Emulsion or Immitation

Posted on November 23, 2014 by dcarmack

 

380-97866-Products_Detil_LOWFAT_300x335If you make something the way that it has been made for centuries, then you could rightly claim that your product is ‘authentic’. If you use only natural ingredients, the same ingredients that were in existence when your grandparents made it then you could call it ‘all natural’. In the past there have been fights about who could call their pizza “pizza”, who could call their butter “butter”, whether or not your swiss cheese was “Swiss” enough.

Now there is a fight over the word Mayo, which is a twist on the old fight. The fight is over mayonnaise, and Hellman’s wants to prove in court that a new-fangled competitor, Hampton Creek, who makes a vegetarian spread that they have called “Just Mayo” is confusing to the mayonnaise-buying public.

For my part I would love for Hellman’s to get into a fight over what is authentic. Back in the day all foods that were modified from the traditional, if they included an ingredient like margarine instead of butter, for instance, had to be called ‘imitation’. I like that. Margarine should be called imitation, in my opinion, and so should a bread that contains it. Something like Hellman’s that contains highly processed oils should be called ‘artificial mayonnaise’ or if the ‘egg’ they use in their product is an imitation egg protein, they should be called ‘imitation mayonnaise’. As a consumer, I would like to know if my foods are made the good old fashioned way, or are they made the new way, with Frankenstein ingredients, and only resemble real food. A new product that looks a bit like mayonnaise could call itself ‘mayo’ of course, which is a made up word, shortened but really does not mean mayonnaise any more than the word ‘spread’ means butter.

Hellman’s makes a product called ‘low-fat’ mayonnaise.

This is the ingredient list–WATER, MODIFIED CORN STARCH*, SOYBEAN OIL, VINEGAR, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP*, EGG WHITES, SALT, SUGAR, XANTHAM GUM*, LEMON AND LIME PEEL FIBERS*, COLORS ADDED*, LACTIC ACID*, (SODIUM BENZOATE*, CALCIUM DISODIUM EDTA) USED TO PROTECT QUALITY, PHOSPHORIC ACID*, NATURAL FLAVORS. GLUTEN-FREE.

Hellman’s the people who are suing another company for calling it’s all-natural ingredient product mayo, has a lot of nerve. This concoction they call ‘mayonnaise’ with a straight face.

Here is how I make my More Real Than Hellman’s Real Mayonnaise (TM): I put one egg yolk in a bowl, and I mix it with 2 teaspoons of home made kombucha mustard. Then I slowly whisk that with 1 cup of cooking oil to make an ’emulsion’. I fold in 2 teaspoons of lemon juice out of a real lemon. Salt to taste. I don’t need an ingredient label. My mayonnaise contains absolutely zero of the ingredients of Hellman’s Low-Fat ‘mayonnaise’–except water. My eggs naturally contain some water in them. My label would not need to list ‘water’ because it would list egg yolk.

I just think it’s hilarious that this company calls this mayonnaise and has a right to tell another company it can’t call it’s product ‘mayo’. Here is Hampton Creek’s ingredient list for mayo:

Non-GMO Expeller Pressed Canola Oil, Filtered Water, Lemon Juice, White Vinegar, 2% or less of the following: Organic Sugar, Salt, Pea Protein, Spices, Modified Food Starch, Beta-Carotene.*

This shares two ingredients with Hellman’s, water and modified corn starch.

I am gonna go out today and find some of this and try it.

I hope Hellman’s proves that only real mayonnaise can be called mayo, then they will have to rename their product, too. Plus, I had never heard of ‘Just Mayo’ until Unilever sued them. Win-Win if I ever heard of it.

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Aching Joints Caused By Sugar

Posted on November 22, 2014 by dcarmack
Get on and ride all day

Get on and ride all day

When I was just still a teenager I discovered something about myself, that if I drank too much soda pop it would make all of my joints hurt. I would get achey and all I had to do to get back to normal was drink water for a day or two. Back then it was easy to tell when you had consumed too much sugar, because all you had to do back then to quit eating sugar was to quit drinking Coke and stop putting it all over your cheerios in the morning. Back then the only added sugar in my food was the sugar I added. I can see where kids these days would have a harder time figuring out what was making their joints ache.

