Want to improve your heart health? Learn how to avoid the worst food at the grocery store for your heart by passing up the following food items.
If you’re trying to eat healthier food, going grocery shopping can be stressful due to the number of healthy (and unhealthy) choices you have. One proven way to make your healthy shopping easier is to make a list beforehand. As you make your weekly shopping list, make sure you avoid the following items, as they are part of the worst food at the grocery store for your heart.
1. Potato Chips
Eating potato chips as a snack is common across the U.S., but if you want to avoid gaining weight, it’s better to choose something else. In just one serving (usually about nine chips), you’re typically getting eight grams of fat and a whole lot of calories and sodium. It’s also likely that you’ll eat plenty of servings, so if one serving is 140 calories, you just ate an entire meal’s calories without any of the nutrition.
2. Ice Cream
Another enjoyable treat that is usually bad for your health is ice cream. The good news is that there are “healthier” ice cream options – you just have to know which ones they are before you go shopping. Otherwise, you’ll be eating a high-calorie dessert that’s also rich in added sugars, which is not good for your health.
3. Frozen Dinners
As with ice cream brands, certain options are not as caloric as others, but you should still pay attention to other nutritional facts. For example, many frozen dinners are not just high in calories but also high in sodium. To illustrate how bad some of them are, keep in mind that certain brands have about 2,000 mg of sodium – and the American Heart Association’s recommended daily limit is 2,300 mg!
4. Flavored Yogurt
If you’re interested in a healthy diet, you’ve likely heard that yogurt is a great source of probiotics. However, when choosing a yogurt at the store, make sure you go with plain yogurt and not the flavored kind, as the latter is high in added sugar content. This doesn’t mean you have to eat a flavorless yogurt: just add some fruits and other healthy ingredients to your plain yogurt to get the benefits without all the added sugar.
Additional Health Tips
These are only some of the biggest food products to watch out for when going grocery shopping. Others to be aware of include deli meat, sugary cereal, cookies, frozen breakfasts, frozen pizza, and more. If you make a list of specific items to get before you go to the store, you’ll be more likely to get healthy choices and avoid the bad ones.
Furthermore, you can give your health an extra boost by taking supplements like L-arginine Plus. Its ingredients support circulation, blood pressure, cholesterol, and more. Help promote your heart health by avoiding the wrong kinds of food and by taking L-arginine Plus.