0 (1s):
Hello, and welcome to the get lean and eat clean podcast. My name is Brian grin. I'm a certified health coach, trainer and author. This podcast is for middle-aged men and women looking to optimize their health and get their bodies back to what it once was 10 to 15 years ago. I will give you simple, actionable items to get long-term sustainable results. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show.
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All right, welcome to the get lean eat clean podcast. My name is Brian grin. And today we're going to talk about reading labels. I think it's an important skill to have, and I'm just going to go through just like a crash course on some, you know, five or six tips that should help you out when you're at the store and you have to read labels now in a perfect world, we would all buy our foods without labels, right? So, you know, fresh organic veggies and fruits and wild fish and poultry and grass fed meats. But I do know this is unrealistic for most people and from time to time, we are going to buy things with labels on them. So it's a good idea to just haven't, you know, have a clue as to what to look for.
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Cause some people don't even look at labels and they just pick up things from the store and assume that it's, you know, halfway decent for them just by reading, like maybe a few marketing things that are just right on the top of the label. But again, you got to do a little investigation for yourself and I'm going to go through and give you some tips to help you with that. So number one, ingredients on labels are listed from highest to lowest quantity. So whatever that first ingredient is, that is what is it? That is the highest percentage of what's in that product. So for example, let's just say, if you're looking at, I don't know, protein bars and the first ingredient is Brown rice syrup, you should put it back because I'm going to talk about another one that Brown rice syrup is just to note another way of saying sugar.
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Number two, look for small ingredient lists. That's an easy one. You know, like if, if you grab, let's just say a bar again or anything else in there's like more than, let's just say six ingredients, I would probably not get it. And also if you cannot pronounce a lot of these ingredients, I would just put them back on the shelf because there are scientists that are putting together these formulations to make them palatable and addicting. Let's just say they want you to keep buying that product. So if you can't pronounce it, don't buy it. Butylated hydroxy Hydrox and they sole I can't even pronounce it.
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It's called BHT. It was one ingredient that I found and it's an actually a preservative that's used in like cereals, potato chips, even chewing gum and the health and human services peg them as known carcinogens. So just one example. So if you can't pronounce it, put it back,
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Be aware of sugar
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And all its different names. Like I mentioned to you earlier, Brown rice syrup, malt syrup, corn syrup, barley malt, cane juice, fruit juice concentrate, and on and on and on. These are, Elias's attempted to conceal the presence of large amounts of added sugar. So again, these companies want to sell you food and sell you food that's that it tastes great. And they know that they're going to try to find ways to disguise sugar and that's the ways they do it. So stay away from sugar and all its Elias's stay away from fat-free foods, as we know. And if you listen to a lot of my podcasts, that fat is actually good.
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Saturated fat is good for you. And if you're always buying things that are fat free, they are going to put other things in there like sugar and artificial ingredients that make it unhealthy. So instead I would look for foods that have healthy fats or cook with healthy fats, per se, like grass fed butter or olive oil, MCT oil, or even coconut oil. So stay away from those fat-free even low sugar they'll stay fat free or no sugar, but they'll put artificial ingredients and artificial sweeteners in it as well. So be aware of that. That's actually, my next one was you want to avoid these artificial sweeteners for the most part, you know, some are better than others.
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I would say, like for example, I would avoid like aspartame, you know, sucralose
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Saccharin.
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And just to name a few and perhaps if you know, something is going to be sweetened with like, like raw honey or coconut sugar, or even Stevia li for Stevia drops, that is a better choice. So my next tip is, you know, there's a lot of products out there now that say organic or glute even gluten-free and or either one that does not mean it's automatically healthy for you. Again, you want to look in the label and see what is in it because you know, rice flour, potato flour, corn starch, tapioca starch, these all can cause major spikes in blood sugar. And that was the things that you want to avoid. Cause then you're just going to crash later on.
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My next tip is I would limit like these high sodium, canned and processed foods. We all know that you want to have a healthy amount of salt in your, in your diet, but you want to get those salts from things like, you know, Redmond's, you know, good Celtic, sea salt or Himalayan, and you want to add those to your meal or even to your water, but you don't want to go crazy with these high sodium canned foods and all these processed foods
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Out there
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Next is avoiding vegetable oils. This is something I keep hearing about as pretty much what's causing our, our overweight and these are cheap and easy ways to, to, to cook and to, and to keep foods fresh. And you're going to see these in like pretty much almost anything you can buy. I just was looking at a bar called the perfect bar, which you'll see all over the place. And yeah, there's, there's veggie oils in there. So sunflower oil is a popular one that you'll see and you'll think, Oh, there's nothing wrong with that. But that's a vegetable oil that you want to stay away from. Canola oil, soybean, corn, peanut safflower oil.
1 (6m 30s):
Okay. So really keep an eye out for these because they're hidden in a lot of different products and products that you wouldn't even think they're hitting in that they're hidden and excuse me. So these vegetables are heated at unnaturally high temps and become oxidized, which can lead to inflammation, damage the cells of your body when consumed. So yeah, avoid vegetable oils. So those were my tips. Hope you took notes and you got some things next, your arm. Next time you go to the store, you know what to look for and, and you can just apply them, you know, for your everyday life. So remember that, you know, obviously the best foods are the ones that don't require a label, but in a perfect world, sometimes we do have to buy foods with labels on them.
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Just be sure to investigate, do a little bit of an investigation and it'll make things a lot easier. So thanks so much for listening. I hope you enjoy this episode and talk to you next time. Thanks so much.
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Thanks for listening to the get lean, eat clean podcast. I understand there are millions of other podcasts out there and you've chosen to listen to mine. And I appreciate that. Check out the show notes@briangrin.com for everything that was mentioned in this episode, feel free to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend or family member who is looking to get their body back to what it once was. Thanks again, and have a great day.
