 Hey everybody, today we're doing something a little different. I am doing a Trader Joe's haul. But more specifically, I am going to show you how to read labels because just because you walk into a Trader Joe's or even a Whole Foods and you start throwing things in your basket thinking that everything you eat is healthy from that store, right? That's not the case. You've got to read labels so you know what you're putting in your body, what you're feeding your family. So that's what we're going to do today. I've got a few items here. I went to Trader Joe's, bought my usual, and I just wanted to share with you and show you some of the ingredients that are in these and kind of the things you should look for. So recently I made a video on Minestrone Soup and I went to Trader Joe's. I picked up some San Marzano Peel Tomatoes. These are super yummy guys if you check the label and you read it. You can see that the ingredient list is simply San Marzano Whole Peel Tomatoes, San Marzano Puree, Salt, and Basil Leaf. Great ingredients. These are special. They come from Italy, you know, in the southern part and they just have a really fantastic flavor and the price is really, really good for this. Now let's jump into the, maybe the cold cut area, all right? I like to pick up this Oven Roasted Turkey Breasts from Trader Joe's and the ingredients. Again, turn over your package. The ingredient list is Organic Turkey Breasts, Water, and Salt. I love those kind of ingredients and I continue to buy it. All right, I'm trying out a new product today on this last purchase and I picked up some hot dogs and the reason I, this caught my attention is because they are uncured beef hot dogs that are grass-fed. It's always a good thing in my mind and again, if we look at the ingredient list, now normally, you know, when you look at ingredient lists, most people go to the calories, right? They're looking at the calories. They're like, how many calories am I eating? How much fat's in here? That's not something I really look at or I certainly don't focus on that. I'll look at the sodium and the sugar content and the protein content. But the first thing I go to is the ingredient list. That tells you how much is in here. Usually the first thing listed is the ingredient that has the most of it in it. So here it's organic beef and then we've got some sea salt, celery powder, etc., etc. All good ingredients. They're food products that you know and can pronounce. So next up, I got a couple of items here that I have actually not tried before but they look good. Now what I have here are artichoke hearts. Now these come kind of sealed up here in a package that don't have to be refrigerated. You want to look at the ingredient list, of course. We'll start off with that. What do we have here? We have artichoke hearts, water, salt, and citric acid. Now so for this one, when you look at the nutrition facts, you want to see here, okay, sodium's a little bit high, 530 milligrams is a bit high. So what you can do with these is when you go to use them, maybe you're going to put them in your salad, you want to put them, run them through a strainer, rinse them, that will release some of the sodium so we can knock that down a little bit. But other than that, I think these are great. So my next product here is, now this is new to me, yellow, lentil, and brown rice pasta. So this is gluten-free, flip it over, check that label. Every time I buy something, every time I put it in my cart, I'm always looking at the ingredient label, always. No exception. All right? The ingredients are good. The thing about this pasta, as opposed to just a complete brown rice pasta, is that it has some protein in it from the lentils. So we're actually getting, what, 14 grams of protein for two ounces. And the total carbs are still 32, which is a little bit high, but it does knock it down. So that'll be a good one to try. Next up, now I found some sauerkraut. Now you want to buy sauerkraut, not the kind in a jar that's sitting on the shelf because they've pasteurized it. There's no good bacteria still alive in that, you know, product. But if you get it raw and refrigerated, you can almost guarantee that you're going to have some good bacteria there for your gut. Sauerkraut is awesome for you to eat. And Trader Joe's, I tried this about three weeks ago. It is the best sauerkraut that I've ever bought at the store. I love the flavor. It's not too tangy tart. If you like it really tangy tart, you might not like this one. But I love this one. In fact, I made a turkey milk, and I put this on there. Man, it was fantastic. Just a beautiful flavor. So try the sauerkraut. It is really delicious. My next refrigerated item here is, you know, I was looking for hummus. And do you know how difficult it is to find hummus that doesn't have canola oil or sunflower oil or some other oil that's really not good for you? You want to have, number one ingredient would be a good olive oil in your hummus. That's how they make it when you make it from scratch, and that's how it should be. They're always putting in these other types of, you know, less quality oils that are not good for us, and it saves them money. So check out this eggplant hummus. The ingredients are great. There's chickpeas, eggplant, sesame tahini, lemon juice, garlic, water, salt, sea salt, pomegranate juice, and I see no mention of any oil of any kind. This would be great to serve with a drizzle of some nice olive oil right over the top right when you serve it. Now, we all know that turmeric is great for us. It's an anti-inflammatory, and maybe we should be consuming it more for, you know, joint pain or whatever it is you're dealing with. Peter Joe's has this mighty turmeric juice shot. Really caught my attention. It's expensive, I think. It's two bucks for this thing, but I went ahead and tried it anyway. Tastes great. Organic coconut water, organic turmeric juice, organic lemon juice, organic black pepper. Now, you always want to have some pepper mixed in with your turmeric. It just makes it more available for your body to absorb the turmeric, and all the benefits from it. So you want to see that, otherwise you can add your own. You just take this, and the lady in the store told me, you just down it. Don't even sip it or anything, because it's not, you know, it doesn't taste that great. But I had no problem downing it. I mean, it was good. Next up are potatoes. Now, I have some sweet potatoes here, and I always buy my potatoes from Trader Joe's that are organic. Now, there's a group called the Environmental Working Group, and every