Guiding Stars

If you’ve ever shopped “by the stars,” you already know how handy it is. Lots of foods in the store are labeled with their Guiding Stars 1, 2, or 3-star rating. Choosing more 2 and 3-star rated foods allows you to skip the in-depth label reading. You can easily put more nutrition in your cart. But what about putting more nutrition on your plate? There are only so many foods that we eat simply as they are. (Shout-out to baby carrots, my go-to do-nothing veggie side!). This is especially true if we are making an effort to purchase whole or minimally-processed foods. In other words, we often have to cook our food and combine ingredients together in recipes. How do we make sure our meals earn Guiding Stars too? Lucky for us, the Guiding Stars has roughly 1,200 star-earning recipes on the website!

There are few ways we can modify, enhance, and boost a recipe to make it more likely that a developed dish will earn Guiding Stars. As you may know, a food earns one or more stars when it offers vitamins and minerals and is higher in fiber and heart healthy fat (including omega fats), while also being low in added salt, sugar, trans fats, and artificial colors. Making a recipe from ingredients that reflect these attributes means the recipe is more likely to earn Guiding Stars.