Welcome back to my autism-aware shopping trip through the grocery store. Week by week, I'm showing you what the store sells, prune down the selection to what's safe for me (because autistic people can have very sensitive systems) and point out various gotchas the store tries to make you buy stuff you didn't come for.
As a reminder, I shop with the following conditions in mind:
- dairy-free
- low sugar
- avoid ultraprocessed junk
- avoid food coloring
- conditional vegetarianism
- avoid high histamine foods
- awareness of gluten-free options and sugar-free options
Last week we found sugar bombs in our "healthy" granola bars and snacks laced through our soup. Our crackers also bled into cookies, and even the sugar-free varieties were bad news.
It's time to delve into the second blatant snack aisle. A truly dizzying variety of chips await!
I actually had a significant amount of trouble figuring out what the themes for each section were for the chips aisle. Typically foods of a type are shoved together so you can find what you're looking for, but in the chips aisle it wasn't quite so clear. Perhaps that's on purpose, to make you wander the aisle more to find what you were looking for...
At any rate, here's the first clear section. Y'know how people like chips, and also sometimes like popcorn? This is what happens when you combine those. The result is actually surprisingly good, or at least I liked the Popcorners versions. Notable also is the cauliflower tortilla chips there, which are a gluten-free option for folks that deeply miss chips. I've never had them, sadly.
Popcorn chips continues into veggie chips and supposedly healthier options. Protip: these may have less oil or more fiber, but they are still ultraprocessed foods. Opt for an apple if you want a snack that won't silently poison you.
We now hop from "healthy" to "convenience." Bulk boxes of both chips and cookies, attractive to moms on the go and also portion-conscientious-but-not-environment-conscientious people. Each of those small pouches is plastic, so that adds up really fast.
The convenience section turns into the convenience popcorn section. Not the "make it yourself" type yet, just the big grab bags. For those counting, this is the second popcorn section, we had the first with the popcorn chips earlier.
Further down the way, we have our meaty snacks. Jerky from a dozen brands, and at least seven different animal species. Beef and pork are by far the most common, but turkey, chicken, fish, venison, and bison also feature here. At the lower left, snack sticks by the brand Chomps, which are Certified Humane (and thus, safe for me to consume). I actually didn't know these existed here until I perused this aisle carefully.
And now, the cook-it-yourself popcorn, which makes this Popcorn the Third. I count at least six brands and various levels of butter and salt. There's also the "provide your own butter and salt" options at the very bottom, which is the healthiest option in a fairly unhealthy snack. Humans don't actually digest corn very well, by the way. It also doesn't contain much by way of nutrition.
After Popcorn the Third we're back into ultraprocessed junk. Snack mixes (including sweet ones that I guess didn't make it into the granola snack mixes and candy section?), and Combos.
And we cap off this side of the aisle with tube chips. They all come in cardboard tubes rather than plastic bags. That's... better? Maybe? Except I guess the Stax come in plastic tubes, which is worse. Bah.
On the other side of the aisle, more convenience packs for the environmentally oblivious. Lots of variety, though!
Pretzels. I really hate pretzels, actually. Not much to say about these except that if you like them, you definitely have options.
Tortilla chips, plus salsa and nacho cheese. You may have your tortilla chips in triangles, strips, big circles, small circles, and shaped scoops. Is the absurdity of USian snacking habits striking you yet?
Kettle cooked chips. This is a particular frying process that turns out a particularly tasty chip. Note the dizzying variety of flavors. This is the US, after all.
And at last, we hit what USians typically imagine when "chips" is mentioned. Potato chips, with ripples or not. Barbecue, sour cream and onion, salt and vinegar, or original, it's all here.
And lastly, in case you weren't satisfied with the size of all these bags... the party section. Complete with party-sized salsas and nacho cheeses. A much more limited selection (and some of everything to boot), but the bag is large enough to give you several days' worth of nutritionally-deficient calories.
