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I’ve been wanting to put together a guide for people on how to eat cleaner without any knowledge or effort in the nutritional field.

I understand that many people don’t want to read the ingredient list on a food item, they don’t know what all the certification stamps on it mean, and they don’t know what all these buzz words like ‘organic,’ ‘grass-fed,’ ‘pasture-raised,’ and ‘fair trade’ mean.

I can sympathize with you for not caring to keep up with all that stuff. Luckily, that’s what I like to do. I know, it’s an interesting hobby. But regardless, I’ve put together a little guide here on how to navigate the world of food when you’re trying to eat clean but don’t have the time or interest to do all the research.

Maybe it’s for your family, maybe it’s just for you. Whatever the case, you’ll be able to leave here knowing exactly what matters to look at when picking out your groceries or eating out. It’s easier than you can believe:

Pick Options with Less Ingredients

This rule is always going to serve you well because it removes the complication from choosing wisely.

When you pick foods with shorter ingredient lists, you avoid all kinds of extra junk like unnecessary sweeteners, preservatives, stabilizers, artificial flavors and colors, and so on. This is not meant to be a perfect rule but its an excellent place to start when you remind yourself to consistently pick the shortest list. 

Many food products you find today will have what I like to call “an essay” written for the ingredient section. It’s frankly ridiculous how much stuff some of these companies throw into their food all to make it look, taste, and feel a certain way. It’s overly scientific when food is meant to be simple. Avoid the essays, stick to ingredients that are easily readable and make sense being there.

Avoid Vegan Options

This may bother some people but the truth is, vegan products typically sacrifice quality to meet the expectations of the customer.

The most common things I see in vegan foods are that industrial seed oils and multiple added sugars dominate this industry in each food item.

When they need to replace butter in a recipe, they will typically load it up with canola, soybean, or vegetable oil (seed oils) to replace the original fat. When they need to amp up the flavor from losing animal products in the recipe, they’ll add a lot more sugar to make it more enticing.

I often see cane sugar as the first or second ingredient in products like vegan muffins or yogurts and considering that means it’s the most prevalent ingredient in that item, that’s nasty.

Being vegan should not cost you your health. This is something I wish I knew earlier when I was vegan. At least I know now and can try to steer people in a good direction. 

Avoid Foods with Multiple Sweeteners

Sugar is probably the #1 ingredient to minimize if you were to start anywhere.

Lots of foods today not only have added sugar to them, but they have multiple forms of sweeteners in them.

Sugar, cane sugar, sucralose, stevia, monkfruit, erithrytol, glucose syrup, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, honey, dates, sorbitol, and so on. A food product really doesn’t need to have more than 1 or 2 of these. 

The more of these sweeteners you see on the label, the lower quality the product is overall. They’re sacrificing the quality and sneaking sugar into it so you’ll love it and come back for more. The problem with this is that you’ll end up feeling it.

Not to mention, the more sweeteners are used in your food, the less they can keep track of the true amount of sugar it contains. There are many products that will claim they didn’t add any sugar themselves but they will use something like an apple juice concentrate for example, which will not always get counted in the total and added sugar labels accurately.

There are a lot of foods I can’t eat the way I used to and that’s really just a testament to how much I’ve adapted my diet over the years. I eat way less carbs and way less sugar than before and my body loves me for doing it.

Now, when I eat a cupcake, drink a chocolate milk, or eat a couple cookies, I get the red alert from my body to cut it out because I start feeling like crap. Back in the day, this type of behavior would be just a snack that I’d enjoy a couple times a day. How times have changed for me.

Pick Options that are More Plain

This one sounds harder than it actually is, in my opinion.

A great example of how to go about doing this is with yogurt. When I was younger, I loved eating flavored yogurts like vanilla, banana, and later even lemon, because my Dad and I liked those.

As I got older and started to care more about what I ate, I realized basically every yogurt is flavored with the infamous “natural flavors” which we have no way of knowing what that even means because it’s not regulated.

When eating a banana yogurt, the ingredients should include ‘banana’ or ‘banana puree’ and honestly should not even need natural or artificial flavors. As I’ve been emphasizing, shorter ingredient lists are always better. They contain more of the stuff you do want with less fillers and junk. The things they use will also be clearer because there’s less room for unnecessary and artificial things in there.

So, when you pick foods that are plain, you ensure there are less ingredients. I now buy plain yogurt instead of flavored.

Even if you don’t want to eat things plain, its very easy to enhance it yourself with real food. I used to drizzle some honey into my yogurt when I wanted more flavor. Now I like to pour some granola in or drop some berries in.

Its very easy to eat this way and now you’ve maximized the nutrition of your food while minimizing the artificial ingredients you don’t need. 

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