Shopping Nightmare

First of all, let me just say that I had a hard enough time planning out 7 days worth of healthy meals while trying to mix it up each day. I ended up making a grocery list that was probably way longer than it even needed to be which made my trip to the grocery store even more lengthy and annoying. I chose to go to Giant Eagle and look for all the items on my list. Something I noticed a lot was the amount of mislabeled products being sold and also the misleading advertising with the eye-catching words or pictures printed on the labels. Pretty much I feel like food companies are very tricky and smart in the way they design their product--I guess they have to be if they want to maximize their profit. It seems that there are not a lot of companies that are 100% honest with the consumer and to me that is scary. I tried to find as many organic items as possible for the list that I had written and this took me a lot longer than I expected because many still listed additives in their ingredients labels. So after spending way longer in the grocery store than I would ever want to, I made it through my list and found what seemed to be the best options for me. This assignment really showed me how convenience could play a big role in grocery shopping because it took everything in me not to just change my list around and pick something that looked delicious and was easy to find--but wasn't necessarily healthy.

Another thing I noticed was how many products that were "low fat" or had some other "healthy" benefit on their box, were just PACKED with added sugar. It killed me a little inside to see how easy it is to be tricked into thinking you are consuming food that is better for you, when it is actually the complete opposite. I also found that if my food wasn't packed with sugar it was loaded with sodium. After locating as many organic items as I could I continued to search for where they came from and was shocked to see that most of them weren't even from around here--a lot from across the country.  I think shopping for food needs to be handled kind of like this assignment because even though it is time consuming and a little stressful at points--you really do learn a lot about what you are putting in your body. Educate yourself on what good things you can find at your local grocery store, read the labels, read the ingredients, look up the brand names and see what their farms are all about because it is getting harder and harder to tell whether a food company is tricking you.