{Book Review} Unjunk Your Junk Food – Healthy Alternatives To Conventional Snacks

Unjunk Your Junk Food – Healthy Alternatives To Conventional Snacks by Andrea Donsky and Randy Boyer, creators of NaturallySavvy.com, with Lisa Tsakos is a great book for people who want to eat healthy but also “keep it real” and have snacks and desserts from time to time. Unjunk Your Junk Food doesn’t ban you from eating favorite salty and sweet treats like ice cream, cookies and chips, it simply shows you a healthier alternative from the same category. For example, if you love chocolate peanut butter cups, you will want to read page 102 and learn why Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are a bad choice based on the ingredients label. The good news comes on page 103, where you learn about a better-for-you option: Sun Cups.

This book teaches you how to select food with the least amount of processing, chemicals, artificial ingredients and additives. It eliminates the mysteries behind food labels by telling you exactly what fancy sounding names like Monosodium Glutamate really mean (MSG= BAD for you flavor enhancer). There is so much useful information packed into this easy-to-read guide that it really surprised me at how much I still don’t know about what really goes in to the food my family eats.

Page 25 contains the Worst Ingredients Chart. It’s a helpful list to carry with you to the grocery store so you can know what products to watch out for as you shop. The ingredients on the chart are classified into groups called The Scary Seven:

• HFCS: High Fructose Corn Syrup
• Trans-Fats
• MSG: Monosodium Glutamate
• Artificial Flavors
• Artificial Colors
• Artificial Sweeteners
• Preservatives

Out of curiosity, I decided to go through my pantry and read some of the labels on the food my family currently eats. I found several things in there that contained some of the Worst Ingredients, including our Cheez-Its. These crackers contain Annatto, a type of coloring, which is one of the ingredients to beware. I was most surprised to see that my favorite brand of ketchup contains High Fructose Corn Syrup. I knew something must be in there to sweeten the ketchup, but I never thought it would be one of the Worst Ingredients!

This guide has changed the way I shop for food.  I am smarter now that I know exactly what ingredients to watch out for on nutritional labels.  I also use the book to look for healthier alternatives to the foods we like to eat.  We have exchanged our usual cereal bars )that were actually misleading us into thinking they were healthy) for more wholesome cereal bars made with no artificial flavors, colors or trans fats.  I love that this book uses colorful pictures of the exact brands of foods that are being compared.  There is no question that I am making the healthier choice for my family when I use their expert advice and shop for the products they have tested and found worthy to list in their book.

Would you like to Unjunk Your Junk Food?

Buy the book!  Unjunk Your Junk Food: Healthy Alternatives to Conventional Snacks is available at Barnes & Noble online and in stores, as well as at Amazon and other online retailers.