The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal
Creating healthier food choices
Healthy Heart Market is a good place to shop online for low-salt offerings you can’t find in local stores. I turned to it extensively after my 2012 angioplasty as I dropped salt, fat and sugar from my daily eating routine.
Continue reading “Healthy Heart Market offering shipping discount”
Claims about foods and superfoods come and go, so I usually don’t put a lot of faith into anyone touting any food as helping with your health or specific aspects of it. But I tend to be more skeptical than most on the subject.
So when I recently read this piece on 8 Foods That Can Help You Speed Up Your Metabolism I decided I’d share it with you all and you can decide whether you believe it or not. As we age, our metabolisms supposedly slow down, making it more difficult to maintain a healthy weight. So maybe these can help a bit. Continue reading “If you believe foods can speed your metabolism, try these”
When I first met with a nutritionist to discuss health eating after my 2012 angioplasty, I brought along four pages of foods I liked to eat. She told me one by one that they were all unhealthy. Most had too much of one or more of what I call the evil triangle of American food — sugar, salt or fat.
This blog is the result of that meeting and of my attempt to keep eating foods I find tasty while cutting out the evil triangle. But it is extremely tough in a world of so many mixed food messages. That point was brought home to me by a recent piece I read on npr.org headlined 75 Percent of Americans Say They Eat Healthy — Despite Evidence To The Contrary. Continue reading “Think you’re eating healthy? Think again”
One of the most popular posts on this blog is a piece I wrote about how to make a Costco food court salad healthier by not using the dressing and eliminating even more salt by taking off the cheese as well. I’ve also written about how to shop smarter at warehouse club stores like Costco.
So I enjoyed coming across this story recently headlined Get the Skinny: The ‘Costco Diet.’ the piece really isn’t about a diet plan, as the headline might suggest. Rather, it lists products available at Costco that are relatively healthy, such as fresh produce and salmon, which I regularly buy there. Continue reading “More on eating healthy and smart shopping at Costco”
ABC this week premiered a new show, My Diet is Better than Yours, that sounds a bit hokey but was fascinating viewing for me. It’s a variation of Biggest Loser on NBC.
On the ABC show, contestants get to pick a diet plan and diet plan advocate to follow and train with. The five diets all have some wacky elements to them but they’re basically about eating less processed foods and exercising more, which is really the secret to any successful weight loss.
What I found most interesting was the low self-esteem all the contestants expressed. It was really sad to hear about all these unhappy people hiding behind food. I’ve done it myself and still do it, so I understand, but it’s still sad to see it on the air. Continue reading “My Diet is Better than Yours: worth a look”
Finding low-sodium products in supermarkets is a constant battle I’ve been fighting and writing about for more than three years now. Items labeled healthy or even low-sodium may still have too much salt depending on how much you’d normally eat in a meal (serving sizes on packages bare little resemblance to what actual servings are for most people).
So I was interested to see a Connecticut supermarket is teaming up with a local hospital in Norwich to help shoppers there find low-sodium options.
I also was encouraged to see that low-sodium is being defined there as less than 140 mgs or sodium per serving. That means double the serving size would mean 280 mgs of sodium, acceptable to someone like me who is trying to eat less than 1,500 mgs of sodium a day. Continue reading “A noble experiment to help shoppers find low-sodium options”
This blog normally writes about food, not food retailers, but I can;t resist saying something about the news today that Kroger, the country’s largest supermarket chain, is buying Roundy’s, a Midwest operator that’s become known for its new store concept, Mariano’s, which is taking the Chicago area by storm.
Mariano’s is one of the new wave of supermarkets — it has more produce, more prepared foods and a smaller center store footprint, in industry parlance. That’s because people are buying less and less processed, prepackaged foods, no longer trusting big brands to give them healthy products in such formats.
Rather than try to copy the Mariano’s concept, Kroger is simply buying it. That’s what big companies do. The question now will be can Kroger continue to grow Mariano’s, perhaps taking it national, or will it kill it as big companies often do when they buy up smaller, more innovative brands. Continue reading “Kroger buying Roundy’s — how the big food boys play”
I’ve written before that food companies will make whatever they think they can sell. These days, that means increasingly re-examining long-time processed food products which fewer and fewer people want. Advertising Age recently ran a fascinating, in-depth look at the upheaval changing American tastes and perceptions about health are having on the food business.
Read the article in its entirety, it’s worth your time. It covers Kraft, Pepsi, Kashi and the problems being owned by Kellogg present it, Campbell’s Soup, Heinz…it’s an extensive piece.
What I think is most interesting about what’s happening is the impact of a changing food retail landscape on food processors. The article gets into this too, noting that more retailers are offering more prepared foods in-store, meaning they aren’t relying on the big brands to make them bucks as much as they once did. Food retailers are consolidating too in the face of Wal-Mart becoming a food-retailing behemoth. Continue reading “Hate Big Food Companies? They’re getting the message”
This blog, the No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal, has reached another important milestone — we’ve had 25,000 views through the first five months of this year, nearly as many as it took us all of 2014 to achieve. So we’ve doubled our audience this year.
We also now have 96 other blogs following us, 194 Twitter followers and 265 Facebook followers, all representing wonderful growth from when we started in December 2012 with a mere 57 views for the month!
If I could have a celebratory cake I would, but since I can’t, I’ll say thank you to everyone who has come to read and enjoy the posts here.
This blog began out of desperation when I discovered my angioplasty in 2012 meant I could no longer eat any of the foods I loved. I had to create a new eating and life plan. It began with completely cleaning out my pantry of all high-salt, high-fat, high-sugar foods and starting over.
Along the way, I’ve developed new recipes, found new ingredients, come up with new ways to shop healthier, and shared that all with you, hoping I can help you as well.
Thank you for being part of this new journey.
John
Anyone on a restricted diet, either by choice or necessity as I am since my angioplasty in 2012, has to learn meal planning skills. So much food you buy prepared, either at a supermarket or a restaurant, is simply not acceptable because of its high levels of fat, salt and sugar, so eating on the spur of the moment is out.
Meal planning has always been part of my routine. I normally scan supermarket ads on Wednesdays, decide what I will buy that’s on sale, and then create meals around what’s available to minimize my food costs. So I feel my planning skills are pretty good. But a recent post I received from MyFitnessPal gave me some new worthwhile tips as well.
If you’re not normally a planner, or even if you are, there are tips here that can help you do a better job of planning meals and buying what you need to minimize waste by using ingredients for more than one meal. The illustration here is a good start, clcik through to the article for more details.
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