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Alpha Nutrition
Kitchen
Shopping Suggestions |
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From the The Alpha Nutrition Program is low allergy, gluten free, low fat, low salt, heart smart, healthy, and safe. It’s good for everyone. |
Good health begins by making the right purchases at the at the grocery store. The first strategy is to purchase real foods, as close to the natural state as possible. In the best tradition of cooking, the chef makes a trip every day to the garden or market to choose fresh produce to cook that day. Attending the market is part of the pleasure and art of preparing food. We realize, of course that most people have lost the most enjoyable opportunities to find and prepare food and attend the local supermarket with some reluctance to buy enough food for a week or more. Supermarkets have thousands of products for sale. Your job is to select about 50 of the best food items and ignore the rest. You are interested in less than 5% of items that are for sale. Price is a major consideration and many products are promoted by special discount prices and not by quality, safety or health considerations. Many stores have specialty and “health food” sections with higher priced packaged goods that are of little or no interest to us. One the plus side, supermarket chains do a wonderful job of keeping the shelves stocked with a variety of vegetables and fruits every day of the year. You make friends with produce section of the store and the produce manager if he or she is available. The trick is to develop a route through the store that minimizes your exposure to the products that you are not going to buy. You are not going to buy any baked goods, so avoid the disappointment of gazing at all the breads and bakery items. Similarly the long coolers filling with dairy products and eggs are not interesting; you pass by hardly noticing that they are there. The long rows of packaged crackers, cookies, snack foods and bakery goods are almost invisible as we quickly find our way to the rice cakes and rice pastas. There are several varieties of rice available. We buy a 10 kg bag of Jasmine rice from Thailand as the staple food (this is often the best bargain in the entire store.) One kilogram bags of sticky rice are bought occasionally to make desserts, sushi and special Thai meals. Some brown rice varieties are good for breakfast cereals and special meals. Rice pastas in different shapes and sizes are now more available and are wonderful substitutes for gluten-based pastas. The frozen juice and vegetable section is interesting. You develop a routine of buying some favorite vegetable mixes as “fast foods” when you are in a hurry and don’t have time to prepare fresh vegetables. One of the program recommendations is that you combine vegetables in groups of 4 or more. Many of the frozen mixes do that for you and most are nutritionally desirable. Some frozen fruits such as raspberries, strawberries and blueberries might appeal. Frozen orange juice, unsweetened, is a stable food. We mix Alpha ENF or Alpha DMX in orange juice for breakfast every morning. The frozen juice section is full of “cocktails” and “punches” which are high sugar concoctions that should be avoided. The label should read “unsweetened.” The idea, of course, is that fruit juice already contains enough natural sugars to satisfy your needs, so that adding more sugar is not desirable. Continue with me on our adventure --- cooking simple, delicious meals designed to get better,
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