The healthy sphere

Wondering what can you buy in a supermarket if you can’t eat gluten, dairy, sugar and grains? Get my in store or online shopping list and make your weekly shopping a breeze!

When I first started to pay attention to what I eat and looked for healthier options, I noticed that there was a lot of confusion out there about what is healthy and what is not and what to buy in a supermarket.

Come to grocery shopping time, people who are trying to go down the route of real food or paleo for the first time spend a lot of time figuring out what to buy, reading labels and asking the same questions: is this food paleo? What can I buy in a supermarket if I can’t eat gluten, dairy, sugar and grains?

I want to help folks looking to eat better and that’s why I put together this shopping list from one of the leading UK supermarkets, easily accessible from most locations across the country and with online delivery as well. This list contains easy to find fresh produce and vegetables to help you do your weekly or monthly shopping knowing you are getting a wide variety of vitamins, minerals and nutrients.

With this list you can:

• Select the ingredients you like and navigate the supermarket looking for this or very similar options.
• Or if you do your shopping online you can add them directly to your basket!

Once your fridge is full of the following ingredients creating a meal is super easy. If you don’t know where to start, the easiest thing is to divide your plate in 3 parts, 1 of protein (meat, fish or eggs), 1 of starches* (potatoes, sweet potatoes, plantains, butternut squash, beetroot, carrots, …), and the last 1 part full of veggies (broccoli, asparagus, kale, a big salad, peppers, courgette, aubergine, etc). Before calling it a day, add in some extra fat, like half an avocado or some olives if you are having a salad, a knob of butter on your potatoes, a good drizzle of olive oil on your veggies or a handful of nuts. If for your protein you are eating lamb, chicken wings or a couple of rashes of bacon, you probably don’t need to add much more fat to your meal.

*Note: if you are following a low carb or keto plan reduce the starches and increase the fat intake.

Eating this way has helped me feel better in my ways, less lethargic, more productive and lighter, as well as helped me manage my IBS symptoms and gave me a strong immune system which significantly decreased the amount of times I feel unwell, get a cold or get sick from exposure to all the viruses and bacteria (which is every day living in London and getting the tube to work!).

I buy 90% of my food from regular supermarkets and the rest from farmer markets and the occasional stop at a health store. What I want to show you with this list is that eating healthy is NOT that hard and expensive as many people think. You can get almost everything you need to improve your diet and health from a regular supermarket, especially if you have a big one nearby, like a Tesco or Sainsbury’s Superstore.

Before you get to the list, just a couple of notes on what you are going to see in there and my personal recommendations to radically improve your health and how you feel and perform in your day to day life.

• I recommend to buy grass fed or organic for the fattier meats or cuts, and otherwise free range/free to roam/outdoor bred animals. This is good not only from an environmental and ethical standpoint but also for you, as these varieties have significantly more nutrients than farmed pigs and sheep, caged birds or feedlot cattle. As a general recommendation, which I see very often and I think it’s a great advice: buy the best quality you can afford. But don’t sweat it too much if you can’t, it shouldn’t be an excuse for you not to eat healthily.
• For fish, opt for wild caught instead of farmed. Farmed fish is fattier, and although I have nothing against animal fat (as you might have noticed by now), all the chemicals and hormones used in farming methods will be stored in the fat.
• For vegetables and fruits: I try to buy organic when I can, especially for those that I eat raw or with the peel, like berries, carrots, tomatoes, salad leaves, etc, and then I just make sure to wash and peel well the ones that are not organic.
• Within the fats/oils category, I’d go for unrefined or extra virgin olive oil and coconut oil, as well as grass-fed butter (or ghee if you are sensitive to dairy), and rendered animal fats – who doesn’t love some good old duck fat roasted potatoes? Avoid heavily processed oils like rapeseed, canola, or sunflower and marg. Does this mean you cannot eat out because mostly everything is cooked in one of the super refined oils? No, it doesn’t mean that. Just try to avoid it as much as possible, but if you dine out a couple of times a week that’s just a very small percentage of all the food you eat! So don’t worry about it.

So these are my favourites and what I normally buy or I’d buy from Tesco when doing the weekly or monthly shopping. I’m sure there are plenty more options in your local store but this is a comprehensive list to get started and most of the items are available all year round.

Tesco UK paleo shopping list

Discloser: I am not getting paid or received any kind of incentive for posting this, I honestly just want to guide you through your food choices and hope you find this useful!

I am not affiliated in any way with Tesco, and I will try and expand this to other supermarkets.

If any of the links are broken or spot any mistakes please do leave me a comment and I will try and update them as supermarkets change stock and the links originally provided can no longer be available.