Food is a daily necessity for our body, and each of us wants these products to be as healthy as possible. However, on the shelves of the store, all products look attractive, so how do you know if they are useful or pose a health hazard?
Goodshapetips learned what to look for and how to calculate potentially harmful products.
What products are most useful?
To this question you will answer: “natural”. But what does natural mean? These are grown without the use of growth stimulants, fertilizers or chemicals. These can be grown in the village or in the country, in your garden.
But what if you have to regularly buy groceries in the stores closest to your home. You can find healthy and natural products in any store, you just need to know some rules.
All edible products are a useful product, if they are without “chemistry”, another thing is the amount of these same products. After all, even the most useful carbohydrates in honey, if consumed in excess, can cause excess weight and obesity. And a piece of bacon with dark bread, eaten with a vegetable salad once a week, will bring many benefits to the vessels and liver. Therefore, the concept of usefulness and harmfulness is relative.
Problem of choice
Each of the product groups has its own undeniable advantages – a person needs for a normal life meat and fish, vegetables, baked goods, cereals and much more. However, food manufacturers, in pursuit of profit, are trying to speed up the production process as much as possible and make it as cheap as possible, even if as a result, products can lose quality and even acquire negative properties that are dangerous to health when consumed systematically.
Today, when the shelves are littered with products of local and imported manufacturers, it is necessary to be able to distinguish the useful from the dubious, natural from synthetic. After all, even if the product has passed all the tests and added to it nutritional supplements are not harmful, no one has yet studied their delayed action in time. Will they give a serious illness in 30 years? Therefore, the buyer has a choice – to spend more time in the store, or to take products from the shelf that attract with price and packaging.
How to choose?
You can find completely useful products. To determine useful and not very useful products, you must be guided by the information written on the packages. Today, the manufacturer was obliged to write full information about the product – the full composition, release date and shelf life of the product.
First of all, products should fall into disgrace, especially dairy products that have a shelf life of six months or more and do not require storage in the refrigerator. Milk in cardboard bags, ice cream with vegetable fats and powdered milk, cream in boxes, yogurt, not requiring storage in the refrigerator – all this can be called useful products with a big stretch.
Natural milk has a shelf life of no more than 3-5 days, they are usually stored in bags or boxes at a temperature of 2 to 6 degrees. Without a refrigerator, natural milk quickly turns sour.
The same terms and conditions of storage for natural kefir, yogurt, cream and sour cream are stored a little longer. In healthy butter there are no vegetable fats, it contains only cream and, possibly, salt.
It is better to buy meat fresh, cut off from the carcass, chickens also need to be bought chilled. Be sure to smell meat and chicken, they should not smell of powder or washing, otherwise there is a possibility that they were treated with chemicals.
Press on the meat – if a pronounced hole remains – the meat is not very good, inspect the chicken skin – the holes may be injection marks with a syringe, it is pumped with saline or processed so that it does not deteriorate.
Attention to the label!
Check the deadlines!
Any, even the highest quality product, can become a time bomb if it was stored incorrectly at any of the stages, and the shelf life is violated. Basically, this is the fault of retail stores. There you can sometimes find bread with tomorrow’s production date, expired dairy and meat products, and fish.
Do not rely on the fact that store employees honestly remove the delay in the warehouse, check the expiration dates for any goods and, in case of the slightest doubt, do not take the goods. Even if the expiration date has not expired, visually check the good quality of the goods by smell – alas, we have a break in expiration dates by unscrupulous dealers.
Down with “chemistry”
Of course, there are also safe food additives, but there are not many of them, and it is difficult to check the safety of most dyes and preservatives in terms of time. Many of the previously allowed preservatives and E-additives were banned over time, as they showed serious negative effects. Therefore, products with E cannot be called useful.
Allergy sufferers, children and people with disabilities should especially avoid eating them. digestive diseases, for them they can be very dangerous.
Make it a rule to read the label carefully and choose products that do not contain additives marked “E”. True, manufacturers intentionally usually write the composition very small, and you may need a magnifying glass or glasses.
Safe additives are citric and acetic acid, pectins, starch, agar. These are natural substances that are safe for the body. In addition, beware of sweets and foods with bright dyes – natural dyes do not give an acidic and saturated color.
Paying attention to standards
In Soviet times, serious requirements were imposed on product quality and GOSTs were developed. Today, products made in accordance with GOST, in terms of quality and usefulness, are significantly superior to those made according to modern specifications (technical specifications). Therefore, choose products with GOSTs – they have less chemistry, they are more useful. Only today there are GOST goods less and less.
Less processing
The healthiest foods are unprocessed, natural foods, so make sure you include plenty of fresh, unprocessed, or otherwise processed foods in your diet. Eat seasonal vegetables and fruits, they usually have little chemistry, they grow in the open field in natural conditions.
However, when buying, smell and taste fruits and vegetables, if they are fragrant and tasty, most likely they are grown without the use of stimulants and activators. Absolutely smooth and even fruits of vegetables and fruits are a reason to think about their naturalness and benefits, they are usually beautiful, but not very tasty and healthy.
Bake meat and fish in foil or steam, so the maximum of vitamins and minerals will be preserved. Milk try not to boil, the exception is fresh cow’s milk, it can contain dangerous microbes – causative agents of intestinal infections and pseudotuberculosis.
Do you read what the labels say?
