Shopping blind: how do you choose healthfully when there's no nutritional information?

Vegetarian Times, March, 1996 by Suzanne Havala

WHO HASN'T NOTICED fellow shoppers in the checkout line and silently evaluated what they are buying? Perhaps you've spotted an interesting new product in someone's cart and thought, "I always wondered who bought that."

But what I also notice in the grocery store is the look of confusion and frustration on so many faces. I know that many people want to make wise choices when they shop. But even avid label readers are foiled by many items that list ingredients only, or have no labels at all. These are common in the deli and bakery sections.

Supermarkets are devoting more and more space to deli and bakery items, featuring all sorts of prepared foods that are ready to eat or just need to be heated. Beautiful salads, sandwiches, fresh pizzas and pasta dishes, rolls, breads and other bakery items pack this place. And few have nutrition labels.

These sections don't have to foil your good eating intentions. With a few hints and shopping strategies, you can make wise choices from among their offerings. Sure, this area is inhabited by doughnuts and pastries and Gouda and Brie. But there are some great low-fat and healthy choices tucked into every nook and cranny. And for (almost) every fat-laden coffee cake and fiberless gelatin mold, there's a much better choice just waiting to be discovered. Let's take a look at the choices here and see where the best ones are hiding.

BREAD AND BAKED GOODS

IF YOU HAVE a hankering for fudge brownies, pies, cakes, cookies, Danish pastry, doughnuts, cinnamon rolls or sticky buns, you've arrived. If you had something else in mind, don't give up. This is also where the muffins, bagels and a huge variety of rolls and breads are found. Some of the packaged breads have nutrition labeling on their plastic bread bags; others do not. Most of the bakery items have no nutrition labeling.

Not to worry. There are some ways to improvise and use whatever information is available in order to make choices. For instance, if packages don't list nutrition information, they may give an ingredient listing, and we can use that.

I've seen the ingredients for doughnuts and croissants listed on a card attached to the bakery shelf, and I've found bagel ingredients listed, along with the flavor of the bagel, on the signs on the bagel bins themselves. I've also found that store personnel can be very helpful. Ask if there is recipe information you can look at, or ask to see the box that the item arrived in, if it was baked off-site, and see if it lists the ingredients.

The ingredients on the label are listed in their order of predominance in the product. In the absence of nutrition information on labels, you can often make a fairly accurate estimation of the nutritional merit of an item by knowing what it is made of. Here's an example:

Glaxed Doughnut

Ingredients: Enriched bleached flour, water, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, high-fructose corn syrup.

Cinnamon-Raisin Bagel

Ingredients: High-gluten flour, water, raisins, white sugar, malted barley flour, salt, yeast.

No nutrition information for either of these two items? Look at their ingredients. Both are made from flour and water, and both contain sugar. So far, they're similar. But the bagel also contains raisins--more raisins than sugar, judging by the order of c the ingredients. Raisins are loaded with fiber and iron. Furthermore, the bagel is fat-free. The bagel can be a great substitute for a sweeter, fattier breakfast bread or pastry. Better yet: Look for a bagel made with whole grain flour.

HELPFUL HINT: Shopping for muffins but find there's no nutrition information on the label? Here's another way to help you choose wisely. Buy just one. Take it home and set it on a napkin for a few minutes, then pick up the muffin. Check out the napkin. If there's a greasy spot where the muffin was sitting, you can be reasonably sure that it's very high in fat.

Do you find you get tired of the same old loaf of bread? You can build a much more interesting sandwich by using different breads. There are so many possibilities: onion rolls, pumpernickel and sourdough breads, light and dark rye, Kaiser rolls, French bread, crusty hard rolls; the list goes on. There are just as many or more low-fat breads to choose from as there are high-fat ones, and some even contain whole grain flours. To find the healthier choices, compare ingredients. Here's an example:

Cheese Bread

Ingredients: Enriched bleached flour, water, cheddar cheese, yeast, high-fructose corn syrup, salt, hydrogenated soybean oil, whey.

Marble Rye Bread

Ingredients: Enriched bleached flour, water, rye meal, rye flour, yeast, caraway, wheat gluten, salt, malt, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, sugar.

Flour and water are the first two ingredients in both. But the third ingredient in the cheese bread is high-fat cheddar cheese. (This bread is even greasy to the touch.) The rye bread is made, in part, with whole grain flour. And although it contains some fat, the amount is very small. The oil is listed after the salt and the malt, both of which you might guess are present in very small amounts. So in the rye bread, the fat is a very minor ingredient. It's a great choice. It's low in fat, made with some whole grain flour, and is beautiful to look at and delicious.