Shop for Lower Cholesterol

Where and how you shop can have a huge impact on your cholesterol levels.  If you do most of your shopping at the local supermarket, are you often tempted by the foods you see on sale in the aisles - foods such as potato chips and frozen chicken dinners?  Do you leave the store with high-fat items that were not on your list?  You are not alone.

The many foods and choices available to us when we shop should make it easier to choose healthy items that we enjoy and are good for us, but often the opposite is true.  When faced with lots of food choices, many of us find it hard to resist the foods that we know are bad for us.  Luckily, relearning to shop can go a long way towards lowering your cholesterol over the next 30 days.  For the next 30 days, consider where you shop for food:

1) Greengrocers, farmer’s markets, and farmer’s stands.  These are excellent places to shop, and if you want to lower your cholesterol over the next month, you will want to make it a priority to shop at these types of locations for groceries.  Shopping at farmer’s markets, farmer’s stands, and greengrocers has several advantages:

• You will get a wider variety of very fresh food products than you would get at a grocery store.

• You will support local farmers and enjoy lower prices.

• These places are more environmentally friendly and give you better healthy choices

• These places to shop feature fewer advertisements and convenience foods packed with fats.

If you want to lower your cholesterol and enjoy a lower-fat diet, shopping at your local farmer’s market, greengrocer or farmer’s stand is an excellent way to get the foods you need to stay healthy.

2) Farms and organic farms.  Pick-your-own farms, organic farms, and farms that sell directly to customers offer great value and fresh in-season healthy foods, often at great prices.  A few hours at one of these farms can give you some fresh air, exercise, and the foods you need to stay healthy.  Visiting these sorts of farms for some of your menu items is a great way to eat more heart-healthy products.

3) Health food stores.  Health food stores often have a wide variety of products that are low-fat and animal-protein-free (there products are sometimes called vegan).  These stores can be great places to buy dried peas and lentils, herbs, natural products and a wide variety of items that are not available at your grocery store but which are great for your heart health.

4) Grocery stores.  Many grocery stores offer a produce section as well as meat and deli sections which feature low-fat products.  However, most grocery stores are also filled with high-fat convenience foods.  If you need to shop at a grocery store for all or much of your food, make conscious choices to pick out the healthiest products possible and avoid the aisles or sections of the stores that have high-fat foods.

Tip: When shopping in a grocery store, do your shopping around the perimeter of the store.  This is usually where the produce, milk, and meat sections are.  Avoid the center aisles, where chips, pop, cookies, and other high-fat foods tend to lurk.

5) Convenience stores.  You should avoid shopping in these types of stores unless it is a true emergency.  Most convenience stores have higher prices and lots of high-fat and processed foods that are prominently displayed.  Healthy foods are often at the back and fresh produce tends to be in less than fresh states. Since these stores are tiny and specialize in “convenience foods,” there is usually very little variety of healthy options available.  If you want to lower your cholesterol over the next month, avoid shopping at convenience stores.

6) Cafeterias, cafes and restaurants. Since cafeterias, cafes, and restaurants are businesses, they want to make money by having you enjoy their food enough to purchase more of it.  For this reason, these places worry more about taste than about heart-health.  High-fat and high-sodium foods are on too many restaurant and cafeteria menus, and if you want to lower your cholesterol, you need to stay away from these places.

If you want to lower your cholesterol over the next thirty days, avoid buying prepared or pre-packaged food, whether from grocery stores or restaurants.

Brown-bag your lunch and arrange to meet friends somewhere else besides a restaurant. If you need to eat at a restaurant, choose the smallest portions of the plainest foods available.  This is better than ordering the salad, assuming that it will be healthier - a salad packed with bacon bits and cheese can sometimes be among the highest-fat items on a menu!

Instead, choose dishes that seem to have low-fat elements - such as skinless chicken or fruits.  Ask for dressings on the side and eat around any high-fat items such as cheese. Avoid cream sauces.

You don’t need to completely change the way you shop over the next thirty days in order to lower your cholesterol, but stopping by the farmer’s market once a week and avoiding convenience stores and restaurants will make it that much easier to find a terrific variety of fresh heart-healthy foods that you will enjoy eating.  After all, how good your diet is depends on the ingredients you put into your food.

How you shop can be as important as where you shop.  Taking a few simple steps can make it easier for you to choose foods that will help you lower your cholesterol:

1) Shop for food once a week. Plan your menu for each week ahead of time and select one day a week for food shopping.  This will minimize the amount of time you spend thinking about food and will reduce the chances that you forget items or overshop (and overeat).

2) Shop after eating. Shopping on an empty stomach will encourage impulsive buying. Your willpower will also be at its weakest when you are hungry, making you more likely to reach for fatty comfort-foods.

