ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is the product of thousands of hours spent in supermarket aisles and test kitchens; hundreds of conversations with nutritionists and industry experts; and the collective smarts, dedication and raw talent of dozens of individuals. Our underlying thanks to all of you who have given your time, energy and enthusiasm to this project. A special thanks to those who have played a vital role in this adventure since the very first edition of Eat This, Not That!, in particular George Karabotsos, Stephen Perrine, and Tara Long. —Dave and Matt Check out the other bestselling books in the EAT THIS, NOT THAT!® and COOK THIS, NOT THAT!® series, and make sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter! WHAT'S INSIDE Front Cover Acknowledgments Social Media Introduction PLUS: Inspiring Eat This, Not That! success stories CHAPTER 1 Anatomy of a Supermarket Make the most out of every trip through the aisles CHAPTER 2 Your Save-Money Shopping Guide Learn the secrets for slimming down your grocery bill CHAPTER 3 The Produce Section Elevate your meals with these fat-burning superfoods CHAPTER 4 The Meat & Fish Counters Build a leaner body with the smartest protein choices CHAPTER 5 The Refrigerator Section Keep your cool—and never feel hungry again CHAPTER 6 The Pantry Aisles Stock your kitchen with the healthiest building blocks possible CHAPTER 7 Ahashare.com The Snacks & Sweets Aisles Master the art of the healthy indulgence CHAPTER 8 The Freezer Section The best pizzas, entrées, and ice creams in the supermarket CHAPTER 9 Drink This, Not That! Learn how to cut out the calories that hurt you the most Index Credits & Copyright Back Cover INTRODUCTION There’s a wonderful world where all you desire and everything you’ve longed for is at your fingertips... —Bruce Springsteen, “Queen of the Supermarket” NO WONDER BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN SANG of “aisles and aisles of dreams” in his ode to checkout girls. In an interview with Britain’s The Observer Music Monthly, he even declared, “They opened up this big, beautiful supermarket near where we lived....[A]nd I thought, this place is spectacular. This place is… it’s fantasy land!” We can be as appreciative of its bounty as The Boss and still be wary of the supermarket’s dangers. As with every other sensory-rattling funhouse, in the grocery store, nothing is as it first appears. Friendly characters entertain our children while peddling junk that will blow up their waistlines and make them susceptible to diabetes. Words like “healthy” and “lite” are often meaningless phrases coated with fat and sugar. Even the lowest-priced supermarket in your neighborhood is brimming with complete rip-offs—“health” foods that aren’t healthy, “gourmet” foods that aren’t gourmet, specialty items that just aren’t that special. Yet the supermarket is a fact of everyone’s life. The average American makes about 1.7 trips a week, and each one of those trips is a chance to gain weight, or to lose it. To save money, or to waste it. To set yourself and your family up for a lifetime of better health, or to deprive you all of the vital nutrients your bodies need to stay strong. You make hundreds of health and financial decisions with each trip, yet there’s not a lot of help to be found: The people stacking the boxes know where everything belongs, but they don’t know what’s actually in anything. Managers are seldom trained to do much more than settle coupon disputes, and at the checkout, you have the choice of a robot telling you to place items in bag, or a robotlike teenager swiping your family’s food along a grimy scanner. Once you enter a supermarket, you’re on your own. And we’re victims of that lack of helpful information: Only 27 percent of shoppers can correctly identify monounsaturated fat as a healthy fat, and nearly one in five people don’t know whether trans fats are good or bad. (They’re worse than bad. They’re ugly.) No wonder two-thirds of the American population is overweight or obese. No one is telling us the truth about what’s in the foods we’re eating! Well, that stops now. The Eat This, Not That! Supermarket Survival Guide is designed to make shopping faster, easier, cheaper, and, most important of all, healthier. And along the way, it’s going to show you how to start losing weight fast— without dieting, without exercise. These pages are packed with thousands of simple grocery-store swaps that can save you 10, 20, 30 pounds or more—this year alone! Now, I know what you’re thinking: Eating healthy is expensive. It doesn’t have to be. You don’t have to buy costly “health food” to get the weight-loss benefits of the Eat This, Not That! Supermarket Survival Guide. The simple swaps you’ll find in this book will show you how choosing between two seemingly identical—and identically priced—products can save you hundreds of calories, and dozens of pounds, without impacting your wallet—or your taste buds. Consider this: Drop 20 pounds in 1 year with this simple swap! • Who doesn’t love Häagen-Dazs? But here’s a secret: Not every pint of Häagen-Dazs loves you