My Weekly Grocery Guide
$6$10
This is my actual weekly shopping list, written out food by food, with an explanation of what each one does inside your body and how we turn all of it into ordinary meals at home.
What you get:
104 pages covering 39 staple foods, aisle by aisle
What's chemically inside each food, and what happens to it once you've eaten it, explained for someone with no science background at all
What the research actually says about each one, and how much confidence it deserves, because some of this is far better established than the rest
What UK and US guidance says about every food, and where the two differ
How we cook and eat each one at home, including a proper technique for around half of them that will make you look like you can cook
A note on who should take extra care with every single food, plus a full section covering kidney disease, blood thinners, IBS, pregnancy, gout, diabetes medication and more
The plate shape I use instead of recipes, and a seven day example week built for people who don't enjoy cooking
Where our fibre comes from, added up food by food, and how to build up to it without a fortnight of bloating
The order to buy this list in if money is tight, and swaps for allergies, coeliac disease, IBS, vegetarians, vegans, older adults and anyone cooking for young children
Nine myths I'd like to put down, including the ones about eggs, seed oils, frozen food and cooking with olive oil
A day zero and day thirty tracker on its own printable page
A one page shopping list you can photograph and take round the shop
A full reference list so you can check anything I've said for yourself
Why I wrote it
I've worked in emergency medicine in the NHS for around a decade, and I've become convinced that what you eat underpins an enormous amount of the disease we see in the Western world. The parts of the world still eating fairly traditional diets, full of fibre, protein and healthy fats, generally have the lowest rates of chronic disease. Heart disease, strokes, type 2 diabetes and several of the common cancers all have long, slow beginnings, and a good part of that beginning happens in your weekly shop. The influence I have over any of that inside a hospital is quite minimal, because by the time somebody arrives in front of me the process has usually been running for twenty years. That's why I started writing about food instead.
What's actually in the trolley
Seven aisles, starting with vegetables, because half of every plate in our house is vegetables and around a third of them come out of our own garden through the season. Then fruit, including the one I keep in the fridge and would take over any dessert, and the bag in the freezer that costs a fraction of fresh and often carries more vitamin C.
The protein section leans heavily on tins, and I explain why. There's a fish I eat two or three times a week that costs less than a coffee, sits in a cupboard for years, and goes from tin to lunch in four minutes, which is the only reason I actually manage two portions of oily fish a week rather than intending to. There's also a straight answer on wild against farmed, on free range against organic eggs, and on why some yolks are deep orange.
Then pulses, nuts and seeds, which do more work for less money than anything else in the shop, including the tin that costs pennies and carries a combination of protein, fibre and resistant starch nothing else comes close to. There's a section on seed mixes where I name the two I use and explain, with an apology, exactly how I know that one of them isn't being digested properly.
Grains and bread covers which oats to buy and why the ones you're probably buying behave more like flour, the loaf that goes straight into our freezer the day it arrives and what freezing does to it, and the shortcut I use several nights a week that I don't think deserves its reputation as processed food.
Dairy and ferments covers the drink a friend of mine once poured into his coffee by mistake and finished out of politeness. And the store cupboard covers the one item I deliberately overspend on, where I buy it from, and how to tell a good bottle from an expensive one that tastes of nothing.
Honest about the awkward bits
There's a full section on red meat and chicken, including how often I eat both and why I've landed where I have when the research points in more than one direction. There's a paragraph on the barbecues we have in the summer, what's on the grill, and the two things I pay attention to when we do. There's my position on alcohol. And there's a list of what isn't in our trolley at all, with the honest reason for each one.
Built to be used, not admired
Every entry ends with how we actually eat that food, in a real kitchen, with a ten month old and not much time. The habit I'd steal if you take nothing else is on one page and costs about two pounds a week. And the printable list at the back is meant to be torn out and stuck on the fridge, because all of this only counts if it changes what you come home with.