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Agave nectar is slightly sweeter than honey, but won’t spike your blood sugar.

One telling sign that a career in food was a good fit for me was that I’ve always loved grocery shopping. I can happily spend hours browsing the aisles just to see if I might discover something I haven’t noticed before. Lucky for me, I’m the food editor of EatingWell Magazine and I get to talk with our team of cooks in the EatingWell Test Kitchen about their daily supermarket shopping trips and the new things they’ve noticed during their trips up and down the aisles.

All that shopping and talking helped us come up with this list of trendy foods for 2012. Whether a food has become ubiquitous in the stores, something that’s generating media coverage or simply something that our readers and fans are buzzing about, each of the foods on our list of the top 15 trendy, healthy foods is having a moment.

Read more: Top 15 Healthy, Trendy Foods for 2012

One option ranks first in a comparison of plans like Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, and others.

Being on a diet doesn’t always mean good things for your health. You want to make sure your new diet will provide enough calories and doesn’t skimp on important nutrients or entire food groups. The Best Diets for Healthy Eating rankings take both nutrition and safety into account.

Read more: Best Diets for Healthy Eating

The summer treat doesn’t have to send your diet on vacation if you steer clear of certain kinds.

I love the smoky bite of a hot dog mounded with sweet and tangy toppings and the delicate, salty balance of meat with the bun. But I’m not a huge fan of the buckets of sodium and oozing fat many hot dogs contain. Plus when you eat a hot dog with an average white-bread bun, you add 100+ calories and 200+ mg of sodium to the calories, fat and sodium the hot dog already contains. So is a healthy hot dog even possible?

Read more: How to choose the best hot dogs (and what to avoid)

Ingredients like pumpkin, kale, and wild boar make these treats anything but boring.

These tasty, nutritious packaged bites will wean you off the vending machine.

Read more: The 13 Healthiest Snack Foods

This year try turkey breast baked with rosemary and fresh lemon juice and gingerbread loaf

Start a new tradition this year by serving healthy holiday fare. It will not only save you calories and excess fat, but you will have a colourful and balanced dinner on your table and actually feel great afterward. Here are some ideas on how to sort through each component of your meal and how to choose wisely:

Read more: Eat this, not that! Healthiest choices for your holiday dinner

Navigate the buffet wisely, and you’ll avoid putting on pounds this season.

Mixed Nuts or Olives?

The Better Choice: Olives
Like olive oil, olives are high in monounsaturated fats, which help lower cholesterol. They’re also low in calories. Each olive has only about five calories and less than a gram of fat, while one pecan, for example, has almost 14 calories and nearly two grams of fat. And though you can toss back numerous nuts almost too easily, olives often require a little more work. And when you’re left with a plateful of pits, you’ll know exactly how many you’ve put away.

Read more: The healthy holiday party food guide

After zooming from one end of the mall to the other, don’t you deserve a quick bite? Of course. Does it have to be greasy fries, gooey cinnamon buns, or some other equally fattening, sodium-loaded calorie bomb? No way! Believe it or not, you can eat healthy while you tackle holiday errands. Check out our delicious, nutritious picks.

Read more: America’s Healthiest Mall Food

My pantry at home is always well-stocked. (Actually most people would probably call it overstocked.) I don’t feel right if my cupboards are bare. And once I started working on our new book, EatingWell on a Budget, I realized that my pantry-stocking obsession also had the benefit of helping me save money: when I have key ingredients on hand to make dinner, I’m much less likely to call for delivery or go out. (Plus cooking at home is almost always cheaper than going out.)

Here are five of my favorite ingredients to keep on hand that help stretch my food dollars further.

Read more: Cut your grocery bill with these 8 healthy ingredients for $1

Who hasn’t unwrapped a sandwich while driving down the highway or pulled a hard U-turn into a fast-food joint on the way home from a late meeting or soccer game? We practically live in our cars, so we need quick food, and please, we’d like it to be healthy.

Well, guess what: We surveyed the nation’s 100 largest fast-food chains, as defined by the number of locations, and found many are creating menus that look more and more like what we’d cook ourselves (if we had the time)—from nutritious soups and healthy salads to fresh whole grains and sensible desserts. Even better: They’re offering good-news Mexican, Asian, and Mediterranean fare.

Read more: America’s Top 5 Healthiest Fast Food Restaurants

Call them healthy, call them grown-up; whatever you want to call them, this group of cereals doesn’t include Fruit Loops and Cap’n Crunch. We wanted to find out which were the best-tasting out of the so-called “healthy” cereals sold in national supermarkets. So we compiled a list of thirteen boxes, picked them up along with some milk, and settled in our conference room early on a Monday morning to crunch, much, and scribble on score sheets. Flakes, squares, clusters–all shapes and sizes were included. We also got nutritionist Sandra Frank to weigh in, breaking down which three cereals are the best for you out of the already good-for-you pack.

Read more here: Supermarket Standoff: Healthy Cereals