Give me a “heck yea” if you’ve ever been at the grocery store trying to pick out healthy options, but you are stuck trying to decipher what all the confusing labels, marketing speak, and ingredients actually mean?

You are not alone! This is a frequent conversation I have with many clients – learning to make sense of ingredient labels and lists. 

When you need to buy packaged foods, below are my top tips for interpreting what is actually a healthy packaged food vs. one full of additives and garbage. Keep an eye out for these red flags:

🚩 Long ingredients list (more than 3-5 items): Beware of overly complicated lists, indicating highly processed foods with potentially harmful additives.

🚩 Thickeners, stabilizers, or emulsifiers: These additives can disrupt digestion and may indicate a heavily processed product lacking in nutritional value.

🚩 Added sugars or sweeteners: Look out for hidden sugars under various names like sucrose, fructose, corn syrup, or aspartame which all contribute to excess calorie intake and disrupted metabolic processes. 

🚩Can you pronounce the ingredients? Look for ingredients you can actually pronounce. The more complicated the words are and the more multi syllable, the more likely the ingredients are made in a lab and are highly processed.