I Can Make You Hot! (13 page)

4. If the supermarket has a pharmacy, it’s probably there to tempt you to shop while your prescription is being filled. Phone your prescription in ahead of time so that it will be ready when you arrive to pick it up.

5. Be careful about stocking up on sale items. Very often they are products reaching their sell-by date that the market wants you to buy before they have to remove them from the shelves. Whenever you’re buying an item with a sell-by date, check the ones in the back to see if the date is farther in the future than the ones in the front. When markets restock the shelves, they often move the older items to the front to sell first—and the same is true of fresh produce. Take it from the back where it’s likely to be fresher.

6. Waiting to check out can be dangerous. Tempting goodies are often kept at or near the cash registers where you’re likely to pick them up on impulse. If you can, try to shop “off hours” when the lines will be shorter.

7.
Don’t
go food shopping when you’re hungry! Not only will you want to eat everything in sight, but also, if your blood sugar is low your judgment may be impaired—just like when you’ve had too much alcohol to drink.

Foods to avoid:

Most commercial cereals—they have enough sugar to be packaged candy

Most soups—they’re packed with sodium

Packaged breads and rolls—except for pitas

Chips—except for kale chips or baked pita chips

Here’s a list of brand name and generic market foods I like to buy:

Annie’s Boxed Mac & Cheese

Bumble Bee water-packed tuna

Goya canned black beans (for beans and rice)

Cerignola olives

Ginger beer

Land O’Lakes unsalted butter

Luigi Italian Ices: chocolate and lemon

Odwalla Superfood smoothies

Organic popcorn with no salt or oil

Skinny Cow ice cream desserts

Sriracha hot sauce

Stonyfield low-fat yogurt

Sun-dried tomatoes

Vita Coco Coconut Water

Whole wheat Italian Taralli Pugliesi (good replacement to croutons)

Even though supermarkets have a great variety of really healthy foods, there are some items I still tend to buy at Whole Foods or other large specialty markets. Here’s what’s often on my list.

Agave

Almond butter

Annie Chung’s sauces

Arugula

Avocados

Bananas

Blueberries

Broccoli

Brussels sprouts

Cabbage

Celery

Cornmeal

Dark breads rich in grains

Dates

Dog treats

Eggs

Feta cheese

Freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Honey

Jalapeño salt

Lavender pepper

Mesclun salad

Mushrooms

Olive oil

Pita bread

Plain hummus (can be “dressed” up with jalapeños, red peppers, tomatoes, pepper, lemon)

Plum tomatoes

Raspberries

Red peppers

Serrano peppers

Shallots

Shitake/oyster mushroom combination packs

Sliced marcona almonds

Sliced beets

Soy milk (Soy nog for the Holidays!)

Spinach

Sugar snap peas

Sweet potatoes

Vanilla sugar

Whole-wheat couscous

Yams

We should all try to buy the healthiest food we can find and afford. “Try” is the operative word here. If possible, I’d love you to buy organic, but I know how expensive that can be. I recently walked out of an organic market having paid $400 for just three bags of groceries. If you can’t buy organic, buy something that’s natural and fresh; if you can’t buy fresh, buy frozen or even canned. In fact, in the winter when good tomatoes are hard to find, you’ll get much better flavor if you cook with Italian canned plum tomatoes.

“Organic,” in any case, seems like something of a misnomer to me. I know the Food and Drug Administration has regulations for certifying foods organic, but to me, for foods to be truly and totally organic, they would have to be grown in a test tube or a greenhouse with no exposure to the natural elements. We’re all exposed to impurities every day, and so are any foods grown or raised in a natural environment. According to Charles Stuart Platkin, Ph.D., M.P.H., whose syndicated health, nutrition, and fitness column, “The Diet Detective,” appears in more than 100 daily newspapers, “When organic vegetables are grown in the midst of conventional crops, pesticide drift is hard to prevent. Low levels of pesticides can remain in the soil thirty years after the product was applied, and sometimes pesticides in irrigation water lead to detectable levels in an organic field.” So please don’t get unnecessarily hung up on buying organic.

Just be sure to read the label and buy the best you can find. Become a comparison food shopper. Avoid heavy syrups, added sugar, and foods loaded with sodium. There are many frozen and canned foods that don’t have all these unnecessary added ingredients. And don’t buy foods whose labels are full of words you can’t pronounce. If you can’t pronounce it and you don’t know where it came from, it probably isn’t good for you.

What I really want you to do is eat as healthfully as you can in the environment you’re in.

We eat with our eyes—creating a palette—as well as our palates. A white palette may look great in the bathroom but not on a dinner plate. I think of each meal as a way to “color me beautiful.” Bright red strawberries, purplish blueberries, orange carrots or yams, gorgeous ripe tomatoes, dark green broccoli, spinach, or other greens all have different kinds of antioxidants, which are chemicals found only in plants and help to slow down the process of internal aging. The younger we are on the inside, the hotter we’ll feel and look on the outside.

I also believe that
how
you eat is as important as
what
you eat. Eating ought to be a total experience; it isn’t just about stuffing food in your mouth to fill yourself up. It’s also about taking time for quiet reflection or for conversation and laughing with family and friends. Let’s face it. You’re not starving. You’re not worrying where your next meal is coming from. No one’s going to swoop down and snatch the food off your plate if you don’t eat it fast enough—so turn off your cell phone and engage in conversation.

I’ve seen how Europeans eat as a matter of course. They put their knives and forks down between bites and talk. They set the table with a cloth or placemats, nice china, and cutlery. They drink from glasses, not a bottle, can, or a paper cup. And they don’t put paper cartons, bottles, or jars on the dining table. “Dining” is the operative word here. Try it. You can even splurge and use cloth napkins.

Kelly’s Cardinal Rule