Juice the Second (remember the refrigerated stuff in the first post?), powdered additives for your water, and, well, water. And products thereof.
We start off with bottled water. Hey, remember how the PH (how acidic or basic) of bottled water varies dramatically? Be careful with your teeth when you buy this stuff. Also, all those plastic bottles add up really fast, recyclable or no.
More bottled water, with varying PHs and bottle designs. At the top where you can't see very well, there's actually a juicebox-like design. I truly have no idea whether it's better for the environment, but at least one brand opines that it is, I guess.
Canned, carbonated, and flavored water. Beware the flavoring, it can come with a boatload of sugar.
Impulse buy cap in the middle of the aisle, connecting this aisle to the pop aisle. The sale is pretty good, at least if you want these products.
We were promised powdered drinks, and here they are. Lemonade in powder form, various flavor additives, Kool-Aid, and hyper-concentrated liquids to color and flavor your water. Artificial colors run rampant in this section, and so do sweeteners. I have thankfully reached a point in my life where I'm pretty content just drinking water without extra flavor, so I typically give this whole section a miss. It's a huge industry, though, as you can see.
It begins! We move from flavored "sports water" (ie: "we put salt in this and covered the ick factor with sweeteners and flavoring!") to actual flavored drinks. More on the latter later, but a reminder to beware of those sweeteners and flavorings... and also the artificial colors.
The "sports water" becomes Gatorade and similar ideas. Salted sweet beverages that may hydrate and refresh you, but at the cost of filling you with garbage artificial food coloring and possibly sugar.
Let's have a look at one of these zero sugar options...
I'll give them credit for coloring with vegetable juice, but to my complete lack of surprise, their sweetener is sucralose. That's a big NOPE from me.
Remember how this was the juice aisle? We start that business with vegetable juice. Now, you might recall that juice is a deceptive sugar-bomb from Juice the First, back in the very first post of this series.
But surely vegetable juice is different, right? Vegetables aren't as sweet, and they're more full of vitamins and minerals.
Wellll, prepare to be disappointed. This wasn't a great picture but that's 7 grams of sugar in an 8 ounce serving. They had to sweeten this up to make it tolerable. (Also, I've tried vegetable juice and was unimpressed regardless of the sugar content, but that's a personal preference.)
Tomato juice is about the same deal. I will grant you the calorie count is pretty low, but that 6 grams of sugar for an 8 ounce glass is definitely not okay. Remember, a whole day's serving of sugar is 15 grams. Two glasses of this and you're basically done for the day.
Let's compare to the flavored waters, though! Vitamin Water sounds healthy, right? Maybe not, with those 26 grams of sugar in one single-serve bottle.
Something a bit less deceptive? Seems promising at first, with zero calories and zero carbs and sugars, but check what it's sweetened with: sucralose. That's a nope.
We get some relief from the disappointment train of this whole aisle with Sobewater, which has opted to sweeten its product with stevia. The nutritional benefits are still minimal, but at least this product isn't going to quietly kill you when you drink it. It's been colored with beta carotene, too, which you'll know as the same substance that gives carrots their orange color.
Also less disappointing, Bai appears to be trying to reduce their poisonous impact while still providing a tasty beverage. Erythritol (a sugar alcohol) and stevia sweeten this lemonade, and it's colored with vegetable juice. I've seen worse.
After the veggie juice comes more typical juices. You've got your grape and your cranberry and apple, but there's also odder stuff like cherry and grapefruit. Also cran-??? mixes. But no peach juice, and I'm going to whine about that forever.
As I mentioned before, juice is pretty much just sugar water with some extra vitamins. Let's have a look. 8 ounces will net you 150 calories and a whopping 36 grams of sugar. Yikes! I like grape juice, but for that amount of sugar I'd rather have ice cream.
Was the name brand any better? Nope! Bonus points for trying to add some fiber back into your sugar water, I guess, but grapes would make a better snack for a variety of reasons.
Apple juice isn't much better. 28 grams of sugar and 120 calories for 8 ounces.
