My first post-Supermarket Tip #1

Hello everyone. I hope to provide you with some helpful information on this blog that may include facts about nutrition, training exercises and technique and some other odds and ends. I will do my best to make the posts as interesting as I can. So here we go...

I want to thank my client Rob for giving me this idea. Rob came into train the other day and brought some frozen vegetables and asked me if they were healthy. I informed him they were not. I maybe fibbed a bit because his veggies were similar to the Green Giant ones below and what I should have said is "They PROBABLY aren't healthy"....and all I mean by that is the substances in them are not part of extensive nutritional research and have not been proven to be bad or good. In my opinion, I generally like to avoid ingredients in food that have to be created by a guy in a nuclear hazard suit.

That gave me an idea. So here are some pictures of random vegetables I found in the supermarket and a classic case that big food companies produce mostly garbage.



Big Y generic veggies





Ingredients for Big Y veggies





Green Giant (General Mills) veggies




Ingredients for Green Giant


















So what do we notice? Well, while the Big Y veggies look boring, they are exactly as advertised. I get broccoli, corn, cauliflower, and red peppers. Nothing more, nothing less. How about the Green Giant?
If you look at the front of the package, it lets you know it's an ANTIOXIDANT BLEND! YES! Antioxidants are good for me, right? Well, as is with most nutrition...that can be debated and is maybe the subject of another post.

But what we know is good for you are the vegetables and only the vegetables. If you look at the back of the Green Giant veggies, you see that the extra buck you pay for them is not only going for packaging costs but also the cost of paying a chemical engineer to add enzyme modified butter, modified corn starch, "natural flavor" (which is a new way of saying MSG without saying MSG), and annatto extract color. Now, these items are not widely studied and so there is little proof to say they are "bad" for you, but in general, I always recommend unaltered food to eat. Why add the extra junk if your body cannot use it and does not need it?

ALWAYS CHECK THE INGREDIENTS.