Shopping with your head, not your stomach

Date Published: 11-Apr-2008

The problem with reading food labels is that the print is too small and when you can make it out, it usually tells you something you don’t really want to know.

Do we really want to know that our favourte TV snack has all that fat and salt in it — ok,we guessed, but we didn’t really want to have it confirmed, did we?

But that’s exactly what you sign up for on one of the supermarket tours organised by the HSE West’s Community Nutrition and Dietetic Service, because they are meant to be informative and educational.

Now those two words, informative and educational, mightn’t be everyone’s idea of fun, but on a Wednesday evening recently, I think we enjoyed our two-hour ramble around Dunnes in Westside with a qualified dietician.

Our tour leader Lisa Corbett led seven of us around the aisles on a ‘low fat tour’ showing us what we should look for on food labels to guide us towards a healthier diet. Our mission was to find low fat foods and by the time we moved onto the butters and dairy spreads, we had got the hang of it, each of us trying to outdo the other on finding the healthiest product!

That was after we had studied the breads — most white sliced pans are “little more than air” according to Lisa and lacking in much needed fibre.

We used the food pyramid as a guide, but basically, as Lisa kept reminding us, a piece of fruit is always better than any other snack.

You would imagine a two hour educational tour would feel long but honestly, the time flew and the group bonded —…………….