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Savvy Shopping for Healthy Eating

Healthier meals start with healthy food shopping.  Here are a few tips to help fill your shopping cart with healthier choices:

•    Look for foods around the perimeter of the supermarket.  There you’ll find fresh and frozen produce, fish, meats and dairy.

•    Opt for preserved foods in pouches or small cans, like tuna, salmon, crab and shrimp, which need less heat during processing, so fewer nutrients are lost.
 
•    Choose frozen vegetables over canned – these retain most of their nutrients.  Canned tomatoes, however, are a good buy, because the heat from cooking helps release beneficial nutrients like lycopene.

•    Make sure that the first ingredient in a bread or grain-related food begins with the word “whole”.

•    Avoid foods with partially hydrogenated oil in the ingredient list, and choose low-salt varieties of canned, frozen and boxed foods.

•    Focus on foods with fewer ingredients:  “In many instances, fewer ingredients – and the ones that people recognize – suggest that the food is closer to its natural form,” says Richard Bell, who researches eating behavior for Tufts University, Harvard University and the US Army.  “If you are going to get applesauce and you have choices, choose the one that says, ‘Ingredients: Apples, water.’”