The Clean Eating Grocery Store Manual: 9 Tips to Help You Know Which Foods to Buy (and Which Ones to Avoid)
In a YouTube clip entitled “How I Do My Grocery Shopping,” I was both delighted and somewhat surprised to discover that Shark Tank’s Mr. Wonderful, aka Kevin O’Leary, the financial and social media mogul, goes grocery shopping twice a week for his family.
I assumed he’d delegate grocery shopping to his assistant. But he doesn’t.
O’Leary uses Instacart to have groceries delivered to his home, but he also physically goes into the grocery store and doesn’t just buy food for his family; he also reads food ingredients before putting them in his cart.
“I don’t buy any products with cane sugar in them,” says O’Leary.
He continues: “That’s just pure suicide. That is absolute poison.”
Despite O’Leary’s outlandish assessment of cane sugar, which I try to avoid at all costs as well, if one of the most widely recognized business personalities of our time sees grocery shopping and reading food ingredients as too important to delegate to someone else, it serves as a wake-up call for the rest of us to start getting serious about reading food labels.
But where should you start?
Should I Eat This? The Most Important Factor to Consider
It’s not carbs. It’s not protein. It’s not even calories.
The most important factor when deciding whether you should eat something is the ingredients.
Prioritizing food products with first-in-class ingredients is the fast route to better health.
But here’s the problem: most people don’t know what most food ingredients mean on a label. Making matters worse is the deceptive marketing at play with food companies.
I’ve done the work for you, so let me give you a rough, quick, and easy framework you can take with you the next time you go to the grocery store or order groceries through an app.
9 Tips to Help You Know Which Foods to Buy (and Which Ones to Avoid).
Instead of making this post read like a scientific textbook, let me give you nine simple pointers.
Look at the first ingredient. The first ingredient listed means it has the highest quantity in the food compared to all the other ingredients listed. It’s crucial to know what it is ― and what it means.
The fewer ingredients, the better. Usually, the fewer total ingredients, the better. I hear health influencers boasting about eating only single-ingredient foods. While it’s optimal to eat only single-ingredient foods, it’s not always possible nor necessary. Give or take, focus on foods with 1–5 ingredients in them. Less is better. If you see a food product with a long list of ingredients, that’s a bad sign. It’s almost always loaded with junk.
Don’t go to the grocery store alone — use an app. Use an app to help you decide whether a food product is healthy or not. After scanning a food product at the store, the app will quickly recommend or not recommend a product, and tell you why. Lots of people like the Yuka app, but I use the BobbyApproved app. It’s been a life-changing app for me, which has taught me a ton about nutrition and how to read food ingredients.
After scanning any food or drink products at the store (and even beauty products and kitchen cookware), the app provides a green light, yellow light, and red light score, encouraging you to buy, be cautious, or avoid. I know it’s an overused expression, but the app truly is a “game-changer.” I’ve also enjoyed using the app from the Environmental Working Group.Look for numbers and colors in the ingredients. AKA artificial food dyes. Examples are: Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Blue 1, and so on. You’ll find it in many snacks, and even in items like pickles, cereal, and soda. There are no nutritional benefits from these dyes. It just makes the product look prettier. They are, however, harmful to your health, so avoid them.
Can you pronounce the names of the ingredients? If you can pronounce all of the ingredients, good sign. If you can’t easily pronounce all of the ingredients, bad sign. I’ll go further: if the product has even one ingredient that you can’t pronounce, it’s likely unhealthy.
Avoid “Natural Flavors.” “Natural” flavors are misleading. They are sometimes packaged on a label as “natural” or “flavor.” They are commonly found in food and drink. While artificial flavor sounds bad to the ear because of the word “artificial,” natural does not mean natural at all: natural flavors are a mix of chemicals created by flavorists in labs that mimic the taste of food. They can contain over 100 chemicals, and by law, food companies are not required to tell you what those chemicals are, so you can’t be entirely sure what you’re putting in your body. Definitely not good for those of you with allergies or serious dietary restrictions.
Avoid most ultra-processed foods. Some people quickly bemoan, “Stop eating processed foods.” This statement lacks the nuance to be helpful. Some processed foods are healthy for you. Processed foods mean the food composition has changed from its original state. For example, an apple is an unprocessed food. But after you slice it (altering it from its original state), it’s now processed. Are you saying it’s unhealthy to eat sliced apples? Nonsense. But fruit snacks with apple flavor? That’s an ultra-processed food, the kind of food you want to avoid. Lane Norton provides a helpful X (formerly Twitter) thread on the difference between unprocessed, processed, and ultra-processed foods.
Know the difference between the Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen when buying produce. This is a list released by the Environmental Working Group every year that tells you about the pesticide residue levels in your produce. My takeaway from the list is that it shows me which produce is safe to buy non-organic and which produce I should buy organic. Strawberries and spinach, for example, are usually at the top of the “Dirty Dozen” list every year, meaning you should always buy those organic. You can view the list for 2025 here.
Avoid Seed Oils. The debates online about seed oils are endless. Most say you should avoid them. Others say they aren’t harmful — and they have the studies to prove it. I’m in the first camp. Examples of seed oils are sunflower oil, canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, etc. I believe they are bad for you because they are highly processed. They’re also high in omega-6 fatty acids, and, when consumed in excess, can cause inflammation. And chronic inflammation is linked to all kinds of health issues. Do not use seed oils. Instead, opt for good cooking oils like extra-virgin olive oil, avocado oil, ghee, and beef tallow.
Your health will improve if you prioritize foods with clean ingredients. Use the advice above to find those foods.