A disruptive lifestyle can often land shift workers in a constant cycle of eating all the wrong foods at the wrong times of day.
But if you can’t change work hours, what kinds of foods are really healthy for shift workers?
Would you believe in food that contains few ingredients?
Confused? Well let me explain.
Thanks to the weight loss industry, we’ve become so obsessed with reading nutritional information on food labels that we’ve forgotten to take a closer look at the other part of the label: the ingredient list.
Let’s take a look at an example.
Right now I need you to go to the kitchen and open the pantry. Take a cereal box and bring it to the computer.
Note on the label how the amount of fat, cholesterol, sodium (salt), carbs, and sugar inside the product is broken down, which is great.
But do you recognize any of the ingredients?
They are not very familiar.
The sad thing is that today we are so engrossed in reading the nutritional labels of foods; we don’t really look at the actual content of food.
In fact, many people select foods from a supermarket shelf based on vitamin and mineral content, even if the food doesn’t resemble real food. Protein bars, breakfast cereals, margarine, and diet foods are good examples. These foods may look good in nutrient content, but when you look at the actual ingredients, you find a bunch of numbers and a lot of other foods that aren’t real.
So if you’re looking for the healthiest food for shift workers, keep things simple. Choose foods that are as close as possible to how Mother Nature designed them.
I rarely check the ingredients on the food I buy because I hardly ever eat food that has an ingredient list! For example, a piece of fruit does not come with a food label. What you see is what you get: there are no hidden ingredients.
So stop worrying about how many grams of this and that is in something; spend more time concentrating on what are you actually eating.
For shift workers who rely heavily on packaged and processed foods for “sustenance,” eating these kinds of foods long-term is certainly not good for your health.
So the next time you go to the supermarket to do your shopping, spend more time in the produce aisle than in the many boxes, jars and packages of food.
At the end of the day, nothing can replace a real fruit or vegetable – anything else is a cheap imitation and always will be!