Then in today’s news I read this:

“It’s been suspected for years and years, both in humans and in the animal model, that the development of autoimmune diseases like arthritis is dependent on the gut microbiota,” says immunologist Diane Mathis of Harvard Medical School in Boston. Now, she says, those suspicions are beginning to be confirmed in humans. “It’s a very striking finding.”

This is from news.sciencemag.org and it is from a report that is to be released next week. At the end of the article they make this prediction:

The findings, Mathis says, open the possibility of new therapies to prevent or treat rheumatoid arthritis. Current treatments for the disease include drugs with scary side effects—Remicade, for instance, seems to increase the risk of developing certain cancers and serious infections. Perhaps P. copri could be attacked with antibiotics, Littman says, or crowded out with probiotic pills full of good bacteria. Either way, patients may someday be able to relieve their joint pain by focusing on their guts.

I recommend a treatment option not mentioned here: Stop Eating Processed Foods. Don’t eat any foods with added sugars, only eat natural sugars found in real food. Eating is how we discriminate between good and bad germs in our guts. Eating unnatural foods promotes unnatural bacteria. I have read that if you have lots of plaque growing on your teeth that you are also growing plaques in your heart vessels. This makes sense to me, because I know that people who eat a lot of sugar are getting heart disease from doing so. Just the other day I reported on these pages that a study of veterans in the veteran’s hospital system revealed that three out of four of them already had plaques forming in their coronary arteries. I bet they all had lots of tooth plaque too, and ate the normal western diet, where 80% of all foods have added sugars in them.

I could now list and cite a dozen different maladies that have been related to foods we eat, or specific artificial ingredients in those foods. I could relay all of the known information about eating grain fed meats, and what they do to you, or, I could once again implore you to just eat REAL FOOD. It does not have to be organic, it can even be GMO, because real food is one thousand times less likely to give you complications. Real food does not have to be approved by the FDA as Generally Regarded As Safe, because it IS safe. God only knows what effect artificial ingredients and added sugar have in YOUR SPECIFIC body, because nobody is studying any of it. They make money selling you the poisons in food, and then they make money again selling you poisons to correct the symptoms of your prior poisoning, and then they will sell you poisons to correct the new problems caused by the medicines. Good luck getting off that merry-go-round.

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Be Selfish, It Hurts No One

Posted on November 21, 2014 by dcarmack

How do you help yourself without hurting your friends? That is a really profound question, if you give it some serious thought. There are a lot of my friends, whether I know them or not, that make their living creating foods that I should not be eating if I want to live to a ripe old age in my full health. I have a relative making pasta, I have friends that have family that grow corn and soybeans, I have family raising confined hogs. None of these foods are healthy, most of them contribute to inflammation when eaten, contribute to unhealthy weight gain and chronic diseases.

You know, though, I am in the same boat as my friends in the food industry. While I don’t make foods that are bad for my friends and neighbors I do make electricity, out of coal. My industry is a perfect example of good people innocently working in an industry that is bad in some ways. My plant tries very hard to limit the bad outcomes from burning coal. We spend a fortune treating the gases from coal combustion to take out the causes of acid rain and global warming. We produce carbon dioxide, though that we can’t do much about. When President Obama was elected lots of the men I work with were afraid that he would regulate coal out of business. Even though that would affect my livelihood, I would support that. Coal burning on this scale IS bad for the planet. If we need electricity after coal, we will still produce electricity, and therefore I will work in that plant instead of this one. Food production is exactly the same. People have to eat, and if my relative did not make confined pork, he would make the kind of pork that people will eat. If my relative did not make pasta from refined flour, perhaps he would make pasta from fresh ground flour, whole wheat flour instead.

