Healthy food 101

We want to feed our kids the healthiest food possible, but life gets busy and sometimes we do need to buy packaged snacks. What are the healthiest options you can find there? First I would like to provide you with a simple guide on how you can navigate those ingredients and find the best available options in the store. Second, I will provide you with a list of my favorite options. If you don’t have time to dive into the ingredients guide you can just go directly to the second part.

Ingredients guide

Always look at the ingredients list first, not at the nutritional value only. The shorter the list of ingredients the better.

What if the list of ingredients is long and I don’t know what half of those names are? The simplest way to choose the best ingredients is to look for the list of ingredients where you know every single item on the list and would also buy it yourself. Let’s see what it might look like:

When you look at Almond Milk #1 you know what every single thing on the list is, right? So that would be on your best choice list. Almond Milk #2 ingredient list has way more ingredients and it’s unlikely you have them in your pantry, so that product might not be the first one to choose.

To put it simply, all the names that sound like chemicals most likely are chemicals and you don’t want to have them there.

And now it gets tricky, there might be ingredients on the list that look familiar and friendly, but you might want to limit or avoid them if possible and make them your second choice option if no other options are available.

• Sugar. Sugar makes products sweet, but provides zero nutritional value and is a source of simple carbohydrates that spike our blood glucose levels.
• Industrial seed oil (canola oil, rapeseed oil, cottonseed oil, corn oil, vegetable oil, soybean oil and etc) is rich in Omega -6 and pro-inflammatory. It’s better to opt out for ghee butter, coconut oil, olive oil, and avocado oil.
• Citric acid. Manufactured citric acid is often produced from a type of mold and can cause allergies or side effects. It’s better to use lemon/lime juice for a natural course of citric acid.
• Natural sweeteners (maple syrup, honey, coconut sugar, stevia). They are fine to use occasionally as an alternative to refined sugar, but you would still need to watch the amount you consume. Although I prefer to use as little sweeteners as possible to not develop a sweet tooth in the first place.
• Artificial sweeteners (aspartame, saccharin, cyclamate and etc.). There is not enough research to confirm its safety.
• Natural flavors, natural sweeteners and etc. Even though it doesn’t sound harmful, what concerning is that the manufacturer chose to not disclose what that really is and I prefer to avoid that if possible.

What you can buy in the store

I hope it didn’t get too overwhelming and in case it did, I would like to provide you with the list of options you can find in the store to make this process a little bit easier for you. Please, note that the products might not be available in all the states or stores. You will also find there an ingredient list so you have an idea of what ingredients to look for in case you don’t have the same product in your store.