Reimagining Supermarkets as Guides to Good Nutrition

Much of your day is probably spent caring for the nutrition needs of others, both patients and your family. It’s no surprise that you don’t have time or energy to scrutinize those tiny print labels on packages in the supermarket. But how else can you know you’re getting all the nutrients you need and no ingredients you don’t want?

These labeling practices make your life unnecessarily difficult! What if it were different?

Have you ever noticed that the health claims, Nutritional Content and Ingredients labels are all on the packaged goods that take up 90% of the space in your local supermarket? And that there are neither health claims nor Nutritional Content labels associated with the produce, usually at the perimeter of the store?

And yet we all know that the most important part of our diet is those real food items in the produce section. We know we need to ramp it up. Those veggies and fruits should make up 50% of our diet! 900-1200 calories-worth of veggies and fruits. That’s a lotta fresh produce!

What if it were the reverse? What if you could walk into your supermarket and find most of it filled with fresh produce? Even better, let’s place placards next to each fresh item, reviewing its nutritional content and suggesting ways to use it. This informational piece could indicate the growing season of the item, the source, whether it’s organic or not and whether it’s GMO-free or not. All in large print. A pad of tear-off easy recipes next to each item.

While we’re re-imagining, let’s also think about the packaged goods that fill the vast middle of the store. Let’s remove anything with an ingredient list longer than three items. Let’s remove from the remaining packages the meaningless health claims, currently in large print, like “Heart-healthy!” or “Natural” or “Trans Fat Free” or “No High-Fructose Corn Syrup!”

Those health claims are big and easy to read, but it takes a Ph.D. (and strong glasses) to read and understand the more important small-print labels. With the extra space we free up on the packaging, we can enlarge the print on the Nutritional Content and Ingredients labels. We can place tear-off recipes throughout the store with referrals back to the fresh food.

If we re-imagined our local supermarket as a place to learn about food and how to use it, it might even be fun to shop for dinner and go home filled with ideas about how to quickly make it into something wonderful and fresh and nutritionally superior for our family.

So let’s keep imagining, and let’s apply some pressure to make our supermarkets more user-friendly. Until that happens, here are some good websites with lots of ideas about how to build a real food, nutritionally superior, diet:

www.drhyman.com
www.drfuhrman.com

And when you visit an unreformed supermarket…do most of your shopping in the produce section, and shop the rainbow. You can’t go wrong! You can bet those foods are heart healthy, trans fat-free, natural and have no high-fructose corn syrup in them!