If we choose to eat only foods that are not processed, then the jobs processing foods and dreaming up artificial ingredients would dry up, but there would be an entirely new industry born to get the increased amount of real foods into your kitchen. The people who make their livings providing the old system with raw ingredients would switch to the new. The people whose jobs were to package in the old pipeline would find equally important work in the new one.

Our demand for food will direct the food supply system. Us coming to the realization that our foods are unhealthy and poisonous over the long term will lead us to quit eating it and that in turn will lead the people producing those foods to stop that and pursue healthier things to cook. What we have to avoid is falling for labeling tricks. If it is in a bag or box and claims to be healthier, it is still processed imitation food. If it looks like food your great grandma cooked with, it is real food, whether it is organic or not.

You could fairly say that our nation’s food system is fueled by corn. You would be correct. Corn feeds your food animals, corn is broken down into myriad components and re-added to your processed foods. Only about thirty percent of the corn grown in the US is in our processed foods, though. About forty percent is now being turned into alcohol for cars, and about thirty percent is being fed to our food animals.

The economics of farming are such, these days, that about ninety percent of all of the farmland in Iowa is now being used to raise corn and soybeans. Soybeans are the compliment to corn because corn takes nitrogen out of the soil and soybeans put it back in. Fertilizers are also used to put nitrogen back in, but fertilizer costs money and soybeans make money. Both soybeans and corn are guaranteed to make the farmer money because of the government subsidy on these crops. Even if the price of corn and soy fell to zero, the farmer would make enough to cover his expenses and provide a living. This system encourages planting more and more, no matter what the market does. You and I can make this system less expensive to us, the taxpayer, by stopping immediately the purchasing of processed foods. If corn usage drops because we are eating naturally raised beef, chicken and pork, then–and only then, will farmers quit raising so much corn and soy.

Someday the nation may come to it’s senses on energy and quit subsidizing the energy-wasting ethanol industry. Probably not, but at least that use for corn is not leading to type two diabetes for half of the teenagers in the country. If we stop eating corn and corn products, the farmers who are right now wasting the nations energy and treasure making it would instantly flip to producing products that we DO want. It is all the same to them. I am not hurting my farming friends by eating only foods that maintain my health and avoiding those that harm it.

I can see where farmers, soft drink makers, processed junk food makers do not want laws that force people to avoid their products. I don’t really want that either. I prefer laws that force TV networks to offer for free as much air time for heathy food and anti-sugar ads to equal the number of minutes that they currently advertise sugary foods and sweetened drinks. This would probably lead to kids cartoon programs with zero of these commercials, as advertisers tried to limit the kids seeing anti sweet ads.

If our country would just admit that our imitation foods are bad, that low-fat was a mistake, that real foods are good and begin educating doctors and consumers it would be a gigantic leap forward. Educating people is a great objective. Confusing them with ‘conflicting science’ or claims that the science is somehow ‘incomplete’ is a horrible policy. Until our nation gets it’s act together it is up to us, individually, to defend our families from processed and sweetened foods.

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Here is a picture of a facility that makes either food or power, maybe both. Everyplace that food is made industrially is bound to look unnatural. If you eat foods out of boxes and bags then you have to go back many weeks and many many miles to get to a farm. Some of the ingredients in those foods were never on a farm, especially the parts that taste like food. All of the things that taste like food in your processed foods are man made ingredients.

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Ying and Yang

Posted on November 20, 2014 by dcarmack

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If it’s good for me, it’s bad for you. If we both benefit then the good and bad are evenly divided. My needs swirl around your excesses. When they say that opposites attract, I think that ying and yang more closely represent the relationship between opposites.

So, there is no such thing really as ‘all bad’. Think of the worst thing, maybe death, and very quickly when you analyze it you see that without death, life would be impossible. Everything we eat must have just been alive. In fact all of our foods are still teeming with life until the temperature gets above 150 degrees. Every bite of salad you take is swarming with life and not just the lettuce. The life you eat does not all even die when you eat it. Eating sauerkraut or drinking kombucha provides you with living organisms.  It is the point of eating these things.

