 As the number of regular supermarkets increases, more and more people have access to the basic ingredients they need to make simple, healthy meals. Another obstacle people erect to cooking is the idea that a cookie must go to the farmer's market and buy all local and organic food, and that's really not the case. The first and key decision, if health is a concern, is moving off of processed food and onto real food. I'm talking about plants and animals in their more or less natural state, or things that are very lightly processed, like pasta or flour, things like that. And those things are still in your supermarket. They're mostly on the periphery of the supermarket. And one way to shop is sticking to the perimeter of the store. That historically is where the produce is, where the meat is, where the fish is, and where the dairy is. When people visit the supermarket to buy perishable items like milk or eggs, the most direct roots to those items will often be stocked with the most heavily processed foods, things like cereals, chips and sodas. In many countries today, food marketing is a big business. In the U.S. alone, billions of dollars are spent establishing brand loyalty and placing highly processed items at eye level where we can easily reach them. This can make it difficult to leave the supermarket with only the milk and the eggs we intended to buy. For this reason, it's a good idea to make a shopping list before you go to the store and then try and stick to that list. Going grocery shopping when you're hungry can also dramatically increase the temptation to buy calorie dense, highly processed foods. Avoid the center aisles. The center aisles are where the imperishable foods, the foods that are immortal, live. And you know, food is alive and it should eventually die. And a food that doesn't, there's something we should wonder about. It's been over-processed. It's been hyper-processed. One way to tell if a food is hyper-processed is to look at the number of ingredients listed on the packaging. A food that contains fewer ingredients is almost certainly less processed. Also, if we can recognize the ingredients listed, this almost always means the food is less processed than foods containing ingredients that the average person has never heard of. And remember, foods that don't come with ingredient lists like fruits and vegetables are usually the best choices of all.