Have you even wondered how we at Cooking God’s Way make the correct food choices to support our healthy lifestyle when in the store or out at the restaurant. Yes, after time you learn what is a good choice, but what about knowing which restaurant has better food on the menu or understanding some ingredient on a food label.
Let me share a few tricks that will give you the upper hand when making food purchasing choices.
1. The Dirty Dozen – this is a list of the 12 fruits and vegetables that have the highest levels of pesticides. And the Clean 15 is a list of fruits and vegetables that contains the least levels of pesticides. When making your purchasing choices you would want to get organic for items on the dirty dozen list or avoid them completely in restaurants. We have an article that explains this in more detail, Organic Produce: When is it Important to Buy?, which includes a link for the PDF or free iPhone App.
2. Restaurant Nutrition – this is a great free phone app which lists the nutritional values of over 100 popular restaurants from fast food to sit down and 15,000 food items. You can use this tool to see what calories, sodium or fat a menu items contains before ordering. A great educational tool that may make your eyes pop when you see some of the numbers these meals contain. A new feature of this app I like is that it now lists medical alerts; such as if an item contains wheat, soy or nuts. This app is available for the iPhone and android under the name of Restaurant Nutrition made by Unified Lifestyle and they keep it updated often.
3. Don’t Eat That – this phone app will help you translate food labels into common language so you can see is that unpronounceable ingredient is harmful or not. Over 1,500 dangerous food ingredients are listed in the app. I can’t tell you how many times I have used this app to find out if that one ingredient I did not recognize is harmful or not. This app is available for the iPhone, iPad, and iTouch. This is the only app of the three that is not free, but the cost is low and they provide updates regularly.
So there you have it 3 tools that can be used when out and about to help you stay on track with your healthy eating lifestyle.
Remember to stay ahead of the game, you have to prepare.