Even, it turns out, viruses are not all bad. Scientists have actually just identified the first beneficial virus found in the human being.

“Viruses have gotten a bad rap,” said Ken Cadwell, an immunologist at New York University School of Medicine. “They don’t always cause disease.”–New York Times

The only viruses until now that have been isolated and named were the viruses that cause trouble; Polio, Smallpox, Measles..just to name a few. It takes a great deal of effort to find one, after all they are very small and the haystack is very large. Ken Cadwell, an immunologist at New York University School of Medicine has, by accident, discovered a virus that performs healing functions in the bowels just like gut bacteria do. The virus performs this function if the gut bacteria have been damaged leading to damaged function of the intestine…

Dr. Cadwell wondered if viruses can restore the gut when it has been disturbed in other ways. Heavy doses of antibiotics, which kill off much of the microbiome, can lead to drastic changes in the gut. Some villi die, and the population of immune cells drops. But as bacteria return to the gut, the damage gets fixed.

To see whether viruses have a similar effect, Dr. Cadwell and his colleagues gave antibiotics to normal adult mice for two weeks. When they infected the mice with murine norovirus, their guts returned to normal.

Thinking that bacteria are all ‘germs’ or that all viruses are bad has probably led to some very poor outcomes without our knowing it. An antibiotic does not discriminate against the bacteria that it annihilates. Taking antibiotic for ten days is much like burning down your house to get rid of termites. It is effective, but it kills the good with the bad. Taking antibiotics, or giving them to your children has to be a last resort kind of medicine, not the first and only approach.

If you couple antibiotics with our habit of eating only processed dead foods, then a person’s guts could become compromised as the good germs are decimated, and the foods we eat only promote the growth of bad germs. Diet soft drinks are now known to promote bad germs that cause insulin resistance after just a few doses of artificial sweetener.  Perhaps science is on the verge of finding ways to promote our gut health that do not involve crazy blunt instruments that they are using now. Scientists like Dr. Cadwell are advancing the frontiers of the gray area between good and bad, the area where ying touches and embraces yang.

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Pseudo-Science, Defined

Posted on November 18, 2014 by dcarmack

There is science and the scientific method, and then there is pseudo-science. It can be difficult to tell the difference, but once you know about the scientific method it becomes much easier to tell them apart.

From Wikipedia:

The chief characteristic which distinguishes the scientific method of acquiring knowledge from other ones, is that scientists seek to let reality speak for itself, supporting a theory when a theory’s predictions are confirmed and challenging a theory when its predictions prove false.

The steps taken when conducting scientific study, before conclusions are drawn are, formulate the question to be answered, propose a hypothesis for a possible answer to the question, predict the logical conclusions of your hypothesis, design tests that will support or refute the hypothesis, then, finally, determine if your test results actually strengthen your prediction and conclude that your hypothesis is true or not.

I bring all of this up because it turns out that drinking milk as an adult is probably bad for you. Nonetheless, here is what the USDA says about drinking milk, and they recommend that you drink three cups of milk PER DAY:

  • Health Benefits

    • Intake of dairy products is linked to improved bone health, and may reduce the risk of osteoporosis.
    • The intake of dairy products is especially important to bone health during childhood and adolescence, when bone mass is being built.
    • Intake of dairy products is also associated with a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, and with lower blood pressure in adults.

Now, using the scientific method, the question would be, “does drinking cow’s milk improve bone health and reduce the risk of osteoporosis?” Our hypothesis would be to make the conjecture that “people who drink more milk will be shown to have better bone health than those who do not.” The test would be to survey a large group of people over time and actually record their health outcomes. If our hypothesis is true, then we would predict a measurable improvement that we might be able to correlate to their milk consumption.

This has been done, now, several times. In 2011, there was this study by the same government, the NIH:

Our conclusion is that in our meta-analysis of cohort studies, there was no overall association between milk intake and hip fracture risk in women but that more data are needed in men.

