Before I begin, I know that grocery shopping is such a chore, and when you start going up and down the aisle the amount of choice and difference in price of similar products etc can sometimes be all too much – you just want to get what you need (normally sticking to the same brands or grabbing what’s on special) and getting the heck out of there!!!
As time consuming and sometimes confusing grocery shopping can be, you may wonder why I am going to load you up with one more thing you need to be looking for when you select a product. The simple answer is: knowing what the Health Star Rating is will help you make better choices.
Once you know what you are looking for it will stand out and you will wonder how you missed it all those times before.
The Health Star Rating is a front-of-pack labelling system that rates the overall nutritional profile of packaged food and assigns it a rating from ½ a star to 5 stars. It provides a quick, easy, standard way to compare similar packaged foods.
The simple thing to remember is, the more stars the healthier the choice you are making.
Packaged products detail the nutritional information on the back panel of the packet but I find this super time consuming when I am trying to compare like products. One has something better than the other and then something has not so good as the other and you just start to feel overwhelmed.
The Health Star Rating is a simple tool that is visible on the front of the packet that allows us to quickly see what it is rated and compare it quickly with like products, enabling us to make quick, healthier choices.
Making simple swaps in our grocery shopping for products with a higher Health Star Rating will mean that we are picking packaged products that are higher in good nutrients and lower in not so good nutrients that are linked to obesity and other diet related illnesses. This ensures that we are providing our families with a balanced diet that is better for our health.
So what are you looking for?
You are looking for this symbol on the front of products:
It will range from 5 (being the best option) to 0.5 being not so good.
I went through my cupboard and fridge and found that not all of my packaged items had the Health Star Rating on them. You will find a list of which companies use the rating here, but a lot of my products did. Here are some photos of the products I had. It was actually a mind opener when I went looking for the Health Star Rating and something I am going to focus in the coming week’s grocery shop.
Next week I will show you how it is easy to implement the use of the Health Star Rating when shopping and then I will put what I have learnt into action in the third week.
This is a sponsored post for the Department of Health. Information I have supplied can be found on the Health Star Rating website
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