Not all food found in health food stores is healthy

“Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.” ~Phaedrus

You might not know this but health food stores do sell foods that aren’t really healthy for us…they are desired by us but not healthy for us.  We can’t blame them.  It’s simply a supply and demand issue.  We demand convenience foods and they find a way to supply them to us.  Our challenge is to eat less of these convenience types of foods…you know, the ones we crave but don’t give back what we need because they don’t have any, or at least very little, nutrient value or contain ingredients we should be avoiding.  In other words processed, manufactured, and packaged foods.

Everywhere you look in a health food store you’ll see they have similar products found in any grocery store.  All the same categories as any store selling grocery items.  The big question is “can we assume that everything in the health food store is healthy?”  The short answer is no.  Whole foods like produce, meat, fish, dairy, nuts, and seeds are often better quality because they typically sell higher-quality foods like organic, grass-fed, wild-caught, free-range, wild-crafted, etc. Where the question comes into play is for any processed or packaged foods.  Products sold in health food stores may begin with better quality ingredients but much of the processing is the same.  Other products that need to be questioned are the “made without” products.  Gluten-free, meat-free, dairy-free, to name just a few.  Some of these products can be made quite easily but others are challenging and sometimes require the use of ingredients that are not desirable…or good for us.  They take away one ingredient only to replace it with another, or several, to achieve a similar taste, appearance, texture, or shelf-life of the product.  Sometimes these replacements take us in the wrong direction, away from healthy and into the land of the questionable.  Manufacturers do their best to make products to accommodate our food sensitives and allergies but we have to judge for ourselves if these ingredient substitutions are as bad as the original, worse than the original, or are they okay for us.  Only we can make that judgment by monitoring how we feel after having consumed these foods.

One of my personal pet peeves is gluten-free.  These products often contain higher amounts of sugar and refined flours or starches like rice flour or potato starch to compensate for the functionality of the wheat flour.  For those who can’t have gluten, this is good but these ingredients can cause an insulin spike, so…not so good.  Sometimes when manufacturers are trying to make a product without a classic ingredient like wheat flour, they have to compensate by using a collection of alternative ingredients to achieve the same quality (or so they hope) as the original good tasting, good textured product had in order for it to sell.  Have you ever considered that if we never had wheat, we might never have had bread? Wheat flour does amazing things that no other flour or starch can do…trust me I’ve tried.  As a pastry chef who has to limit her gluten intake, I know that nothing can replace wheat flour in many recipes when it comes to function. My mother tells me my expectations are too high but I don’t feel the need to eat anything that is sub-standard in taste and texture. Instead, I choose to eat foods that are actually good and pleasing to eat, and they are usually in their natural form, unaltered. In other words, choose to eat something really good instead of something that was so posed to satisfy you but instead leaves you dissappointed.

There’s really no end to how many products there are that are not healthy even though we find them in a health food store.  A fried chip is still a fried chip.  Even if you use the highest quality organic potato and extra-virgin olive oil…it’s still a deep-fried item and shouldn’t be considered healthy.  Tasty, yes.  Healthy, no.  Candy.  Still made with high amounts of sugar…even if it is cane or coconut sugar.  It’s still a lot of sugar and should be eaten sparingly...just like those chips. Extruded cereal or puffed vegetable chips?  Still not good.  These are highly processed foods causing the destruction of vital nutrients and natural protein structure they once had in their natural whole forms.  Prepared and frozen foods undergo a similar fate.  In order to make any food appetizing after being processed, cooked and refrigerated, or frozen plus requiring a long shelf or freezer life takes some skill…and sometimes ingredients we should avoid.  This is the nature of any food we insist on having a longer shelf life than is reasonably possible.  If we make a dish from scratch at home and then freeze it, is it the same after being frozen and reheated or cooked?  Not always.  Some foods just lend themselves better to freezing than others.   When it comes to prepared foods, whether frozen, refrigerated, or dry, always be aware that these products could be made with ingredients that you just don’t want in your diet. 

So, whether you shop at a health food store or not, just remember that any food item that has been manufactured, prepared, cooked, frozen, packaged, or processed in any way, is still not a whole food and should not be a staple in our diet.  When shopping at the health food store take advantage of all the beautiful, lovingly grown whole foods they have.  Appreciate the extra effort that farmers take when growing and producing their higher-quality foods for us to enjoy and benefit from.  Making the effort will be worth it!