The study surveyed 200,000 women.

Here is a study that tracked 100,000 men and women over a twenty year period, looking for some association between milk drinking in adolescence and hip fractures later in life. The conclusion:

Greater milk consumption during teenage years was not associated with a lower risk of hip fracture in older adults.

Here is a brand new study out of Sweden, they tested men and women for health outcomes  related to milk consumption:

High milk intake was associated with higher mortality in one cohort of women and in another cohort of men, and with higher fracture incidence in women. Given the observational study designs with the inherent possibility of residual confounding and reverse causation phenomena, a cautious interpretation of the results is recommended.

I highlighted the bold bits up there. Not only does drinking lots of milk not ‘do the body good’, it is actually related to dying younger. It is also related to women’s bones breaking easier. It is actually being proven to do the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the USDA would lead you to believe. So, where did the USDA get their ‘facts’ from? What scientific studies were done to recommend that we all drink three cups of milk per day for the rest of our lives? Well, I poked around tonight and couldn’t find any studies not funded by the milk industry that scientifically showed a correlation between milk and improved health. Maybe you will have better luck than I did. Some showed that calcium is good for you. Some showed that vitamin D was good for you. Couldn’t find any that showed the milk is good for you.

What seems to have happened here is that the people who make their living selling milk began their ‘science’ with the conclusion that milk is good for you, and went about their business of proving the conclusion. Calcium is good for you and has provable benefits, milk has calcium in it, THEREFORE, milk is good for you. Ditto with vitamin D. This is ‘pseudo-science’.

Pseudoscience is a claim, belief or practice which is falsely presented as scientific, but does not adhere to a validscientific method, lacks supporting scientific evidence or plausibility, cannot be reliably tested, or otherwise lacks scientific status.[1] Pseudoscience is often characterized by the use of vague, contradictory, exaggerated or unprovable claims, an over-reliance on confirmation rather than rigorous attempts at refutation, a lack of openness to evaluation by other experts, and a general absence of systematic processes to rationally develop theories.

Now that actual science has turned it’s attention to whether or not milk can be proven to be good for you, the results seem to be REFUTING milk’s claims to health benefits. Naturally it will be a very, very, very long time before the USDA begins to change their advice to drink three cups per day. They are still touting ‘low-fat’ products, even though these products tend to be ‘high-sugar’ foods and are therefore actually much more deadly to us than the regular foods that they replace. No, the USDA will be the last arm of the government to finally admit that some food made in the US is anything but perfect and a bargain at twice the price.

If you make your food choices only on the advice of the government, then perhaps you should find and volunteer to be a subject in a REAL scientific study on the effects of eating a USDA recommended diet. They could compare your outcome to mine and the future generations will thank you for your selfless sacrifice to scientific knowledge.

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You Have All the Power

Posted on November 16, 2014 by dcarmack
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SugarScience.org

 

The good thing about living during an epidemic is that you have lots of company to share your misery with. We are living in an epidemic, one that is destroying lives young and old. You know someone, probably whole families, that are suffering the effects.

The difference between this health care epidemic and most others is that there is no panic at all associated with it. Unlike the most recent health-scare, ebola, there are no calls for quarantine. Unlike AIDS there are no gigantic rock and roll rallies promoting awareness and money for treatments.

You don’t catch these diseases by breathing tainted air or contact with body fluids, you get them by watching TV commercials and eating like everyone around you. All you have to do to get type two diabetes is drink a Coca Cola with every meal. Eat processed foods and drinks every day and after less than a lifetime you can be on the waiting list for new knees, weighing the pros and cons of amputation, finding out that you need triple bypass surgery on your heart, wondering when you will have a donor liver available for the transplant you need.

If you think I am being dramatic, watch the documentary ‘Fed Up’. This documentary is about your kids. Amazingly, there are children getting type two diabetes by the millions. It is an epidemic. That type of diabetes is referred to as ‘adult-onset’ diabetes, because it is caused by diet and kids did not used to get it. Now it is an epidemic.

