Going grocery shopping with a nutritionist is an eye-opening experience for Gill South.
I've been at home with a sick child for the past couple of days, so the opportunity to go on a supermarket tour with a nutritionist at 6.30 in the evening seems highly appealing. I arrive at New World Victoria Park a bit peckish, breaking rule number one: never go supermarket shopping hungry.
I tell Mission Nutrition nutritionist Rene Schliebs that I would like to be eating in a more healthy way. We start with the fruit and veg section where I discover I am eating too much fruit and not enough veges. Apparently, I should be having two or three pieces of fruit and four handfuls of veges a day. We make a special visit to the broccoli which "is the king of all vegetables," says Rene. It has Vitamin C and Indole-3-Carbinol which acts as an antioxidant.
We race past the wine section much too quickly for my liking. Rene, who's obviously not a big drinker, sweetly suggests I go for low alcohol as the sugar is concentrated in the alcohol. Hmm. Swiftly we touch on chocolate. "A little bit of what you fancy does you good?" I suggest. "It's a personal decision," she says kindly. We look at grams of fat per 100g - a total 10g of fat per 100g is good, even better is less than 5g per 100g.
We move on to some of my family's favourite products: in the case of my son's Meal Mates crackers, Rene tells me we might as well be eating chippies. They have 11.8 g of saturated fat per 100g when the recommended is 2g or less. Vita-Weat, my crackers of choice, get a big thumbs up, they are low in fat and salt though I've been deviating a bit recently with Salada Light. Bad move on dietary fibre. Vita-Weat is sitting pretty with 11.1 g per 100g compared with 1.3 g in the Salada Light.
Cereals are next. Apparently you can afford to have more grams of sugar if you have nuts, seeds and dried fruit. The recommended intake is less than 15g of sugar per 100g or less than 25g per 100g for cereals with dried fruit - good excuse to eat dried fruit. My current favourite, toasted muesli and greek style yoghurt, is fine for athletes but Rene's under no illusions that's me. Weet-Bix is a good one, rolled oats are even better. I make Bircher muesli, so feel like the star pupil.
Rene stops the tour at dips, leaving me to fend for myself through yoghurt - that evil section. With dips, ideally you want 10g of fat per 100g and my latest craze, hummus with pumpkin seeds on top, is a naughty 10.4g while Just Hummus is 7.6g. Beware pots of pesto, says the nutritionist, showing me one with 46.7 g fat per 100g. Smugly, I tell her I make my own spinach pesto. I win a smile of approval from Rene.
Next week:
I go to see stylist Susan Axford of Your Style, who I'm hoping is going to make me feel chic and fabulous for winter.
