What I Learned from Suzanne Somers

I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I’ve taken advice from Suzanne Somers. Yes, that Suzanne Sommers.

Years ago, I saw her doing a television interview and she made a valid point about grocery shopping. If you think about the kinds of food we are encourage to eat: the lean meats, fish, and fresh produce, all of those items get heavy pretty quickly. And where can you find them? In the horse shoe around the edges of the grocery store. It’s the processed crap: junk food, crackers, cake, they’re pretty darned light weight and serve as filler for all those aisles. Yes, I know there are exceptions to this rule — beans and whole grains hang out on the mid-store shelves too. And juice may be heavy, but it hangs out on shelves and lacks the fiber of the actual fruit.

So that’s my rule of thumb when grocery shopping. Suzanne and I aren’t alone.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! recently interviewed Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, about food culture and the food industry. He probably wasn’t watching Suzanne Somer’s being interviewed a decade ago, but he too recommends shopping the edges of the grocery store.

And if you look at the layout of the average supermarket, the fresh whole foods are always on the edge. So you get produce and meat and fish and dairy products. And those are the foods that, you know, your grandmother would recognize as foods. They haven’t changed that much. All the processed foods, the really bad stuff that is going to get you in trouble with all the refined grain and the additives and the high-fructose corn syrup, those are all in the middle. And so, if you stay out of the middle and get most of your food on the edges, you’re going to do a lot better.

The basic takeaway from his interview :

don’t eat any food that’s incapable of rotting. If the food can’t rot eventually, there’s something wrong. . .

Chips and cake mix will sit seemingly indefinitely in your kitchen cabinet, but berries get furry, and greens start melting down if left uneaten in your refrigerator.

So the next time you’re at the grocery store, think about the real estate of your purchases.

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