If you think I am being dramatic, watch the documentary ‘Weight of the Nation’. It is about you and your fellow citizens. It is about how if you are not overweight, you are in the minority now. Only thirty percent of Americans are now in their proper weight ranges. This epidemic is more prevalent than the Black Plague was in the Middle Ages.

The problem with this plague is that it doesn’t kill fast enough. As you eat four times more sugar every day than is recommended for a healthy diet and pack on the pounds just a few more every year this death is slow motion. Only if you start eating sugar in every bite at birth will you start having health problems by elementary school. If you are reading these words then chances are you are too old to be in that boat. Your kids are in that boat.

This morning I found out about a new website, SugarScience.org, whose goal is to make finding out about sugar in packaged food fun and easy. From NPR we read:

As part of its outreach, Schmidt’s team has created a user-friendly website and is partnering with health departments across the country to spread the word. The website includes downloadable resources, including television commercials, that public health officials can localize for their own cities.

The website makes it easier for local governments and health care providers to spread the word about added sugar. They are going to provide television commercials to go up against every other commercial on television. Of course this will only work if we went back to the days were a broadcast network had to provide free air time for no-sugar ads like they had to do for no-smoking ads against tobacco. The free air-time requirement is actually why tobacco companies quit running TV ads, because they didn’t want to go up against the no-smoking ads. As it is, you will not likely ever see one of these quit-sugar ads on TV.

Right now, we face a real uphill battle in our personal fight against sugar, sugar advertising, and Big Food. Sugar is cheap and addictive. Slick commercials repeated many times a day give us triggers that create desire to eat sugar. Everyone else is doing it.

Frankly, I don’t know how we get out of this health care crisis without government help, but at the same time I don’t see our government helping any time soon. Our government is now run by people that don’t believe that government can help, or that government should help. Regulations against sugar will never come. We are alone, individually against the whole system. We only have each other to count on for help. Being fat and sick is now a social disease. We must not look at one another and see someone that is beyond help, we have to see someone that doesn’t know what the problem is yet. WE have to spread the knowledge mouth to ear.

Take what you learn at SugarScience.org and pass that information to everyone in earshot.

Stop buying processed foods–nothing from a box, bag or bottle.

No added sugar.

Eat real, single ingredient foods. Your fruits and vegetables don’t have to be organic or anything special, they just have to look like whole fruits and vegetables.

Don’t eat fast food.

Send your kids lunch in a brown bag if you can, school lunches are no longer safe.

I know this sounds awful, but the only power we have over the food industry is in our wallets. If we quit eating crap they will quit making it. They only make it now because it is cheap and addictive and we keep on buying it. Stop buying it.

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When Does a Potato Become an Imitation Potato?

Posted on November 15, 2014 by dcarmack

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There are lots of varieties of potato. Right off the top of my head I can name red, gold and russet.  From potatogoodness.com we find that

There are more than 100 varieties of potatoes sold throughout the United States. Each of these varieties fit into one of seven potato type categories: russet, red, white, yellow, blue/purple, fingerling and petite.

There is about to be a brand new variety on your store shelf, one never before seen in the history of the world, one that can trace it’s lineage to the genetic laboratories of agribusiness giant J.R. Simplot.

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This potato will be called Innate. You won’t find Innate potatoes next to the red potato bin in the vegetable aisle. Innate’s claim to extra value comes from the fact that it has been genetically modified to not brown after it has been cut. Innate will be found in the fresh-cut section of your store already peeled and cut up for you. The slices will all gleam white, no matter how long they have been in the bag. You will be buying convenience. Think of the minutes you will save not having to cut up your potatoes. Simplot bets that you will pay a premium for this. According to this in Mother Jones…

…the strategy is to directly target the US consumer. Coles says the company will be introducing its product in test markets “this spring or summer.” And since the FDA doesn’t require the labeling of GMO foods, consumers may not know they’re engineered. But the potatoes still have to be marketed as improved, or they won’t command a premium price. Cole offered this pitch: “Since Innate potatoes provide less bruise and less black spot and browning when peeled, as well as less asparagine, they provide a sustainable, healthy option for consumers, especially in the fresh-whole and fresh-cut markets where no preservatives or additives are needed,” he said. He emphasized that “fresh-cut” potatoes are a new category, and expressed confidence that consumers would embrace the convenience.

