Ben Greenfield presents a short kitchen-demo video demonstrating packaged-food staples he uses at home and explaining how to choose healthier packaged options. In this chunk he introduces olives (as a fat source; ingredients: olives, water, sea salt), sardines (sources of omega-3s and calcium; prefers those packed in olive oil or water over soybean oil), coconut water (store-bought as a convenient alternative to fresh coconut), and a gluten-free pizza crust mix (ingredients include brown rice flour, tapioca flour, arrowroot, xanthan gum, granulated garlic, cream of tartar, salt, baking soda, Italian seasoning, granulated onion, and ascorbic acid).
Chapters
Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. Welcome to my kitchen. I'm dressed up like a race car today because I just got done doing a triathlon. Didn't want you thinking that I dress up like this all the time when I'm at home. As a matter of fact, I know that if you watch my videos a lot, you know that I don't really dress up at all when I'm at home. But what I want to show you today are some of the top packaged foods that we kind of have around our house and use as daily staples. Because I know that you've heard me say that you should eat fresh, recognizable foods that are preferably in as unadulterated a form as possible, and that you should do things like shop around the perimeter of the grocery store. But the truth is, there are certainly things that we buy in our house and we use on a daily basis that would be considered packaged foods that come in cans and bags and things like that. So I want to show you a few of the things that we actually have that we would consider foods.
So one item down here, and we shop for things like this at Costco.
These are olives. We use olives as a good fat source. If you look at the ingredients, you always want to look at the ingredients, if you can. When you get a packaged food, the primary ingredients are olives, water, and sea salt. So we use these as a snack. And primarily the main meal that we would use these with is a salad. So olives, in most cases, just fine to have around as a packaged food. The next thing is sardines. I'll use sardines on a salad. You know, if you're one of the people that looks at the daily diet that I log via photographs that I use a lot of sardines, I love them because they're great sources of things like omega 3 fatty acids, and if they have the bones in them, calcium. For your sardines, just make sure that when you can get. Get the ones that are packaged in olive oil, because it's a little healthier for you than soybean oil. Another alternative, if you want a slightly lower calorie option, would be to just use something like sardines packaged in water. So that is. And I'll kind of set these out for you so you can get a visual as we go. Those are the first two. All right. The next thing that we get that I would consider to be a packaged food, even though there really is only one ingredient, is coconut water. Coconut water you can make yourself with. We have shot videos before that show you how to make your own coconut milk and make your own coconut water. But you can also buy coconut water in its packaged form if you're lazy or you don't have coconuts, or you just want a really quick way to get your coconut water. And frankly, sometimes the packaged stuff tastes just a little bit better than the kind of raw, unrefined stuff you get from a coconut, depending on the type of coconut that you use. So we do buy coconut water and consider that to be packaged food. Okay. The next packaged food that we get that we use around here is a gluten free ingredient. Now, I have a problem with a lot of gluten free foods and you may have heard me talk about how many of them when I talk about them on the podcast are still filled with lots of sugar and not all that nutrient dense. Now this is a gluten free pizza crust mix which actually has brown rice flour, tapioca flour and arrowroot flour, xanthan gum, which you're going to find as filler in many gluten free ingredients. It just helps to improve the texture of the gluten free foods that you make with it. Granulated garlic, cream of tartar, salt, baking soda, Italian seasoning, granulated onion and ascorbic acid. So the ingredients in this really aren't too bad. You're not seeing things like corn syrup and added sugar and agave syrup and all the things that tend to really, really increase the glycemic index and.
A lot of the things that really make a gluten free food not a gluten free food. Because if you look at it, there are things like licorice that are gluten free that might not be all that hot for you. So we're going to put some gluten free ingredients out as something that in many cases would be okay to choose as a packaged ingredient. We make our own hummus here. And if you go to the YouTube.com BenGreenfieldFish Fitness website, you should be able to find a make your own hummus video that my wife Jessa did. And we do use a roasted sesame tahini, which is basically like a sesame butter in that hummus along with garlic and olive oil and some other ingredients. But this is definitely a packaged food that we buy and we have around and it can be used in things like dressings as well. In terms of the pantry, that's really most of what we have as far as packaged foods go. If you're not getting into actual ingredients like extra Virgin olive oil or coconut oil. When we look at the refrigerator, one of the items that you may have seen me talk about in a fat loss video or beat your appetite cravings video was pickles. We do buy pickles. Try and grab pickles that don't have all the artificial coloring added to them. These do not. Sometimes you pay a little bit more for the pickles that are higher quality, but they do have an appetite satiating effect. They can help with appetite cravings. And it is a packaged food that we buy and that will have as a snack or else serve up with something like a barbecue night with burgers. Okay, next, packaged food. And it sometimes gets hard to actually find packaged foods in our house that aren't just like ingredients or supplements. We use sprouted grain tortillas as wraps throughout the week. We'll put vegetables and avocados, maybe some sardines, some olives, things like that in these. And the deal with the sprouted grains is that they actually are digested a lot more efficiently. And when you sprout a grain, you reduce a lot of the ability of things like phytic acids in the grain and lectins to be able to cause some inflammation in your digestive tract. So whenever you buy a bread or a wrap, try and get the sprouted variety. You're going to pay a little bit extra, but it's much better for you from a health perspective. And you can find these often in the frozen food section of a grocery store if you can't find them with the rest of the wraps. So we're going to set the sprouted grain wraps out there, and that's really about it for the refrigerator. If we go up here to the upper pantry, you're going to see some almond butter as another packaged ingredient that we buy. And a lot of times I'll put this in like a hot cereal in the morning. We'll use it, for example, on one of these gluten free pancakes that we make or do something like that. But almond butter is certainly an ingredient that we use. And then if we kind of jump down to what you would consider kind of like my sports supplements type of drawer, I definitely consider a protein powder a packaged food, but it would be kind of an acceptable packaged food to add to your protocol. This one is a blend of it's rice and pea protein, primarily with some other enzymes and probiotics added to it. It's called living protein. That's another one made by the same company. I order this when I get living protein. These are a little like ground up coconuts with chia seeds. It's basically like a snack mix. It's also something that I would consider to be a packaged food, but you know, kind of acceptable in terms of its health profile. It's organic, raw coconut chia seeds, a little bit of xylitol and some probiotics. So whenever you're getting a packaged food, this is painting with a broad brush. But the fewer the ingredients, the better. In most cases you want to look for things like the absence of artificial sweeteners, absence of artificial colors as much as possible, things that don't have things like high fructose corn syrup, or if you're shopping at a health food store, agave syrup or sugar cane extract added to them. But these are examples from the olive, sardines, coconut water, some gluten free mix, sesame tahini, almond butter, pickles, sprouted tortillas, protein powder, coca chia snack mix. These are some examples of the things that we have as staples in our diet that are packaged foods, but that would kind of fall onto that extra acceptable list. So I hope that helps you a lot with your grocery shopping and kind of deciding when you duck down the aisle of a grocery store, why you would do so. And if you have packaged foods that you have questions about or things that you would, you would like to see added to that, to this list, feel free to add them. You know, canned vegetables, for example, are something that you may not see here but in some cases would be acceptable. We just happen to have a vegetable garden. So you aren't going to see those as, as staples in our diet. But if you have other examples of foods like that you'd like to see, leave a comment below this video and I'd love to help you determine whether or not that would be considered a healthy packaged food. So thanks for watching. This is Ben Greenfield from bengreenfieldfitness. Com signing out.
