Stock your Kitchen
Welcome to real food!
In this section, you will find a complete shopping list filled with whole foods and healthy staple ingredients, as well as a guide on how to replace some of the food you just donated. Get ready to restock your kitchen!
Your newly wholesome fridge is now your connection to nature and its seasons. It’s always ready to feed you with plenty of fresh fruits and vegetables, soaked and cooked legumes, organic tofu, nut milk, sauerkraut, homemade baked goods, probiotic drinks, and all your prepped batch cooking ready for meal assembly.
Variety is essential when it comes to fruits and vegetables. Pick as many different types as you can—variety is key for a healthy digestive system! The changing seasons will naturally offer you new options at different times of the year. Buy organic, local, and seasonal produce whenever it’s available and within your budget.
Your newly spacious freezer can now fill your selection of frozen berries and other fruits—essentials for LiveliFood’s delicious desserts and smoothies.
Your kitchen cupboards are about to be the holding area for all those whole food ingredients (like legumes, grains, spices, seeds, and nuts) that you’ll be using to make tasty and nutritious baked goods, smoothies, cakes, dips, sauces, soups, healthy granolas (nut-holas), hot drinks and more!
Of course, you don’t need to have every single thing on this list in the house at all times. It will depend on your weekly menu, what’s in season where you live, how often you plan to cook, and how big your household is.
We are working on the LiveliShopping List App that you will be able to use as your template whenever you’re headed for groceries to make healthy shopping easier. This App will help you discover new ingredients, plan your meals, take inventory, tick the boxes for the items you need and get everything you need for your week!
Liveli
Shopping List
App
COMING SOON!
Hopefully, for those new to whole food cooking, you will find your freshly stocked kitchen inspiring—an opportunity to nourish yourself through cooking delicious meals!
This is the start of something great!
Healthy Trade Guide
Read your Labels
The LiveliFood ideal is to get to a point where there are no highly processed, packaged foods in your kitchen, just whole foods. One of the most significant ways to keep your kitchen safe and healthy is to get good at reading labels when you’re grocery shopping and reject the so-called ‘foods' with nasty ingredients. Label reading is how we find out what we’re putting into our bodies every day. It’s a must unless you’re cooking from scratch with whole foods.
Do it with everything with an ingredients list, especially things you’re used to throwing in your cart without even thinking about it.
So as you’re transforming your kitchen into a more Liveli place, let’s read some labels!
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Use label reading as an opportunity to learn about food. You’ll discover that packaged foods have incredibly long lists of ingredients, many of which you may not even know the meaning of… pretty scary. Eventually, you’ll remember which products are edible and which ones are not good for you.
Hot tip: Food manufacturers hide the ingredients in a tiny font on the back in the bottom corner of the packaging. Bring your reading glasses!
Think of your shopping cart as the inside of your belly, where none of these harmful ingredients are allowed to enter:
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Sugar: more than 1-2 grams is too much for one serving. Pssst… sugar has more than 50 sneaky names. Check out the list down below!
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Vegetable Oil: canola, corn, soybean, safflower, palm, and sunflower oils
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Gums: 412, 464, 466, guar gum, hydroxypropyl methylcellulose, sodium carboxymethylcellulose. Gums are used as a thickener, and some foods contain three or more!
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Highly Refined Grains: white flour, cornflour, white rice flour. These grains have been milled to give a more refined texture and extend their shelf life, but this process removes dietary fiber, vitamins, and iron.
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Salt: also sodium, sodium chloride. Six grams per day is the recommended daily intake for adults with no health issues. Many packaged foods have very high salt content, and you have to check the serving size to see how much you’re getting.
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Nitrates and Nitrites: potassium nitrate and sodium nitrite. Preservatives used in deli meats. Beware: possible carcinogens!
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Other Food Preservatives: BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole), BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene)
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Artificial Flavors: bottled smoke flavor and all artificial flavors in general
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Aspartame: aspartic acid, phenylalanine, brand names NutraSweet and Equal
Here are a few surprising places to be on the lookout for ingredients-list invaders:
Gluten-free baked goods: For manufacturers to make gluten-free baked goods look and taste more like ‘normal’ baked goods, they often add lots of ingredients you wouldn’t expect. Homemade bread, for instance, is typically made with only a few ingredients. Still, it’s common for these additional ingredients to show up in manufactured gluten-free products: vegetable oils, eggs, gums, flours like rice, soy, or corn, and modified starches. With all those additives, it’s not a healthier option sometimes. You’re no better off than if you bought white bread! Unless you are gluten intolerant, of course. If you are gluten intolerant you could try to make your own bread instead or reduce the amount of packaged bread you consume.
Nut and seed kinds of milk can be real tricksters. In theory, they’re a great alternative to dairy. But not when they’re made with vegetable oil, syrups, and gums... yikes! This one tricked us for a while! When we finally checked the labels, we saw that the ‘all natural’ nut milk we’d been heartily consuming was full of crap ingredients (like, serious health offenders) and had very little actual nut content, sometimes only 3%! What the fuck, right?!
Nut kinds of butter/spreads: Nut butter is an excellent, healthy kitchen staple… when it’s pure! Ideally, we make our own. When we can’t, we read the labels carefully. You want a very short ingredient list—simply “raw almonds or peanuts.” So many nut spreads have added dangerous ingredients: vegetable oils, maltodextrin thickener, emulsifiers for spreadability, syrups and sugars, and salt. And some have only 30% actual nut content! The reason being is because manufacturers replace real nuts with cheaper ingredients to cut costs, increase profits and keep the retail price down. They may not care about your health, but we do. Better check your peanut butter label right now!
Bacon, hot dogs, salami, ham, turkey: Deli meats are not as healthy as they might seem. Most of them contain sodium nitrate which preserves the meat and gives it a very high salt content. The World Health Organization has published that nitrates are linked to an increased risk of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Don’t let them through your kitchen door!
