Week Five : House Products – Don’t Take it Home!

Dr Shinae’s tips for reducing your daily chemical exposure

Hello again beautiful people!

Last week I talked about shopping in general and sticking to the fresh stuff but this week I want to give you some tips on how to make smarter decisions when shopping.

We can break this down in to food, health products and cleaning products but let’s just focus on food today as I cover specific products in a few weeks.

So a huge tip for reducing your chemical exposure is to not bring these items into your house in the first place. I would highly recommend not even entering a super market but sourcing from a good local butcher and fresh food grocer or the markets. Not to mention you are supporting local business and helping our economy. My local butcher in Scarborough is Jeremy’s Butcher and they are free range and gluten free so that’s a win for me. If you do need to shop at the supermarket keep these few things in mind:

1. Shop around the edges (see last weeks blog for more info).
2. Don’t buy anything with packaging (reduces preservative and sugar exposure but also saves the environment).
3. If you do need packaged goods, read the label, if you don’t know all the words on the ingredients list then put it back and try find a better alternative.
4. Look at the best before date. If it’s greater than 3 months then my best bet is it’s preserved (exclusion to this is pickling and salt preserved).
5. Only buy what you need for the week. If you are just buying these things to have in the cupboard then you need to reassess your habits. We all have shops close by these days and in most case these will be open until 9pm. If you are buying things for just in case you will probably see them and eat unnecessarily so they don’t go to waste or they will just go off and be stored for a few years passed their used by date.

STORY: I helped my mum a few years back clean out her pantry and she had spices in there from BEFORE I WAS BORN! That’s the expiry date too, she hadn’t even touched them, they were just shoved to the back for “one day”!

I have also found that having a Thermomix allows me to make things fresh from basic ingredients and pantry staples. ‘Thermy’ really does help you reduce your chemical load massively and we can discuss this further next week.

Remember small changes regularly make a big impact. Often changing too much too soon can be overwhelming, therefore we can fall back into old habits. I’d recommend changing one thing every couple of weeks and get into a good habit of implementing one thing into you and your family’s life before trying to change something else.

Bye for now
Dr Shinae
Chiropractor