Grocery Shopping & Food Labels

Grocery Shopping & Food Labels

Grocery shopping can become somewhat overwhelming and stressful when you start to become more conscious and aware of what you are eating. As it becomes more important to make healthy nutritive changes in your diet, grocery shopping can become an actual whirlwind of emotions. You start off excited and ready to dive into your new and improved lifestyle, and so you go to the grocery store and buy whatever “healthy-looking” food items you can, to start your week off on the right foot. However, you notice it’s expensive, the quantity is much less for the price, and you don’t actually like what you are eating. Does this sound familiar? And what if I told you that some of those healthy-looking foods aren’t always as healthy as you think? It’s unfortunately the case, because brands – especially the larger corporations – market to people seeking to eat better, and these are hook, line, and sinker strategies to get you to purchase their foods. These foods that you are seeing, such as the lower-calorie, gluten-free, no artificial flavors, sugar-free, “all-natural,” etc., can be healthy to some extent. Sometimes they may be a great choice depending on your goals, but often there is a catch to these labels on foods. For example, for any of the food labels that I just mentioned, they could still contain a number of chemical additives such as preservatives, pesticide residues, color agents; they could be high in sodium, synthetic sweeteners, etc. Between the years of 1978 and 2008, the U.S. food additive business was worth up to 13 billion dollars (Keener). If you look up the food ingredient market today it’s worth over 100 billion dollars, according to “Global Market Insights.” There are upwards of 2800 food additives approved for use in the U.S. (keener). In the U.S. alone, greater than 400 million pounds of additives are used annually in the processing of meats and meat-bearing products (Keener). The average U.S. citizen consumes between 140 and 150 pounds of food additives per year (Keener). Not all food additives are harmful, some are even beneficial, however, some have been shown to be deleterious or to cause damage, especially from long-term consumption. Although the FDA can choose to prohibit an ingredient’s use if it is deemed harmful, the process takes time for manufacturers and consumers to petition certain ingredients to be reviewed and determined as generally safe (or GRAS – generally recognized as safe). These additives may not be banned right away and rather “they are innocent until proven guilty,” as further studies are required to determine their safety (Keener).

Change is happening in the food industry, however, as people learn more about what is in their food and whether those foods are actually good for human consumption or not. Global Market Insights projects this to have a positive impact on the size of the food additive industry. But this change is extremely slow, and the food additive market is only projected to grow another 100 billion in the next decade (Global Report 2032).

As a nutrition coach, I am here to help guide you through the confusion and the immense amount of information about what is healthy and what isn’t. I will discuss with you the hard-to-pronounce and endless list of ingredients, as well as whether those additives have been shown to be harmful and if they should be avoided or not. Generally, the first ingredients I look at on a food label are the added sugar content, the fat – including trans and saturated fat content, and whether the food item has any synthetic ingredients such as aspartame, sucralose, artificial coloring, flavors, etc. Other ingredients to avoid include MSG (monosodium glutamate), sodium nitrates, and sulfites; these preservatives/flavor enhancers have been shown to cause adverse health effects, including elevated blood pressure due to the increased sodium levels these ingredients add to the food (Mayo Clinic). Natural flavors are an ingredient that have also been getting more and more backlash as these additives undergo a lot of processing, may contain a number of chemicals, and have been shown in some studies to show adverse health effects. With that said, natural flavors are in so many food products including organic foods. When your main objective is to lose weight and while you are simply starting off learning about healthier food options, trying to avoid natural flavors in food is not necessary, in my opinion. We can discuss natural flavors further as well as other speculated harmful ingredients (i.e., allulose, stevia, cellulose, different types of gums, etc.), if you decide you would like to move forward with me as your nutrition coach. I will also be writing more about these ingredients in my wellness blog, which you can become a weekly subscriber to. Subscribe at the bottom of the page or click the on “Wellness Blog” on the menu at the top of this page.

Check out the references below to read more about the information that I included in the post above.

References:

[1] “5 Food Additives You Should Avoid.” Cleveland Clinic, 9 June 2023, 5 Food Additives You Should Avoid – Cleveland Clinic

[2] “Food Additives Market Size Statistics: Global Report 2032.” Global Market Insights Inc., www.gminsights.com/industry-analysis/food-additives-market-size. Accessed 24 July 2023.

[3] Keener, Larry. “Food Safety and Regulatory Survey of Food Additives and Other Substances in Human Food.” Ensuring Global Food Safety, 2022, pp. 259–273, https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-816011-4.00005-7.