WGTS 91.9. I'm Claude and Summer. Jerry is out today.
And sent. Okay. Hey, Claude. Do you ever do grocery shopping online?
Is that what you were just doing right now? Don't tell anyone.
No. I don't do any online grocery shopping. I like to go fill the bag of chips and see how empty they are at the top.
That's funny. Well, but I think a lot of us have gotten kinda spoiled by this. But here's the problem. When you are just going through the motions with your groceries, there is often stuff that ends up in your cart that don't even think about that over time can really affect your heart health.
Things that are less than amazing. And and so during heart health month here, we have Patricia Hertz. She is a registered dietitian with the Center for Fitness and Health at Shady Grove Medical Center. She's gonna share some of those simple swaps we can make in our carts to help protect our heart health.
Patricia, what do we buy at the grocery store that you would say impacts our hearts the most?
In reality, we probably buy lot of overly processed foods just out of convenience and because that's what we're so used to. But what we should be doing is thinking about how can we improve those, choices instead of the overly processed foods foods and trying to do more whole foods like fresh fruits and vegetables. You could do frozen as well. I'm not a big fan of canned foods, because they do tend to have a lot of sodium, but, just trying to stay away from the foods that have a lot of added sodium, added sugar, high in saturated fat, and preservatives.
Okay. So now how can we shop differently, like, just keeping in our in our heads, okay. Good heart health. I wanna eat healthy. What are some of those things we can do a little differently?
I want to not say the cliche answer of shop the perimeter of the grocery store, but in reality, there's a lot of things within the aisles that are heart healthy. You just have to remember how to read the ingredients and understand the more ingredients there are in a food, the less healthy they're going to be. So for heart health, you want to do more whole foods, fresh fruits, vegetables. Again, frozen foods such as frozen vegetables and fruit are perfect options as well as long as it's just the one ingredient of the fruits and vegetables. Make sure to get your dairy in. Try to go for one percent or low fat milk. And then also remembering any overly sugary drinks that you consume, switch them over for sparkling waters, still water, anything that doesn't have all that added sugar.
These changes sound small, but they can be super intimidating. So do you have any tips for listeners that are nervous about making those changes?
Definitely don't be nervous about making those changes. You don't have to make, large changes all at once. You could just start with something small, find an easy recipe that, speaks to you that doesn't have a whole lot of ingredients. Honestly, I was thinking about it this morning.
I was thinking about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, something simple that everybody eats. Think about those three ingredients, bread, peanut butter, and jelly. So the bread, you wanna choose whole grain, high fiber bread. Think about the peanut butter.
Choose the more natural peanut butter. That's just one ingredient. Peanuts or just peanuts and salt. And then instead of jelly, maybe you could do a fruit preserve or, spread some whole fruit onto the peanut butter.
Okay. Now, Patricia, I can't promise you I'm gonna change overnight, but I do promise you, the next time I go to the grocery store, I wanna try to be a little bit more mindful of the things that I'm getting, with, concerning heart health. But thank you so much, Patricia, for all of your help. We're gonna try to get better.
We'll try.
You can catch this health minute and others at our website, wgts919.com, and a special thanks to Adventist HealthCare for sponsoring today's Health Minute.