back. Its Chocolate Peanut Butter ice cream weighs in at 360 calories per half cup. But just switch to the company’s Dark Chocolate and save 200 calories with every 1-cup serving. Do that every night and you’ll drop a pound every 18 days, and cut out one-third of your sugar intake at dessert! • Remember when I warned you about “health” foods that aren’t? You’d think Healthy Choice Complete Meal Sweet & Sour Chicken would be, you know, healthy. In fact, it’s got more sugar than a Reese’s-flavor Klondike bar. Opt for the Oven Roasted Chicken, however, and you’ll save 150 calories per serving, and 10 grams of sugar. Lose a pound every 9 days with swaps like this! • How about a small frozen pizza? DiGiorno makes a Traditional Crust Supreme Pizza and a Flatbread Melts Chicken Parmesan. But the only “traditional” thing about the first item and its whopping 790 calories is the middle-aged spread you’ll get —long before middle age. (You’ll save 410 calories by picking the Parmesan—that kind of swap can save you a pound every 9 days!) Now, a lot of us equate eating healthy with spending hours poring over nutrition labels. And most of us have neither the time nor the patience for that: According to “Shopping for Health,” a Food Marketing Institute study, the proportion of shoppers who read nutrition labels as of 2010 was just 64 percent. (That number is down 7 percent from 2007. Busy, anyone?) And nutrition labels can be confusing: A 2008 USDA study found that only 49 percent of people actually changed their buying decision based on what they saw on a nutrition facts label. Well, that’s where the Eat This, Not That! Supermarket Survival Guide comes in. Now, I still want you to read nutrition labels when you can, because the more you educate yourself, the greater your ability to protect yourself and your family. But even if you don’t, you’ll still be able to make smart swaps and save pounds on almost every purchase. (And if you don’t have your copy of the Eat This, Not That! Supermarket Survival Guide with you, make sure you download the Eat This, Not That! app for your phone!) Ready to start changing your life? Why Your Weight Is Not Your Fault Ever go to a parent-teacher night at an elementary school and try to squeeze into your fourth-grader’s desk chair? Embarrassing, right? Our adult bodies are simply wider, heavier, and differently proportioned than our children’s are. Well, if we could build a time machine and travel back—not to Cro-magnon days, but to our grandparents’ day—we’d find much the same thing. The chairs would be smaller. So would the clothing. And guess what else would be smaller? The meals and snacks. Consider, for example, the humble bag of potato chips, washed down with a soda. Since the days when Fonzie was ruling the drive-ins and diners of America, the average salty-snack portion has increased by 93 calories, and soft-drink portions have increased by 49 calories, according to an analysis of combined data from the Nationwide Food Consumption Survey 1977 and the Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals 1989 and 1996, which created a sample of more than 63,000 people. So if you were to indulge in a bag of chips and a soda once a day, you’d be eating 142 more calories every day than Fonzie would have. And that’s just in one snack! (No wonder it was so easy for the Fonz to be cool.) It takes 3,500 calories to create a pound of fat on your body. By eating the same snack every day that people from our grandparents’ era (with its much lower rates of obesity) did, we automatically ingest enough calories to add a pound of flab to our frames every 25 days—that’s 14 pounds of fat a year! But it’s not just our snack foods that are loaded with more calories. The supersizing of the American diet has infused all of our foods, and nowhere is that more apparent than at the supermarket. For example, in 1971, the average American male consumed 2,450 calories a day; the average woman, 1,542. But by the year 2008, American men were averaging about 2,504 daily calories (up 2 percent), while women were eating 1,771 calories (a whopping 15 percent increase, or 229 more calories every day!). As a result, since the 1970s, the obesity rate in this country has more than doubled, with two-thirds of our population now overweight or obese. The health condition most directly tied to obesity—diabetes—now eats up one in every five dollars Americans spend on health care, and a recent study at Harvard found that obesity has become similar in magnitude to tobacco as the number one avoidable cause of cancer deaths. And the future looks even bleaker for our children: No matter what your weight may have been growing up, because of the way we’re packaging and selling foods at restaurants and supermarkets, your child faces three times the risk of obesity that you did. WHO BLEW UP THE FOOD? A lot of people want to blame the obesity epidemic on too much TV, too little exercise, and too much gluttony. But that’s blaming the victim, in my opinion. Why should the men and women of America have to give up a pizza and a pint of ice cream while arguing over Monday Night Football