year, annually, they put out a list. It's called The Dirty Dozen of the top 12 fruits and vegetables that have the highest levels of pesticides on them. Now, in my view, those are the ones that you should buy organic, and potatoes, all potatoes, are on that list. So, they do put out another list called the Clean 16, I think, and those are, you know, vegetables and fruits that are pretty clean. So if you can only afford to buy a little bit of organic, stick to the ones that are on that dirty dozen list. That's what I've got there. All right, next up, let's hit the snack aisle, shall we? So I was going down Trader Joe's looking for chips, potato chips, and corn chips, and whatnot, and that's a little more challenging to find a healthier version of chip. What I look for is the oil. So what I found at Trader Joe's are these potato chips here. They're olive oil potato chips. The ingredients are very simple as they should be. So this says potatoes, olive oil, and salt. Gotta love that. I mean, that's just the best. That's my recommendation. Most chips have sunflower oil, safflower, canola oil, all those oils, and I just, I stay away from them. I don't touch them. All right. So my other snack that I found are the seasoned kale chips. Have you tried these? These are pretty darn good. I opened the package. I tried them already. They're seasoned. Again, the ingredient list, I always go to that. What do we have? We have kale. It's got cashews, tahini, ground sesame seed, basically, carrot powder, all ingredients that you can pronounce. Sugars are reasonably low. They're 3 grams for, you know, you always have to look at the serving size, right? Half a package. That's quite a few. That's pretty decent. I think this is a good, is a good product to try and serve your family. After that, I've got, okay, so seasonally, right now, Trader Joe's has everything pumpkin, right? And a lot of those pumpkin packages that you buy from Trader Joe's, they have all kinds of preservatives and, you know, emulsifiers and all kinds of other things that I don't want to be eating. But I did find one that is really good, and I recommend you try it. It's Trader Joe's Organic Pumpkin Spice Granola Bark. It does happen to be gluten-free, and so basically, it's pumpkin spice-flavored granola layered with cacao dark chocolate and toasted pumpkin seeds. The ingredients are good, everything's organic, everything's real food, and the sugar, you know, one and a half pieces, six grams of sugar, not half bad, really. So try this out. I think you'll like it. Got a little chocolate craving going on. This will fit the bill. All right. So I buy, I look at, you know, snack bars, energy bars, whatever you want to call them. Hard to find a good one, right? Well, Trader Joe's carries bulletproof, and bulletproof is, you know, a good product, I think. They have some good ingredients in here. These are collagen protein bars, and they have 12 grams of protein, two grams of sugar. They're gluten-free, and the price, they're $2.49 a bar. And when you go to the grocery store, you'll see them for $2.99, so they do have a better price. It's a great place to get it. Another new item that I haven't tried yet, but that caught my eye, is these rice crumbs. These are a nice alternative for regular bread crumbs, but keep in mind that the carbs are pretty high in this, so, you know, you might want to mix it with something else. Maybe some, you know, ground up nuts to kind of cut the carbs a little bit. But this looks really good. It'd be great to bread your fish, or even some vegetables, eggplant, zucchini, any of those kind of things. So, thought I'd give that a try. Here's something I found. They always have the, Trader Joe's always has their new product section, and this is just some Japanese, what do they call this? Japanese, I can't say the word, charcoal infused cloth. And they were like $4.99, and they're supposed to be super soft, and I just thought I would try it out. All right, I also saw this, this was new to me, is Trader Joe's is carrying organic fair trade cacao powder at a really good price, $3.99 for this. This is like eight ounces. You can mix this in your smoothies, cacao powder has lots of good antioxidants, you might want to check that out. It's a really good deal. Yogurt, so I like to get this Trader Joe's Greek unflavored or plain, whole fat yogurt. Now, I'm not afraid of fat guys. I like to eat my dairy products with, you know, full fat if I can, if I can find it. Today actually for breakfast is I took, you know, a nice container full, like about a cup of that, and I added fresh blueberries and blackberries, took an immersion blender and just blended it up, added a little bit of MCT oil, some protein powder. That was my breakfast. It was delicious. Now, salad dressing, I found a great one at Trader Joe's. This one's called the Green Goddess Salad Dressing. Check this out. It's made with simple, flavorful ingredients. It says they use olive oil, which is right on. I like that. No sugars in here. Check this one out. It tastes really good, and the ingredients are spot on. Now, for some coconut milk, I like to buy my coconut milk because it has the best price at Trader Joe's, and the ingredients are very simple and pure. There are no, you know, carrot gein in there. I see that a lot of times when I go to regular grocery stores to buy coconut milk, and I tell you, they got a lot of emulsifiers, lots of gargums, and this is just, you know, the coconut milk. That's it. Here's another new product that I found at Trader Joe's. It's organic bone broth, and these are made from free-range chicken bones. This is just real bone broth that has, you know, a lot of good nutrition in it. I like to drink this instead of coffee, so I'll just have this for the morning, my morning drink, and I'll add some collagen protein powder to it. So it packs a good punch to start your day off. So that's my Trader Joe haul for this week. All about reading those labels, my friends. So do that, and, you know, be more aware of what you're putting in your body. Don't worry so much about calories and whatnot. If you put the good food in, the results, you know, with your body are going to be so much better, and you're going to be much healthier. So thank you for watching, and let me know in the comments what you think. If you like the video, please give me a thumbs up, and if you'd like to subscribe to my channel, I'd love to have you click the subscribe button and the notification bell next to it, and you'll be notified when my new videos come out every week. All right, everybody, we'll see you next time.