are a nutritious choice - they just care that they make it into your cart. The choosing is the job of the consumer (you and me), and it can be incredibly overwhelming!
Remember, knowledge truly is power - we all have to take responsibility for learning how to fuel ourselves properly and keep our health in check. We only get one body, so let’s all do what we can to learn how to treat it right!
Although we all have different ideas and beliefs about what is “healthy” and can have vastly different nutritional needs, I’d like to share with you some of the tactics I use to sort through all the flowery claims and get down to the truth about what I’m putting into my body.
So, here's my condensed guide to evaluating whether to not a food is a good nutritional choice:
Be a sleuth. Read the whole package! Start with the biggest words, and see if you can call bullshit, or play devil’s advocate. Then work your way down to the nutrition facts and do the same.
Try to find foods that are naturally nutrient dense (meaning not all of the vitamins and minerals have been added artificially), and as minimally processed as possible. Think about what it took for the ingredients to go from raw materials to becoming whatever is in the package you’re holding…
If you’re going to branch out into processed foods, shoot for the fewest number of ingredients possible, preferably all ones that you can pronounce.
When an ingredient has been purposely removed (think “fat-free,” “sugar-free,” “gluten-free,” etc.), other ingredients are almost always added to take its place and can really influence the nutritional profile of a food or drink. Always keep your eye out for when these swaps are being made - fat-free foods often contain tons of sugar, gluten-free foods can be higher in fat, etc.
From there, see if you can find any nutritional merit, - then check to see if its other qualities make it “worth it.” For example, fiber is great and all, but corn tortilla chips that have fiber in them are still fried corn, so evaluate accordingly.
Lastly, when deciding whether you can fit a food into your balanced diet, determine a food’s primary macronutrient (aka what it’s mostly made up of), be it protein, carbs, or fat, and evaluate it based on that. Can you afford to eat that amount of the primary macronutrient and still stay within your goals? What about the other macronutrients that come along with it?
This might seem like a lot to think about, but I promise you it gets easier, and faster, with practice. And honestly, if you’re ever to become a fit, healthy, self-sufficient dietary decision maker you’ll have to do some learning.
I have worked with lots of clients who just want me to tell them what to do, give them a strict plan, and send them on their way. But what happens when they’re out there in the world and have to choose for themselves? It’s easy to drown in the details when you’re not informed, so the more you can learn, the better chance you have of making the healthiest choices for YOU when you’re on your own.
If you are ever not sure about a product or you think you’re being duped, try out the steps I’ve listed above to clarify your decision. If that’s not enough to make you feel secure, please reach out to me and we can work to figure it out together! I love it when my clients send me a picture of a nutrition label and we get to discuss the pros and cons - it’s always a great learning experience!
Even if you’re not looking for a lesson in dietary overhaul, using these methods can hopefully at the very least aid you in choosing the lesser of some nutritional evils :) Picking the MORE healthy options, whatever that means, is always great practice, as long as you’re aware that what you’re choosing may not be the greatest for your health overall. Everyone eats cookies on occasion, even (if not especially) me… That’s part of living life! If you can stand to pick a healthier cookie sometimes, awesome - just remember, an organic, non-gmo, naturally-sweetened, gluten-free, all-the-fun-buzz-words cookie is still a cookie!
I hope that this little crash course in decision-making can help you to sort through all of this fluffy language and help you make choices that will best fuel and care for that wonderful machine that is your body.
How do you decide if a food is healthy for you?
Please feel free to comment, upvote, or resteem if you found this helpful! :)
