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The Supermarket trolley dash, swapping the right foods to help you make the right choices...
Did you know that you shouldn't go to the supermarket hungry, as you're more likely to make unhealthy choices - extra box of biscuits, extra slab of cheese as well as buying more food than you actually need. Which results in spending more money and the potential of consuming unwanted calories.
Making small changes at this stage helps to build long lasting habits which are easier to control. So get a shopping list app or write down a list with a few meals plans added into list, have a snack or lunch/dinner before heading in and you'll be surprised that you don't come out of the supermarket with an inflatable kayak or new piece of garden furniture, kid you not, I've done this before.
When we start to feel really hungry, we can become less thoughtful about what we should be eating and focus more on satisfying that hunger, which can result in buying something unhealthy. By adding in healthier food swaps, you can control your hunger and become healthier.
My Simple food swaps:
1. White pasta to wholewheat pasta, so what's the difference and why? Whole-wheat (wholegrain) pasta is simply ground and used, where as white pasta everything is stripped away, the outer membranes contain a lot of fibre, vitamins and minerals, meaning whole-wheat pasta is more nutritious.
For example 128g of pasta contains the following:
Values | Wholewheat unrefined | White refined | |
Calorie | 174 | 220 | |
Carbohydrate | 36g | 43g | |
Protein | 7g | 8g | |
Fibre | 5g | 3g | |
Minerals | Magnesium, Iron, Zinc | Some iron, no zinc or magnesium | |
2. White refined bread to wholewheat varieties, this includes bagels, rolls, baps, white sliced bread, hot dog rolls, burger rolls, wraps - the list is endless. The supermarkets are beginning to add more lines. "Did you know that swapping from white to wholewheat could save you 700 calories a week"
3. Think about adding more vegetables, salad leaves, avocado, tomatoes, radishes, chickpeas, hummus etc to your breakfast roll or lunch sandwich, this is a quick and easy way to get your 5 a day into your diet.
Did you know that 80g = 1 portion of fruit or veg and 80g = 1 portion of beans or pulses can count towards your 5 a day.
4. Adding fermented ingredients to your diet such as kefir, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, kombucha, probiotic yogurt (has live cultures) - these can all help to aid digestion and start to build a good gut biome.
5. White rice to brown rice, this is similar to the wholewheat. White rice has everything removed and is massively processed, where as brown rice is the full grain intact. - article from the Guardian
A plan to develop a new breed of iron-rich rice that could ward off disease was swiftly abandoned by Dr Sirimal Premakumara after he ventured into the countryside of Sri Lanka – and found it already existed.
The secret to injecting more nutrition into the common diet, he discovered, were already there in the varieties of rice the country’s farmers had been growing for centuries.
So instead of researching new breeds, the University of Colombo lecturer has spent the past 10 years studying the brown, purple, red and glutinous varieties of rice still grown in small amounts by farmers in Sri Lanka, despite being almost forgotten as the market demanded piles of cheap white rice.
High yield white rice has been crucial to fighting global hunger, but its reputation is coming into question with concerns about its nutritional deficiencies and its links to type 2 diabetes.