Day 14 - Eating Clean Mini Challenge

Day 14: No more than 5-ingredients – Avoid any and all packaged food products that contain more than five ingredients no matter what ingredients

Today's Mini Challenge is about reading the ingredients on packaging and paying attention to how many ingredients are in there!!! This week I'm going to ask you to avoid any and all packaged food products that contain more than five ingredients no matter what ingredients are listed.  Obviously it would be ideal if these ingredients adhered to the other mini challenges we have already completed.   

Here is Michael Pollan's take on this rule:

“Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients. The specific number you adopt is arbitrary, but the more ingredients in a packaged food, the more highly processed it probably is. Note 1: A long list of ingredients in a recipe is not the same thing; that’s fine. Note 2: Some products now boast, somewhat deceptively, about their short ingredient lists. Häagen-Dazs has a new line of ice creamed called ‘five.’ Great–but it’s still ice cream. Same goes for the three-ingredient Tostitos corn chips advertised by Frito-Lay–okay, but they’re still corn chips.”

Try to find products where the ingredients are all real food and have a max of 5 listed!  It's a challenge but I know you can do it!!  These last two weeks have prepared you for this!

The main goal of this rule is to get people to start reading and scrutinizing the ingredient labels on their food.

To give you a leg up here is a list of groceries that typically have less than 5 ingredients listed: 

• All fruits, vegetables, local meat/animal products, and wild-caught seafood
• Dried fruit, nuts and seeds
• Popcorn
• Carrot Raisin Manna Bread (Freezer Section)
• Lara bars
• Triscuits
• Fruit leathers
• Applesauce
• Whole-wheat Matzo crackers
• Brown rice crackers and cakes
• Oats
• Cheese
• Brown rice
• Whole-wheat pasta
• Olives
• Beans
• Peanut butter
• Puffed whole-grain corn cereal
• Shredded wheat cereal
• 100% pure maple syrup and honey

Share your 5 Ingredient or less finds with us in the Eating Clean Mini Challenge Event on Facebook!