Healthy Shopping with Akea
- Read labels.
- When shopping for groceries, ask yourself: Is this something people in the Longevity Hot Spots would eat? Yes if it’s locally grown produce and meats—no chemicals, processing, or preservatives.
- Keep to the perimeter of the grocery store, where the fresh produce tends to be. Avoid the interior aisles, where the chips and other junk foods tend to be.
- On the interior aisles, avoid the UFOs—unidentified food objects. You’ll know them when you see ingredients that are artificial, unrecognizable and unpronounceable.
- When purchasing fruits and vegetables, always look for labels such as Local, Organic, and No GMO (genetic modified organisms).
- If you can’t find fresh produce, your second choice should be frozen fruits and vegetables. Canned foods are lower in nutrients and higher in sodium.
- Look for free-range, organic beef and poultry products. Levels of saturated fats and harmful chemicals should be much lower than in the products of industrial-farmed animals.
- Choose deep-water, wild-caught ocean fish, which is likely to have lower levels of PCBs, dioxin, and other toxic, cancer-causing chemicals. Avoid farm-raised fish.
- Avoid having tuna more than twice a month. It can be high in mercury. Choose tuna caught by the pole-and-line method. It’s friendlier to dolphins and sharks.
- When buying breads, choose 100 percent whole grain, rather than white breads made with refined flours. Avoid the high-fat, high-calorie pastries altogether.
- Avoid high-fat and high-sugar snacks. Choose whole-grain crackers or baked snacks.
- Try to buy nuts in their shells, since the oils in pre-shelled nuts go rancid quickly. Children love cracking the shells open, so it’s a great way to eat nuts.
- Choose water, juice, herbal tea, and organic fair trade coffee over sugary soft drinks and diet drinks, which contain harmful chemicals.
- “Sugar-free” on the label only refers to sucrose or table sugar. Other sugars to watch for are fructose, maltose, lactose, glucose, dextrose, corn-syrup solids, corn sweeteners, and hydrolyzed corn starch.
- Look for products with healthier sweeteners, such as agave, stevia, or evaporated cane juice. Try sweetening your coffee and tea with raw honey instead of table sugar.
- If you want to use salt in cooking, use sea salt rather than refined table salt, as it should contain some beneficial minerals. Still, use it sparingly.
- When buying soaps, lotions, cleaners, and detergents, look for unscented products. Items with fragrances may contain potentially harmful chemicals.
- Avoid antibacterial soaps with the chemicals triclosan and triclocarban. They’re thought to affect reproductive hormones and the nervous system, and might contribute to the evolution of antibacterial-resistant superbugs.
Healthy Cooking with Akea
- Steam or slow-roast vegetables. Or eat them raw so as to preserve vitamins, minerals, and enzymes.
- Avoid burning or charring meat. You can create pro-aging free radicals and carcinogenic heterocyclic aromatic amines (HAAs).
- Use fresh herbs, garlic, lemon, and spices such turmeric liberally in your food preparation for flavor—rather than salt.
- Try to consume foods that are produced locally to insure they are as fresh as possible.
- Avoid frying. It damages oils and can make them unhealthy. Try sweating onions in olive oil in a heavy-based pan instead.
- If pan-searing or frying, use oils with a very high smoke point, such as coconut, grape seed, peanut, or avocado oils. These oils are more stable higher temperature than corn or olive oil.
- Cook orange and red vegetables such as sweet potatoes and red bell peppers in olive oil. You’ll help make the anti-cancer carotenoids in them more bioavailable in your body.
- Use meat and dairy products to flavor vegetable dishes, rather than using them as the main feature of the dish.
