Healthy Shopping & Healthy Cooking with Akea

Healthy Shopping with Akea
Read labels.
When shopping for groceries, ask yourself: Is this something people in the Longevity Hot Spots would eat? Yes if it’s locally grown produce and meats—no chemicals, processing, or preservatives.
Keep to the perimeter of the grocery store, where the fresh produce tends to be. Avoid the interior aisles, where the chips and other junk foods tend to be.
On the interior aisles, avoid the UFOs—unidentified food objects. You’ll know them when you see ingredients that are artificial, unrecognizable and unpronounceable.
When purchasing fruits and vegetables, always look for labels such as Local, Organic, and No GMO (genetic modified organisms).
If you can't find fresh produce, your second choice should be frozen fruits and vegetables. Canned foods are lower in nutrients and higher in sodium.
Look for free-range, organic beef and poultry products. Levels of saturated fats and harmful chemicals should be much lower than in the products of industrial-farmed animals.
Choose deep-water, wild-caught ocean fish, which is likely to have lower levels of PCBs, dioxin, and other toxic, cancer-causing chemicals. Avoid farm-raised fish.
Avoid having tuna more than twice a month. It can be high in mercury. Choose tuna caught by the pole-and-line method. It’s friendlier to dolphins and sharks.
When buying breads, choose 100 percent whole grain, rather than white breads made with refined flours. Avoid the high-fat, high-calorie pastries altogether.
Avoid high-fat and high-sugar snacks. Choose whole-grain crackers or baked snacks.
Try to buy nuts in their shells, since the oils in pre-shelled nuts go rancid quickly. Children love cracking the shells open, so it’s a great way to eat nuts.
Choose water, juice, herbal tea, and organic fair trade coffee over sugary soft drinks and diet drinks, which contain harmful chemicals.
“Sugar-free” on the label only refers to sucrose or table sugar. Other sugars to watch for are fructose, maltose, lactose, glucose, dextrose, corn-syrup solids, corn sweeteners, and hydrolyzed corn starch.
Look for products with healthier sweeteners, such as agave, stevia, or evaporated cane juice. Try sweetening your coffee and tea with raw honey instead of table sugar.
If you want to use salt in cooking, use sea salt rather than refined table salt, as it should contain some beneficial minerals. Still, use it sparingly.
When buying soaps, lotions, cleaners, and detergents, look for unscented products. Items with fragrances may contain potentially harmful chemicals.
Avoid antibacterial soaps with the chemicals triclosan and triclocarban. They’re thought to affect reproductive hormones and the nervous system, and might contribute to the evolution of antibacterial-resistant superbugs.

Healthy Cooking with Akea
Steam or slow-roast vegetables. Or eat them raw so as to preserve vitamins, minerals, and enzymes.
Avoid burning or charring meat. You can create pro-aging free radicals and carcinogenic heterocyclic aromatic amines (HAAs).
Use fresh herbs, garlic, lemon, and spices such turmeric liberally in your food preparation for flavor—rather than salt.
Try to consume foods that are produced locally to insure they are as fresh as possible.
Avoid frying. It damages oils and can make them unhealthy. Try sweating onions in olive oil in a heavy-based pan instead.
If pan-searing or frying, use oils with a very high smoke point, such as coconut, grape seed, or avocado oils. These oils are more stable higher temperature than canola, corn, or even olive oil.
Cook orange and red vegetables such as sweet potatoes and red bell peppers in olive oil. You’ll help make the anti-cancer carotenoids in them more bioavailable in your body.
Use meat and dairy products to flavor vegetable dishes, rather than using them as the main feature of the dish.