When you want to start living healthier, you need to consider a lot of things. For example – you need to ration your ice creams and chocolates, start exercising, regulate your sleep timings, and inculcate various other habits. However, one thing that most of us might miss out on is smart shopping.

During grocery shopping, you simply tend to pick out foods that seem healthy to you. What you don’t bother to do is check the ‘nutrition facts’. You need to be really careful while choosing from a wide range of fat-free, sugar-free and preservative-free options that are available nowadays.

It is easy to turn a blind eye to these and just look for (and usually fall for) items that have low calories, low sugar, low saturated fat, zero cholesterol, high fibre, and so on.
Most of the time, these are nothing but misleading labels to fool the customers into thinking that the product is healthy. Not everything written in BOLD on the cover should be believed. It is really important to turn the box or rotate the bottle and check the content and nutritional facts of the food item since these items could be doing more harm than good. For instance, the low-fat items – when you eat something that is full-fat, you at least stop after you have taken a bite or two as the fat makes you feel fuller. Whereas, when you eat the low-fat variety, you tend to eat it in larger quantities, because at the back of your mind you think they are not eating much fat. Also, in order to make up for the loss of taste that fat gives, these foods have added sugar and salt which are much more harmful than certain healthy fats. Furthermore, a lot of Low-fat and fat-free food items also contain chemical-laden additives such as colouring and preservatives, which can be really harmful. Continue reading →