Grocery Shopping on a Special Diet: Impulse Buys, Yogurt, and Drinks

Welcome to a new series on life on the autism spectrum.  I've been doing grocery shopping for nearly a decade, and as my diet has needed to change for health reasons, I've noticed I have less and less of the grocery store actually available to me.  As a citizen of the United States, I have a truly staggering number of food options available to me, but if I want to function, most of them are actually illusions.  

I'd like to explore this a bit.  I'll be going aisle by aisle, probably about two aisles a week.  There are 14 aisles plus the bakery, deli, and fruits/vegetables sections, so there's plenty to talk about here.  

The store I typically go to is a hypermarket, which is to say that it is both a massive grocery store and a department store combined into a one-stop-shopping experience.  I'll be focusing on the grocery store section, since this is about food.  

Speaking of food, I should also establish my consumption limitations.  I have an allergy to casein (a protein in dairy).  Which is to say, if I drank a glass of milk, I would go from neutral-pleasant mood to angry and depressed in the span of about 30 minutes.  So most dairy products except for butter are off limits.  

I also try to adhere to a low-sugar diet, and avoid ultra-processed foods in favor of whole grains.  I try to avoid food coloring.  I try to avoid high histamine foods. Lastly, I'm a conditional vegetarian.  Unless I'm quite convinced (usually by way of independently verified labels) that the animals I'm eating were treated like creatures and not objects, I don't eat meat.  

When you enter the store, the first thing they try to do is sell you extra stuff you didn't come for.  Also, because it's 2020 and there's the coronavirus and no vaccine yet, please note the very first display: masks, including child-sized ones.  

I have to pass on the chips.  I'll eat them sometimes but they're definitely ultra-processed junk food: no nutritional content at all.  You'll see this is a major trend, and also that there's literally snack foods everywhere, not just here in the impulse purchase area.

Pop Tarts.  Supposedly a breakfast food.  Ever looked at the sugar content?  I'd rather have a donut for that amount of calories and sugar.  It'd have less food coloring, too.  Ice cream cones behind the Pop Tarts.  I like ice cream but between the dairy and the sugar, it doesn't like me.  

More chips, plus adult beverages.  I guess they hope you'll want to load up on empty calories?  I'm not making Mexican food this week though, so no ultra-processed tortilla chips.  And definitely no beer.  If I'm going to have empty calories, I want them to taste good.   

More chips, though these are more tempting.  Pringles, like every other type of chip, is definitely ultra-processed.  Honestly, they're like potato sawdust mixed with sugar and salt, and then shaped into a chip form.  The result is delicious, but quite bad for you.

Behind it is salad dressing, which is a way people destroy the nutritiousness of salads...  

I don't have specific complaints against bottled water, save that you really need to know what PH it is before putting it in your mouth.  Yeah, I know, it's water, it should be 7, but that's actually not how it is.  This particular water is most likely 6.5, so slightly acidic.  On a personal note, screw Nestle for profiteering off Michigan's water while paying basically nothing for it.  

Behind the water, Chex mix (another ultraprocessed snack), marshmallows (sugar bombs!), and paper towels.  

So those are the impulse purchases and sales as you walk down to the end of the store.  Almost entirely inedible in terms of health and sugar content. But they hope you'll forget that and buy them anyway, because look! They're right there and on sale!

When I shop I always start at the last aisle and work my way forward.  It just seems the most efficient to me.  And hence: aisle 14.  

Yogurt, juice, coffee, tea, and hot cocoa.  

To my great annoyance, juice is not healthy.  It's sugar water with vitamin C.  The reason fruit is healthy is not just the vitamins, but also because of the fiber.  Y'know, the stuff they strain out to get the juice.  So what you have here is sugar water, sometimes with extra sugar, food coloring, and flavorings.  

I dislike coffee, but at least it's not flatly unhealthy.  Unless it's flavored and full of sugar...  

Tea bags and hot cocoa.  A pretty small selection, to be honest, but fortunately I know better places to shop for tea.  I like tea and hot cocoa, but the latter tends to be chocked full of sugar.  At present, I have too much of the former so I've banned myself from buying more tea until I've reduced the levels of my tea collection at home.  

The yogurt section.  Yogurt is supposed to be healthy because of the protein and fermentation process.  It can help rebuild your gut with good bacteria.  Since autistic people often lack healthy guts, this would seem to be a good food choice.  Most yogurt is made with cow dairy, but let's have a look at a random yogurt... 

Look at the sugar content! 19 grams of sugar, or basically an entire day's worth of sugar for me.  But it's cheesecake flavored, surely a nice plain strawberry yogurt wouldn't be so bad...

OH COME ON.  Still 19 grams of sugar?!

The minimal but at least slightly existent nondairy yogurt section. Mostly oat products (not gluten-free, notably) and almond or coconut milk products.  Frustratingly, these nondairy products are typically lacking in protein content.  But they do, at least, still have the fermentation process.  

However, these flavored nondairy yogurt cups are just as full of sugar as the regular stuff.  Meaning, they're no good unless you buy the giant unsweetened container and add your own flavoring. Which defeats the convenience and portability of yogurt, in my opinion...

The refrigerated "quick desserts and baked goods" section.  There's everything from single serve puddings and creme brulees to cookie dough and cinnamon buns.  Sugar, sugar, sugar...  

The only notable thing I regularly acquire here is a specific brand of premade pie crust.  It doesn't use lard, and is also twice as expensive as any other pie crust available.  That said?  Making pie crusts sucks.  The most healthy option would be to make my own using fine ground whole grain flour, but I have a marked dislike for kneading butter into flour.  So most of the time I buy these crusts rather than make my own.  

The butter section is over complicated but at least it's all safe for me to eat. 

Some people with dairy allergies can't do butter, which makes margarine and other options more valuable.  There's also ghee, which has had the proteins removed... but we'll see more of that later in the baking aisle.

The entire cream cheese section is right out. Even if it wasn't dairy, it's full of sugar.  

And that's the first installment of this trip through the grocery store.  Let me know what you think.  I'd originally envisioned doing this grocery store trip in a single post, but it took me so many pictures to just get through the first few aisles that I realized no one would want to read such a long post.  

Next week: the baking aisle and the rest of the dairy section!