Eating healthier while eating out and knowing how to choose the most healthy foods at the grocery store just became a sure thing in the Brazos Valley!

We know it's not easy to understand the best dietary choices you should make for your health each day. We also know that applying important nutrition lessons is even more difficult once you get to the supermarket or restaurant. That's why we developed the Best Bets Program.

Best Bets is the innovative program created by St. Joseph Regional Health Center in conjunction with registered dietitian Linda Kapusniak that will help you find the most heart healthy foods at your favorite restaurants, as well as provide you with practical, easy-to-follow tips that can make choosing healthful, nutrient-rich food at the grocery store a cinch!

Best Bets At the Restaurant

The National Restaurant Association estimates that the average American eats approximately four to five meals a week outside the home. Hence, eating out is no longer special occasion, but part of a busy lifestyle and needs to be treated accordingly.

As a nutrition counselor, it became evident that many of the patients being referred to me by their physician for high cholesterol and obesity were getting a significant amount of fat and calories in their diet from the foods they were choosing at restaurants. I also learned in many cases, the reason for this was often due to the fact that many folks simply lacked the knowledge and skills to make lower fat selections.

Best Bets program was designed to educate diners about the variety of healthy selections available at man area restaurants and make ordering these items as simple as possible.

To determine which menu items to consider Best Bets, we interviewed the chefs and managers at each of the participating restaurants. We asked how foods were prepared, looked at recipes when available, and asked if foods could be modified in certain ways to lower the fat and calorie content. The Best Bet selections are those foods deemed the most heart healthy at that particular restaurant.

In an effort to make this information available to the public, participating restaurants have used the following means

• Placed a heart with the St. Joseph logo on the menu by the item
• Offer a special St. Joseph Best Bets menu
• Have a sign board listing the Best Bets items

Best Bets At the Grocery Store

Food manufacturers are using various tricks and sneaky wording to fool consumers into buying products that falsely promise health benefits. And with thousands of new food products hitting the grocery store shelves every year, shopping for the most healthy foods can become nothing more than a guessing game.

Take tea for example. Is green better than black tea? Should you choose tea with or without caffeine? Is caffeine harmful? Is one brand of tea superior over another? Does tea from the bottle offer the same health benefits as tea from the bag? If your buying unsweetened tea, should you be concerned about the sugar substitute?

Questions such as these and the desire to provide shoppers with the knowledge and tools to make the most healthy choices when shopping is the reason we expanded our Best Bets program into the grocery store.

Earlier this year we teamed up with The Kroger Center in Bryan to provide shoppers with ways to more easily identify the most healthy foods. These are food that research has shown to have the power to cut your chances of developing a number of life threatening diseases.

To accomplish this goal we have developed educational grocery store tours, and are using shelf tags (the SJ heart symbol) to point out worthy products.

The Best Bets grocery store tour is a 1.5 hour isle-by-isle walk through Kroger to provide a hands on training and to teach the basics of healthy shopping. The goal of the tour is to take the latest nutrition science headlines and translate them into meaningful information you can use in your daily life.

During a tour, participants learn how to decipher food labels and health claims. Products are compared, and participants have a chance to see if their product selections hold true. New food products are also sampled, and a shopping guide is provided at the end of the tour which summarizes the tour highlights and provides recommendations for healthy eating.

Best Bets shelf tags are another way to guide shoppers in their selections. The SJ heart logo is now being placed on foods with superior nutritional benefit with an adjacent tag telling what the benefit is.

So when you are standing in the tea isle wondering what the best choice is, you will see one of our hearts placed on a box of green tea bags with a tag next to it stating “Contains more disease fighting compounds that bottled tea”. That's because bottle teas lose some of its flavonoids during the bottling process. It is the flavonoids that provide the disease fighting benefits of tea.

For more information on healthy food selections log onto Healthy Shopping Tips.

To register for one of our upcoming grocery store tours contact St. Joseph Healthy Communities. At 979-731-1231. Class size is limited, so be sure to register today!