3) Choose a time to shop when the stores are not too full and the selection is at its height.  At farmer’s markets and greengrocers, the selection may be best earlier in the day.  You can ask your grocery store when their deliveries of produce are scheduled.  If you shop when stores are uncrowded and selection is good, you are more likely to have the time to make good choices - and you will be able to enjoy a selection that makes healthy eating easy.

4) Stick to a list. Plan your shopping list -based on your weekly menu - ahead of time and stick to the list to prevent overbuying and overeating.  The only exception to this should be fresh fruits and vegetables you see that may make good snacks.  You can buy some of these if you find fresh produce that you have not tried before or produce that is one sale. In general, though, buy only what you need each week so that you will have complete meals rather than food that goes bad or invites binging.

Learn to Read Labels

Food labels are something you will have to pay attention to when you go shopping. Manufacturers of foods in North America are required to provide accurate information about their food products.  You can find this information on food labels, and most food labels today are made to be easy-to-read.  There are several elements to a food label:

• Identification.  The front of the food label or package will likely tell you the brand of the product and what the product is.

• Information about the Manufacturer.  Most food packages will tell you where a food was made, who imported it (if the food was imported) and how you can contact the manufacturer or importer. This information can be useful if you want to contact someone about the exact food value content of a product or if you a question or compliant about the food.

• Codes. Most food packages contain codes and numbers that contain information about where the product was made and when.  Often, expiry dates are listed somewhere among these numbers.  It is a good practice to glance at expiry dates of your food to make sure that you are getting fresh food products.

• Logos, Advertisements, and Claims.  Many foods will have logos or claims on the front of the label or food package.  These may contain terms such as “light,” “the best,” “healthy,” “natural,” and others.  These will likely catch your attention when you are looking for heart-healthy choices.  However, you should never take this information at face value.  Treat these claims as advertisements rather than as facts.  Many foods that claim to be “low-cholesterol” are full of saturated fats that are terrible for your cholesterol level.  Many foods that claim to be “low fat” still have plenty of fat or have small portion sizes.

• Ingredients.  This is where the information starts to get really useful.  Almost all packaged products have lists of ingredients used in the making of the product.  To know how really healthy a food is, you should start here.  Ingredients are listed in order of amount.  That means that if a label reads “peanut butter, sugar, chocolate solids”, the product contains mostly peanut butter, with less sugar than peanut butter, and less chocolate solids than sugar.  Ingredients listed in brackets are ingredients that are part of something else or contain more information about an ingredient.

For example, if an ingredients list reads “vitamins (thiamin hydrochloride, niacinamide, folic acid)”, then the vitamins in the food consist of thiamin hydrochloride, niacinamide, folic acid.  When shopping to lower your cholesterol, always read the ingredients list.  Look for foods that contain healthy foods first on the ingredient list (meaning that there are more of these foods) and foods that have ingredient lists that contain few saturated fats.

• Nutrition Facts.  This is where you need to turn your eyes every time you pick up a food you may want to eat.  Even if you can’t read half the ingredients on the ingredient list, even if you are not sure what you are looking for, this is the section of the food label that can help you separate claims from facts. 

Food labels in North America now contain a simplified section of information about the food.  This is often found on the side of the box or the back of a food package. This part of the label lists portion sizes, the percent or amount of fats, vitamins and other nutrients the food provides, and the amounts of fats and calories the food contains.  This is information you can use.  Each time that you pick up a food, look at the label.  Check the portion size, the amount of fats and the types of fats in the food.

The amount of saturated and trans fats should be very small and the portion size should be large.  For example, consider a serving of cream.  For a 15 ml serving (one tablespoon) the cream has 1 gram of saturated fats.  While the amount of fat is small, the serving is small, too, meaning that the product is actually 8% fat.  Soy milk, a much better alternative, has 1 gram of saturated fat in a two cup serving, making it much lower in saturated fat.  When making healthy choices, check this part of every food level for the following:

• Serving Size: This will tell you whether a food is really healthy or whether it just appears so due to a very tiny portion size.

• Fat/Lipid: Look at the gram amounts of trans and saturated fats.  The lower the better.  The lower the overall amount of fat, the better.

• Sodium: Look for foods that contain as little as possible.

• Calories: Choosing lower-calorie foods is better for your heart, your cholesterol level, and your overall health.

• Fiber: Foods high in fibre are good for your health and cholesterol level.

• Cholesterol: Foods that are lower in dietary cholesterol.

• Percentage: The right hand side of many labels will tell you what percentage of the “recommended daily value” the food represents.  For example, a product may claim to provide 30% of a day’s recommended daily value of iron.  This means that one serving size of the food will give 30% of the fiber you need all day.  When shopping for foods, make sure to choose foods that have the lowest percentages for values such as sodium, cholesterol, and fats, and moderate percentages for values such as fiber.  This will help ensure that you are making heart-healthy choices.