Of course the FDA doesn’t require them to be labeled! They also don’t require them to be tested for safety on humans or animals or at all. The potato is GRAS (generally regarded as safe). We all know without any other information that this potato will be safe, too.

Fresh cut potatoes are a new category. Innate potatoes are a new creation. You will be tempted by the healthy option… asparagine-free potatoes. Asparagine is something in a potato that may or may not be associated with cancer. Nobody knows, but asparagine-free is about to join that long list of ‘free’ products that you just can’t, suddenly, live without. Fat-free, gluten-free, calorie-free are all related. First they invent the harmful ingredient, then they design the heath-claiming label, then you decide you need the healthier option. Win! Win!

There may not be a thing in the world wrong with this GMO potato. They won’t be required to tell you it is modified. I bet they won’t tell you it is modified. They will count on you not even wondering why now you can have cut and peeled potatoes right there in the vegetable case. Fresh-cut potatoes that you don’t have to peel! Gee Whiz!

I will be protected from any potential harm from this new-to-Earth creation, because it will come in a bag. This product will be boldly emblazoned with a health claim–Asparagaine-Free! This violates two of my shopping principles–don’t buy foods in bags, boxes or bottles, and don’t buy foods with health claims on the label. I wish you luck, J.R. Simplot. You will not hook this fish with your flashy package and claims to improved health product. If it’s not right next to the red potatoes, I will never even see it.

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If You Are Obese…

Posted on November 15, 2014 by dcarmack

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If you are obese, you are not to blame. More and more people are becoming obese, the most recent figures say every third person is obese. So many people are obese, it is just not possible that it can be entirely their fault. Two out of three people are overweight…on the way to obesity.

In the past most people thought that people who were fat were lazy, or ate nothing but junk, that it was something that they did that set them apart. Through scientific advances, however, and mainstream media attention, the contributions that the Western diet has made to the downward spiral of health and the upward spiral of obesity and malnutrition are becoming known to all of us.

There is a new website devoted to obesity…Obesity.org

“Obesity is one of the most complex, chronic medical conditions and successful treatment often requires the support and care of healthcare professionals,” said Rebecca Puhl, PhD, Deputy Director at Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity speaking on behalf of The Obesity Society. “These trends are encouraging because they suggest a shift away from simplistic, biased views that focus on personal blame. The more that people recognize shared risks for obesity, the more likely they are to support evidence-based approaches to reducing obesity’s impact.”

When you realize that eating most foods available in the store are going to eventually make you overweight, and then obese, you begin to see that you have a role in not only your own weight, but the weight of the other people in your family who you feed, too. You don’t have to overeat cookies, cakes, candy to gain weight. Eating low-fat foods will make you gain weight. Eating just about any processed food you are likely to be getting added sugar. The sugar is added to turn foods that would have no flavor at all into something you might eat more than once. Sugar is added to get you addicted to your foods.

Of course, there will be ways that individuals and organizations will try to make money off of obesity, just like they have on diabetes and high blood pressure. There will be people who get bariatric surgery, then don’t change their diet to fruits, vegetables and real foods. These people will not get the full effects of the surgery. They will be still feeding the microbes in their digestive system the same things that caused their slide into poor health. If we don’t tell our loved ones about the necessity to quit eating processed foods then no matter what surgery or pill the take, they will once again be overweight some day.

For now, there is a new organization dedicated to educating the public and our public officials about the current science regarding weight and obesity. Obesity.org.

