Warning: Health Food Stores are Not
Health Food Stores

Have you been shopping at any health food stores lately thinking you are doing good for you and your family? You may want to take a serious look at where you shop. With all the additives, preservatives and just plain junk put in packaged foods over the years, many people are turning away from mainstream grocery stores to what they think is a healthy alternative in their local health food store. Unfortunately, what shows up on the shelves of your alternative grocer is not all that different than what you buy at the big name brand groceries in your neighborhood.

Plan Your Meals

Many of the worst offending food manufacturers have jumped into the so-called healthy foods business and are labeling their products with natural and organic looking green and earth tone color schemes to make you think you are eating healthy and wholesome foods. These foods are then placed on the shelves of your local health food stores right next to truly organic products and it is then up to the consumer to decipher between the good and the bad. The food stores know what they are putting on the shelves, but do you?

This all came to light for us recently when we had our usual green smoothies one morning and we noticed a little difference in the taste after we had purchased a different nutritional oil other than our total EFA oil as one of the ingredients in our smoothie. As I was sipping down my green breakfast smoothie I noticed a slight citrus flavor and thought we had possibly used a little more ginger than usual in our recipe. It turned out that the new oil we had purchased from our local "health food store" had natural lemonade flavor in it!

Many, but not all, natural flavorings have MSG in them as flavor enhancers. We could not be 100% sure that this oil contained MSG, but a good indicator that the flavoring it did contain was of the MSG persuasion was that it was called "natural lemonade flavor", not lemon flavor but, lemonade flavor.

What is ironic about putting these kinds of flavorings in EFA and other nutritional oils is that we take them specifically for brain health. Essential fatty acids (EFA) help your brain to function properly but, when you put an ingredient in your EFA that is a known neurotoxin that can do brain damage with long term use, that kind of defeats the purpose of the oil in the first place. You can read more about hidden MSG in food here.

All this to say, watch out for the foods you buy in your health food store because they may not be what they claim to be or the store you are shopping at may just be wanting to get in on the health food craze. Unfortunately this shows that they are not all that concerned about what they're actual selling. It is essential that you read the labels of all packaged food products that you purchase so that you fully understand the ingredients that go into the food you are eating. This latest EFA fiasco kind of snuck up on us as we figured that the oil we purchased for brain health surely wouldn't contain anything that was detrimental to brain health…wrong!

Of course the trick to not getting additives and strange and potentially harmful substances in the food you eat, is to eat as little packaged food as possible. We do 80% or so of our shopping from the produce department and stay away from most packaged foods. It is also a good idea to find the real health food stores in your local area and patronize them more than you do the commercial health food stores. Not that you can't find quality food at the larger commercial whole food stores, you just have to be extra careful in reading your labels.

Usually food co-ops or small community health stores are a better bet that you will be getting quality food. One place we patronize over on the beachside from us known as the Happy Healthy Human, sells mostly produce and makes a lot of their own foods such as kale chips, sprouted cereals, dehydrated crackers and other specialties.

You have to really be on the lookout for healthy foods at commercial health food stores. Until you know exactly what you are purchasing, make sure you thoroughly read product labels so you aren't surprised and find out you've been eating something you didn't plan on eating.

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