The juice aisle deteriorates into stuff that's unapologetically sugar water. So I looked into an old favorite to see how it compares. 8 ounces of artificially colored sugary garbage water will run you 11 grams of sugar and 40 calories. What the heck? Is this better for you than the juice?
Not really. It's because they're cheating with sucralose on top of their high fructose corn syrup sweetener. Definitely don't drink this. Probably don't drink the juice, too, but definitely don't drink this.
The fruit juice-derivative products melt into unapologetic flavored sugar water, which I won't bother getting pictures of. It's tasty and utterly terrible for you. We all know you don't drink Kool-Aid to be healthy.
To my distaste, though, that section finishes with convenience juice boxes, which I did snag a couple pictures of, but first, one more disappointment...
Fruit punch. Zero sugar. Even a mix of fruit juices. And, right near the end of the middle... sucralose. Curse you, drink companies!
I have rather fond memories of this particular brand and its various flavors. So let's look at their nutrition. 177 ml (one environmentally irresponsible pouch) is about 6 ounces of product. You get three kinds of juice, 13 grams of sugar, and zero nutrition. Well, at least it's honest.
The "healthy" option. 100% fruit juice seems healthier, but as we are now painfully aware, it is not. The healthier option has the same sized pouch, but will now cost you 20 grams of sugar instead of 13. Yikes.
Let's dispense with the illusion of healthiness and go find another childhood favorite. 0% juice, it says right on the box. 354 ml for two pouches divides perfectly to 177 ml, which is the same serving size as the CapriSun above. 16 grams of sugar, and it'll taste even sweeter because it's laced with sucralose. I guess it really is worse than the CapriSun... but the best possible option so far has been the regular CapriSun.
One more, because I couldn't resist after seeing the brand name. Honest (Kids). Surely it must be healthy? It has a juice content! (We know that means nothing now.)
Actually, as sugar water goes, these were the best environmentally-irresponsible juice boxes in the aisle. 8-9 grams of sugar (or about 2/3rds your daily sugar intake) in 200 ml, or about 6.75 ounces. There's no artificial colors or sweeteners, but this shouldn't be fed to children, ever. Or humans in general, really. Maybe hummingbirds?
This side of the aisle ends in bottled cold teas. Various kinds, green and black and even herbal in some cases. Many flavorings. Most branded to tell you they're healthy. But are they?
Something called Pure Leaf ought to be healthy. It's even caffeine-free so it won't keep you up at night. What's this 27 grams of sugar doing there? The caffeine might be missing, but this is definitely not a bedtime beverage! Props for the very short ingredient list, at least. Tea, sugar, extra flavor, and flower extract for color. Too much sugar, though. Wayyyy too much sugar.
Is the organic version any better? If you guessed "no," you have clearly been paying attention. 20 grams of sugar is not healthy. This is tea-flavored sugar water, and so was the first one.
And this is where I started being really grateful I was wearing a face mask, because it's harder to read someone's utterly disgusted and disbelieving expression from the side when their mouth and nose are covered.
"Honest" organic tea. "Just a tad sweet." Your "just a tad sweet" is more than my daily recommended intake of sugar, Honest. I'll give them bonus points for using Fair Trade tea leaves and sugar cane, but I will not be putting any of this sugar water in my system or recommending anyone else do so, thank you.
Bai again. Remember these guys from the lemonade section? Yeah, they're here in the tea section too, offering their spin on a less-awful-for-you tea-flavored sugar water. Erythritol again, backed up with stevia. If you absolutely can't give up your flavored tea drinks, this is probably your best option.
So this week we've hopefully driven home the point that sugar water is sugar water, regardless of whether it's made from juice or from high fructose corn syrup. Juice is not good for you. Not even 100% fruit juice. It's all sugar bombs. Get your vitamins from actual fruit, or a vitamin pill if you have to.
Next week it's the pop (soda, Coke) aisle and a very brief stop in the very extensive alcohol section.
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