Want to eat healthy? Stores offer help

By Cathy Jett

Wegmans recently rolled out seasonal "eat well live well" food displays next to their pharmacies. The idea is to make it easier for pharmacists to tell customers how various foods can help improve their health.

"There's so much good science showing that people lower their risk of many health problems when they make healthy food choices and include regular exercise in their routines," said Brian Pompo, a pharmacist and coordinator of wellness and clinical services for pharmacy at Wegmans.

"As health professionals, pharmacists know that food and medication play different but mutually supportive roles in helping customers lead healthier lives," he added in a prepared statement. "We do give customers the counsel they need and want regarding medications, but we also believe that sharing how food supports health helps customers."

Wegmans' "eat well live well" program is part of a push by grocery store chains nationwide to make it easier for shoppers to make healthy food choices.

Food Lion, for example, worked with a panel of nutrition experts to develop its 2-year-old Guiding Stars nutritional guideline system program, which uses green shelf tags bearing yellow stars to make finding healthy food items easier.

Foods with one star have good nutritional value, while two stars represent better nutritional value and three stars signify the best. If the shelf tag has no stars, it means a food item doesn't meet the criteria for a star or hasn't been rated. Non-rated products include bottled water, alcoholic beverages, spices, tea and coffee.

According to the company's website, foodlion.com, sales of foods offering a higher ratio of nutrition to calories are outpacing those that don't. In some cases, they're selling three to four times faster.

The website also offers a wealth of information on exercise and healthy eating.

Additional grocery chains that have jumped on the nutrition bandwagon include Giant Food, Shoppers Food & Pharmacy, and Safeway, while others such as Walmart plan to join in.

At Giant, blue and green Healthy Ideas stickers are placed alongside more than 5,000 foods that have at least 10 percent of the daily recommended amount of one nutrient, such as calcium. These include nearly all the fruits and vegetables in the produce department.

The program was developed to make it easier for shoppers to locate healthy foods without having to read labels, according to Giant Food's website, giantfood .com. A team of nutritionists took into account such things as calories, cholesterol, fats and sodium, then evaluated foods based on Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Department of Agriculture guidelines.

Giant's website also includes a number of recipes for healthy dishes under the Living Well tab. These range from appetizers to desserts.

SuperValu, a corporation that includes Shoppers, rolled out its Nutrition IQ program last year at all its its grocery chains. This program uses color-coded shelf tags to point out key nutrition content in qualified items.

Developed with the help of the Harvard Medical School-affiliated Joslin Clinic, they are based on FDA nutrient content claims.

Nutrition IQ shelf tags are used to denote food items that are low in saturated fat and, at minimum, meet criteria for healthier sodium claims. They also highlight such things as whether a product contains whole grains or is an excellent source of protein.

Shoppers' website, shop persfood.com, includes an interactive wheel to help customers create a shopping list of healthy foods, as well as monthly articles from Joslin Clinic that offer nutrition tips on healthy cooking and eating.

Safeway doesn't have a shelf tag program, but it does have FoodFlex, an online tool that helps loyalty-card holders track the foods they buy and gives suggested alternatives to help them reach their nutrition goals.

Using information captured when loyalty cards are used during checkout, FoodFlex creates charts that allow customers to compare their purchases to USDA guidelines and see how much of several key nutrients they're getting. The program also generates a to-do list that can help them make better choices in the future as well as a shopping list containing those items.