versus Dancing With the Stars? Indulgences like that make life worth living. And really—did they not have cheeseburgers and fries (and television) back in the 1970s? Indeed, I’d argue that Americans are working harder than ever to keep themselves in shape. Every year, we spend an estimated $42 billion on diet books, $20.3 billion on health club memberships, and $5.2 billion on diet foods and weight-loss programs. But unless you understand how food marketers have altered the reality of our weekly trips to the supermarket, it’s impossible to truly see where the battle lines fall in the fight against fat. See, the food industry spends $30 billion a year on advertising —70 percent of it pitching convenience foods, candy, sodas, and desserts. And while they’re busy using dancing leprechauns and talking teddy bears to sell you on how the new shrink-wrapped food of the month is going to make you the most popular mom or dad on the block, they’re obscuring the real story. And the real story is this: The food we consume today is different from the food that Americans ate 30 years ago. And the reasons for that are as simple as they are sneaky. We’ve added extra calories to traditional foods. In the early 1970s, food manufacturers, looking for a cheaper ingredient to replace sugar, came up with a substance called high-fructose corn syrup. Today, HFCS is in an unbelievable array of foods—everything from breakfast cereals to bread, from ketchup to pasta sauce, from juice boxes to iced teas. So Grandma’s pasta sauce now comes in a jar, and it’s loaded with stuff just perfect for adding meat to your bones—and flab to your belly. We’ve been trained to supersize it. It seems like Economics 101: If you can get a lot more food for just a few cents more, then it makes all the sense in the world to upgrade to the “value meal.” And since this trick has worked so well for fast-food marketers, your average product in the supermarket has become Hulkified as well. The problem is the way we look at food—we should be looking at cutting down on our calories, not adding to them. We’ve laced our food with time bombs. A generation ago it was hard for food manufacturers to create baked goods that would last on store shelves. Most baked goods require oils, and oil leaks at room temperature. But since the 1960s, manufacturers have been baking with—and restaurateurs have been frying with— something called trans fats. Trans fats are cheap and effective: They make potato chips crispier and cookies tastier, and they let fry cooks make pound after pound of fries without smoking up their kitchens. The downside: Trans fats increase your bad cholesterol, lower your good cholesterol, and greatly increase your risk of heart disease. Our fruits and vegetables aren’t as healthy as they once were. Researchers doing a study that was published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition tested 43 different garden crops for nutritional content and discovered that 6 out of 13 nutrients showed major declines between 1950 and 1999: protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and ascorbic acid. Researchers say it’s probably due to farmers’ efforts to achieve higher yields because plants that grow faster can be picked earlier. As a result, the plants aren’t able to make or take in nutrients at the same rate. We’re drinking more calories than ever. A study from the University of North Carolina found that, in 2002, we consumed 464 calories a day from beverages, nearly twice as many as in 1965. This increase amounts to an extra 23 pounds a year that we’re forced to work off—or carry around with us. Many of the calories come from the HFCS in our drinks—especially, when it comes to kids, in “fruit” drinks that are often nothing more than water, food coloring, and sweetener. In fact, anything you have for your kids to drink in your fridge right now— unless it’s water, milk, or a diet soda —probably has HFCS in it. Go ahead—read the labels. We don’t even know what’s in our food. More and more, marketers are adding new types of preservatives, fats, sugars, and other “new” food substances to our daily meals. Indeed, there are now more than 4,000 ingredients on the FDA’s list of allowable food additives, and any one of them could end up on your plate. (And here’s a terrifying fact: Only 373 of those 4,000 additives is “generally recognized as safe” by the FDA.) But often, they go unexplained (what is xanthan gum anyway?) or, in the case of restaurant food, unmentioned. Unless we’re eating it right off the tree, it’s hard to know what, exactly, is in that fruity dish. All of these disturbing trends in our food supply are a lot to chew on—but chew on them we do, often because we feel we have no choice. Yet I believe there is a better way. I believe we can enjoy all the bounty of the supermarket—and heck, some pretty good TV shows, too—and not gain weight or lose control of our bodies and our health. I believe that taking control of our food, our weight, and our lives doesn’t have to be difficult. I believe that if we have the knowledge and insight we need, we can and will make the right choices.