You know whole grains are good for you, and you know you should be eating more of them. But do you know how to find the real whole grains hiding in your grocery store? Beth Sumrell Ehrensberger, M.P.H., R.D. tells you how to spot whole-grain foods on your next trip to the market.
Question: How can I tell if a product is whole grain? Beth Sumrell Ehrensberger: When you are choosing whole grain foods in the grocery store, if you are in the bread aisle, the cracker aisle, or the cereal aisle, you need to watch out and be careful for tricky sounding labels. Sometimes labels on our breads, cereals and pastas, can make the product sound like you're getting a real nutrition bargain. Labels like stone-ground, multi-grain, and 12-grain, can all be labels that manufacturers use to work their magical marketing powers to help you feel like you're getting a healthy food.
So, you'll want to read the [ingredients on the] label. The first thing you want to look for is the word "whole." Whole grains, whole wheat, whole oats, whole rye—the word WHOLE is key.
Color can be very deceptive too—a dark bread doesn't mean that it's a whole grain bread. Sometimes things like molasses are added to make the dark bread look like its healthier cousin, the whole-grain bread. It may be no healthier than just plain old white bread. And if you're wondering what whole grain means, whole grain foods contain all parts of the grain kernel—the germ, the endosperm and the bran.
Something else you can look for is a whole grain stamp from The Whole Grains Council, which is a trade group. But remember there are a lot of whole grain foods that don't use this stamp, so you can't use that as your best assurance that a food is whole grain. You want to rely, again, on looking at the ingredients label. The first or second ingredient should be a whole grain.
And don't let the fiber confuse you. If you look at the label and you see that the fiber is very high, don't assume that a high-fiber product means that it's a whole grain product. Sometimes refined-grain products, like white bread, have added fiber, from bran, inulin, guar gum, or something like that, which increases the fiber, but doesn't mean it is whole grain. So you miss out on all the nutrients that come with whole grain.
When you are elsewhere in the grocery store, besides the bread aisle (pasta, cereal and crackers), you should follow the same rules as bread, looking for the first or second ingredient as a whole grain, also making sure you are not looking at the tricky label that sounds healthy, and really reading that label.
Also, something a lot of people don't know, popcorn is whole grain and makes a great snack. Make sure you pop that popcorn without butter. Also, loose grains like barley, brown rice, oatmeal, quinoa, and things like that, that you'll find in the bulk bins and also in the grain aisle, may make good choices too, when you are looking for whole grain products, but not necessarily bread, pasta or cereal.
Have a question for one of our experts? Please email us at bestlifesuccess@gmail.com and check back here for the answer.