There are so many foods around that look and smell all right, but are actually either fakes or unwholesome, and sometimes just bad, stuff. Learn about them in order to forget about them when you are shopping.
Parmigiano-Reggiano Cheese
Practically any dish is bound to gain nicer taste when sprinkled with some good cheese, but this famous kind is a bit too expensive for the purpose – $22 for a pound sounds exorbitant. Why not go for Pecorino Romano or SarVecchio, you won’t be losing much in terms of flavor.
Smoked and Cured Pieces of Meat
Regretfully, cured meat of all kinds has gotten itself a very nasty reputation: it is linked to cancer, headaches, abnormally high blood pressure. If you have got much grease in it – like pork sausage, known to be made from fat in up to 50% – you risk getting your arteries clogged.
Blueberry Can Be Fake
It sounds healthy and nice to have blueberry flavor in cereals, muffins, sauces and what not – and it would be fine if it were real berries. But actually most of the blueberry flavor comes from artificial additives. You would do well to buy berries and add them yourself so as to be sure you’re eating healthy.
Multi-Grain Bread
Once again, you should go carefully with this wholesome-sounding stuff – unless it has whole wheat as its main ingredient, you may be buying white bread slightly interspersed with a handful of grains, and that’s next to junk food. Come to it, straight-up barley, quinoa, or steel-cut oats will serve you instead of bread.
Low-Fat Peanut Butter
Foods taste much worse with fat extracted, so companies have to make up for it somehow to restore the nice taste. Peanut butter has a lot of sugar, and that is even worse. Common peanut butter is to be preferred for healthy fats and unsweetened protein.
Tea from Bottles
If you go to the trouble of making your tea at home and pour it out into bottles, you will save your money and your health, for bottled teas can be even more sugary than other canned drinks!
Tomato Sauces
A jar of pasta sauce will put you back from $2 to $6. If you buy the same amount of tomatoes you will pay less than $1. So much cheaper – and healthier – to get canned tomato pieces or make a mash from fresh tomatoes, especially when they are in season. Get some tomatoes, crash them, put into a skillet, mix in any vegetables and herbs you fancy for the sauce, dress with a little wine or wine vinegar, sprinkle over with some sugar. Let it simmer for an hour, then taste for some final touches in flavoring. Sounds too fussy? Here’s another way: put some fresh tomatoes on a cooking sheet with a few drops of olive oil and roast them for about half an hour at 425 degrees.
Bottom-feeder Fish
These larger kinds of fish – tuna, king mackerel, tilefish, and first of all swordfish – have a high mercury content. Healthier will be smaller fish, so buy salmon, catfish, sardines, flounder for your fish table.
Energy Drinks
Should you feel like an energetic pick-me-up in the middle of the day, don’t go for promoted energetic drinks of the kind of 5 Hour Energy or Monster Energy. According to the FDA information, consummation of these brands is linked to heart disorders, convulsive bouts, and possibly death. Enjoy your coffee.
Gluten-free Baked Foods
Gluten-free baked bread, crackers and cookies generally cost twice the price of regular baked stuff; moreover, they are not really as wholesome as you may believe. They contain a lot of artificial ingredients, refined flour and sugar. If you are not gluten-intolerant, there’s no real reason to stick with gluten-free baked goods.
Non-dairy Milk
Those who go for vanilla, caramel, and other flavored soy milks, should know that they run up your grocery bills, but not your health. Skim milk is much better for the health-minded, but if you still need your flavored soy variant, at least make sure you buy it unsweetened.
Wood Ingredients
Run your eye over the list of ingredients of your snack bar. If you come upon the word “cellulose,” be apprised that it really means “wood pulp.” Adding wood pulp, manufacturers seek to add fiber and give you more food, but do you want your food enhanced with wood?
White Rice
As many as five weekly servings of white rice can hoist up your diabetes risk by 17% in comparison with eating one portion per month. Mind that wholegrain rice is better than refined.
Frozen Vegetables
There are 8-ounce gourmet packets of frozen veggies to be had at stores, carrots with dill sauce, peas with herbed butter sauce, and more, but a more healthy solution is to make vegetable dishes yourself. Enjoy a freshly-cooked dish of peas with the herbs you have at home and some butter instead of putting a frozen veg packet into your microwave.
Ready Sandwiches
Buying a sandwich, you overpay for fancy packaging, fat, salt, and additives. If you settle into making a sandwich yourself, you are sure to set yourself up with a bigger and healthier affair for practically the same price of $3 or lower.