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Dear Diary

Posted on November 13, 2014 by dcarmack

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Dear Diary,

I sent myself to bed without dinner. Went to bed yesterday at 5:30 PM, slept a couple of hours. Got ready for work at 11:00 PM,  worked all night. Now it is 6:30 in the morning and I am surprisingly unhungry. I have not eaten since lunchtime yesterday, but I am not starving. You would think I would be starving. I just drank some coffee, so that I will be able to safely drive home the forty miles, but you would think I would be hungry.

Something about not eating sugar makes it way easier to control your hunger. A person that only eats sugar in dessert is a lot less likely to feel the need to eat all of the time. On a normal day at 6:30 I would have just eaten my two eggs and bacon breakfast, just had my first cup of coffee. I wouldn’t feel any hunger until lunch. This morning I have skipped breakfast because I am not at home yet. Obviously I will not be able to go 24 hours without eating and feeling hunger, but I just find it fascinating that I have gone this long.

The old me, the one this time last year, would have eaten twice by now. I would have had to eat before coming to work, and I would have eaten while I was here. There is no way I could have gone this long without feeding the bugs that live in me. Probably ancient, wild man would have done this all the time. There would be lots of times that you would go to sleep having eaten one meal, and not eat another meal until you have caught it. Only modern man is trained to eat so many times per day, at just this hour or that. A lot of my need to eat is social training. A lot of my need to eat is in my head. A lot of YOUR need to eat is because you eat too much sugar and starch, the microbes in you produce something that stirs your feeding process to call for more sugar and starch when THEY are hungry. They are hungry all the time.

So just now, writing about eating is making me feel hungry. There is another article there.

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Artificial Ingredients Kill Pets

Posted on November 12, 2014 by dcarmack

According to this article on Salon.com, there are things you can eat, in normal doses that you should make sure that your pets don’t get into. One thing that will cause problems is related to the topics we discuss here in our food and nutrition blog…

1. Xylitol. One of the more ubiquitous sweeteners in sugar-free products, xylitol is a naturally occurring sugar alcohol found in the fibers of many fruits, vegetables and mushrooms. It’s typically extracted from hardwoods and corn cobs for commercial use and found in sugarless gum, toothpaste and many low-calorie baked goods.

While xylitol has no known toxicity in humans, just a few sticks of sugar-free gum scavenged by a 20-pound dog can cause its insulin levels to spike and send it into hypoglycemia. Ingesting higher amounts of xylitol can create serious liver problems including acute hepatic necrosis, leading to death. Cats are also susceptible to xylitol poisoning.

Sometimes vomiting occurs soon after ingestion, followed by hypoglycemia within the next hour. At this point, the animal may act lethargic and lose coordination as a result of lowered sugar levels. Elevated liver enzymes and liver failure can be seen within a few short days.

If caught within the first few hours and taken to a veterinary clinic, many pets can be nursed back to health by inducing vomiting and perhaps the administration of dextrose.

Unknown

I recall writing a few weeks back about the emerging evidence that artificial sweeteners are guilty of causing diabetes and insulin resistance just like sugars are. This is undoubtedly related to that. In fact, if food additives required scientific testing before being approved, maybe we would not be eating and drinking xylitol when it started killing lab dogs and lab rats. This chemical may have never even made it to the human trial phase of the approval process.

I just love how in the article they say that xylitol has no ‘known’ toxicity in humans. I know why they don’t know wether there is a toxic level. They haven’t ever looked.

None of the ingredients in your foods are exposed to scientific scrutiny like this. This fact is the primary justification for not eating any processed foods. Lots of times the artificial ingredients are not actually listed on the label, they are lumped together under ‘artificial flavors’ or similar weasel words. Not that it would matter if they put the actual scientific or trade name on the label. Without any knowledge about what these chemicals do inside a human body what difference to know that it is or is not in your food?

Don’t give your pets anything with artificial sweetener in it. They are much smaller than you are physically and something that won’t kill you because the dose is too small, might just kill or sicken them because they are so much littler.

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