A Doctor's Honest Guide to The Grocery Store (What's Worth Worrying About)

Dr. Mark Hyman (0:00)

You're trying to eat healthy, but how do you know the food you're buying is actually safe? By the end of this episode, you'll know what to look for at the grocery store, what's worth spending extra money on, which food safety concerns actually deserve your attention, and the simple changes that can reduce your exposure without making you afraid of everything you eat. All right, so why does buying healthy food feel so complicated? You walk into the grocery store, trying to do the right thing, you pick up the salmon and wonder about the mercury, you reach for the strawberries, you're thinking about the pesticides, you have a bottle of water, remember something you read about, microplastics, and then there's PFAS, heavy metals, food additives, plastic packaging, produce recalls, and suddenly buying healthy food doesn't feel so simple. And if you're paying attention to the headlines, you might start wondering, is any of our food actually safe? The answer is, well, more nuanced than a lot of what you see online because not every food safety risk is the same and not every scary headline deserves the same amount of your attention.

There are the immediate risks we've worried about for decades, bacteria like salmonella, E coli, listeria that can contaminate your food and make us sick. But there's another category that's getting a lot more attention. Substances we may be exposed to in small amounts over and over again. Things like pesticides, heavy metals, PFAS, microplastics, certain food additives and chemicals that can migrate from packaging into our food.

Now, those are two very different conversations. I think we've done a poor job of helping people understand the difference. Because when everything is labeled toxic, you don't become a more informed consumer, you become an overwhelmed one. This episode was brought to you by Function. Get access to over 160 lab tests annually at functionhealth.com/mark. So today, I want to make this practical. We're going to take a trip through the grocery store together. We'll start at the proto-sale and talk about pesticides and when buying organic is really worth the extra money. We'll head to the meat and the seafood counter and talk about sourcing, contamination and mercury. Then we're going to turn over some packaged foods and look at what's actually on the ingredient label. And then we'll talk about something most of us rarely think about. What our food touches before we eat it. Plastic containers, wrappers, cookware, other packaging. And finally, we'll bring everything home and look at some of the surprisingly simple mistakes we make in our own kitchens. And along the way, I'm going to help you separate the things that are genuinely worth paying attention to from the things you probably don't need to lose sleep over. Because the goal isn't to make you afraid of your food, it's to give you a simple framework for making better choices. What to prioritize, where you can reduce unnecessary exposures and where the basics matter far more than the latest scary headline. Well, let's start where most of us begin every week. The produce aisle. Do you really need to buy organic? And how do you handle outbreaks like the ones we saw this summer? Because this summer gave us a pretty striking reminder that even foods we think of as some of the healthiest things that we can eat aren't immune to food safety issues. In July, the FDA and CDC began investigating a major outbreak of cyclospora, which is a microscopic parasite that can cause a severe intestinal illness. The investigation ultimately pointed to iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico. Now, the outbreak spread across 15 states with thousands of illnesses and hundreds of hospitalizations reported. It wasn't necessarily the kind of contamination you could see. The lettuce didn't have to look spoiled. It didn't have to smell bad. Cyclospora is microscopic and it can contaminate food through water or fecal matter.

Once contaminated, produce enters are increasingly complex food supply, and it can end up on our plates hundreds or thousands of miles away.

That's understandably unsettling. So when stories like that appear in the news, I hear two very different questions from patients. The first is, how do I protect myself when there's an outbreak? And the second is, would I be safe for if I just bought everything organic? Well, those are actually two different questions. Let's start with the word organic and what it actually means. Organic doesn't mean a food is completely free of pesticides. It doesn't mean that the food can never be contaminated with bacteria, parasites or other pathogens. Organic farming standards govern how food is grown and produced, including which pesticides, which fertilizers and other agricultural practices can be used. So, when you're deciding whether to spend extra money on organic produce, I think it's helpful to ask, what risk am I actually trying to reduce? If you're trying to reduce your exposure to certain synthetic pesticides, choosing organic can be one tool. But if you're trying to protect yourself from a foodborne outbreak like cyclospora, simply choosing organic is not a guarantee.