Frozen All-fruit Bars
Fruit-and-juice or all-fruit bars are low-calorie and tasty food, but you can always save the $2 and treat yourself to a self-made one. Choose your favorite flavors, put into a blender 2 cups of cut-up fruit, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, 1 tablespoon sugar, and prepare a smooth mixture enough for 4 pops. If the mixture is too thick you can add some water. Pour it out into paper cups or molds, fix in sticks, and put away into the freezer.
Side-dish Rice Mixes and Entrees
Many side-dish mixes and boxed entrees are made up of rice with salt, some flavorings and spices. It can hardly be credited as anything special, but you will be charged for much more than it is actually worth. Chances are, you have got all these foods in your kitchen, and you can come up with a better rice side-dish in a very short time.
Energy Bars
The word “energy” means that these bars are high on calories; there’s customarily a row of them at the checkout counter intended to catch the eye of the last-second snatcher who will think they are healthier than candy bars. This they can’t be, due to a high content of sugar and fats, and, accidentally, they are much pricier than a candy bar. When in need of an inrush of energy, prefer some fruit, some nuts or a yoghurt.
Spice Mixes
Grill seasoning, rib rubs do sound appealing because you believe they are professionally made mixes not to be emulated. But take a look at the ingredients list, and you will see there salt and unindicated herbs and spices. So what? Rummage through your pantry and see how many of these you have, why not try out mixes of your own? You may like them more than those bought from the store.
Various Kinds of Iced Teas
They are called “gourmet” and “flavored,” but actually they are hardly something more than what you can prepare yourself using common tea bags and your freezer. What for producer’s mixes and additives, they are too rich in artificial substances, sugars and fructose corn syrup. You will happily do without it sweetening your home brew with fruit juice. Take 8 black tea bags (10 if it’s green, white, or herbal tea) for 32 ounces of homemade iced tea.
Water in Bottles
Once again, what’s the point of buying water? First, it’s not more wholesome for you than the water in your kitchen tap; second, production and shipment of all these bottles requires quite a large amount of fossil fuel, so it’s not very environment-friendly. Third, it can set you back up to $3 which is almost exorbitant compared to your common tap water, even if you throw in the cost of filters.
In case you have veritably unpalatable well water that is not helped by filters much, and you need the safest water you can get for the little one, get jugs of specially prepared “nursery” water which is to be had at discount stores for less than a dollar for a gallon (compare with $1.50 for 8 ounces from a bottle!). Also, you will need the jugs for your home-produced iced teas and fruit-flavored drinks.
Salad Kits
Bags of greens are really nice and wholesome and can be very helpful in the kitchen when you are pressed for time, but if you come round to buying fresh stuff you will see how much more you actually stump up. It goes even more emphatically for salad kits which offer you a little of greens, a little of croutons and a pat of dressing. So, why bother? Make your own croutons from stale bread cut into suitable pieces and make up dressing from what you have handy.
One-time Servings
It may seem the right thing to grab a snack in an individual 100-calorie package, put it down and go on, but if you stop to consider it, you lose money this way. You will leave your wallet noticeably fatter if you get a large box of cheese crackers or chips, divide it into one-time servings and pack these in reusable food bags.
Trail Mixes
When you buy trail mixes in small bags you don’t always realize that they cost you at the rate of $10 for a pound. Here is another noteworthy opportunity of cutting your expenses and take pleasure in mixing your own snacks from a can of roasted peanuts, a handful of raisins and almonds, any dried fruit and a bar of candy coated chocolate. Improvise until you hit the right taste for you and put the mix in a glass container where it will keep for 3 weeks providing the lid is tight enough.
Snack Packs
With these we pay up to $4 for a meal that is sometimes dubbed “all-inclusive,” but most of this sum goes for the designer tray, wrapper and a fetching label. Apart from that, you buy a negligible amount of cheese, crackers and lunchmeat, all well salted. A waste of good money on something you can easily put together on your own.
Gourmet Ice Cream
It does look grand to fork up $6 for a gallon of ice cream displaying designer brand – but there’s nothing more to it. You can always get a far cheaper brand and pile up toppings of your own in a matter of seconds, chopping cookies, chocolates, and cutting up fruit finely. For the premium brands the advice is to hang back until the next 3-week sales cycle and get a stock at a discount.
Shaped Meat Patties
Experiments with preparing meat patties with your own hands show that it takes about 10 seconds to form a flat patty from ground meat and set it grilling. So why pay more money for pre-formed frozen beef patties or burgers? Besides, buying frozen formed meat you can get more e. coli than you will want. Recent registered beef recalls included quite a lot of frozen beef patties.