You may notice that a number of foods do not contain food labels at all.  Foods sold in bulk, fresh produce, homemade foods (foods sold at bake sales or at farmer’s stands) and prepared foods in restaurants and cafeterias do not have these labels.

In the case of fresh produce and some bulk foods (dried legumes, lentils, spices) this does not always matter, as you generally know that these foods are healthy and contain no fats, cholesterol, or other harmful elements.  On the other hand, no food labels are a good reason to avoid restaurant and take-out meals, as you have no control or choice over how much food you are eating. 

If you really want to know how many fats, sodium, fiber, and cholesterol you are eating in foods that come with no label you may want to invest in food guides that estimate how much fat, calories, and other components are in the more common food products. 

Some restaurants have even begun to offer ingredient lists and food value information about their meals, but this information is not always easy to find - it is sometimes posted in the kitchen or on the restaurant web page.  In the future, it is possible that more restaurants will offer patrons this information so that diners can make more informed decisions about what they eat.

Simplify Your Shopping Cart

Many of us don’t have a lot of time to do food shopping.  With our other responsibilities and our crammed schedules, we don’t usually have the time to research our food well before we buy, and our very shopping trips may feel rushed.  If that describes you, there is an easy way to make sure that your shopping cart has the foods you need to stay heart healthy:

1) Have as much food in there as you think you will need until your next shopping - do not buy more or you may end up overeating.

2) Most of your cart should include fresh fruits and vegetables (this will include fresh herbs).  Yes, you read that right.  If you make most of your diet fresh fruits and vegetables, you will enjoy lower cholesterol.

3) You should have less (significantly less) grains than vegetables and fruits.  These should be simple (not prepared or pre-seasoned or flavored) and whole grain where possible.  Check the labels on your breads and baked products, at least, to make sure that you are getting as little fat and sodium in these products as possible. Favor grains like oat and barley over white breads.

Avoid bakery products like cookies and sweets entirely or buy very, very few (one cookie instead of a package, and check that one cookie that has no trans or saturated fats).  Include at least some nuts (unsalted, unflavored, not roasted).

4) Check to make sure that you have significantly less meats and animal proteins than you have grains. Those meats you have should be lean where possible.  Choose fish, shellfish, and poultry over other meats and choose the leanest cuts of meat you can.  Buy less meat than you usually buy and buy it as plain as possible (avoid seasoned, precooked, prepared, or processed meats such as sausages).

5) You should have very little fats at all, and those should be healthy.  Choose extra virgin olive oil and refuse to buy hydrogenated oils, palm oils, or any oils high in saturated or trans fats (read the labels).

6) Try to eliminate as many packaged foods as you can.  Anything that has been cooked, processed and prepared for you ahead of time or contains flavorings or seasonings should be given a second look.  These packages are usually quite easy to find in your shopping cart - they are usually bright colors and contain logos and brand names.  These should form the smallest portion of your shopping cart.  Your cholesterol will fall even more quickly if you eliminate them entirely.  At the very least, read the levels of these products to choose the products with the lowest sodium and fat levels possible.

Checking your shopping cart takes only a few minutes and following only these six simple steps will put you much further along towards lowering your cholesterol.

Shopping Cheat Sheet

When you go shopping, take the following list along with you to prompt you to make good food choices:

Good Food Bets:

whole grain cereals, oats, and cereals that have psyllium and flaxseed

Any types of fruits

Grains such as quinoa, barley, hominy, millet, amaranth, bulgur, cous cous,

Nuts (almonds, pecans, walnuts, soy, also lives - all with no additives like salt and all untoasted)

Dried legumes, beans, peas, lentils

Vegetables of all kinds (fresh where possible, but frozen is fine too)

Soybean products such as tofu and soy milk

Whole wheat, rye, pumpernickel bread (look for low-salt varieties and check levels of fats first)

Tortillas

Whole grain pita breads and crackers (make sure to get low-salt varieties and check fat amounts)

Fresh garlic and herbs, dried spices and herbs

Low-sodium salsa or spicy sauce

Low fat and low sodium soup base or stock

Low sodium pasta sauce

Lean meats and chicken

Fish

Olive oil

Low fat dairy products

Egg whites

Rice and pastas

Popcorn that can be air-popped

Water

Real fruit juice

Avoid, be wary of, or buy very little of (at the very least find lower-fat alternatives):

Whole eggs

Whole milk products

Red meat that is fatty (looks marbleized)

Organ meats

Processed or prepared foods (heat and serve foods or sandwich meats and sausages)

granola or museli cereals (many contain lots of fats)

Sports drinks, sodas, fruit “beverages” (many are high in salts as well as sugars)

watch out for these ingredients or food values on food labels:

Sodium, salt

Eggs and egg products

Shortening, hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oil (these are high in trans fats)

Fats (especially trans fats, saturated fats, and others)

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