The 22d of September (Monday) at 6:30 PM we are hosting a party during the national watch party time.
We would love to have anyone and everyone that would like learn about living Sugar Free for 1 day 10 days or completely. We would love to have Community Garden owners here to promote their gardens, and Nutritionalist to help promote their services. Together we can help HEAL our NATION one friend at a time!
Here is information about the movie.
If you believe, like I do, that the only way to stop food companies from producing health-harmful products is to stop purchasing them, then we are in fact winning that fight. Lots of times you will see the newspapers and food pundits calling for this or that regulation. Just the other day at this site I highlighted a recent call for a sugary beverage tax in California. Sin taxes would be the category that I would put taxes of this type in, and they have been claimed to be helpful in reducing the slope of the curve of cigarette smoking in the US. On the other hand they seem to have little effect on the taxes imposed on gambling or alcohol, the other things that are ‘sin taxed’. It leads me to believe that perhaps the sin tax does little to curb behavior, but the thought that you are hurting yourself with said behavior does much more.
Today in the Times, there is this article that describes the terrible climate that we have these days for boxed breakfast cereal makers.
For the last decade, the cereal business has been declining, as consumers reach for granola bars, yogurt and drive-through fare in the morning. And the drop-off has accelerated lately, especially among those finicky millennials who tend to graze on healthy options — even if Cheerios and some other brands come in whole-grain varieties fortified with protein now.
Back when I was buying this junk food to feed my kids in the morning before school, the worst thing about them was their exorbitant pricing. I suspected that there was price fixing, mainly because the prices would all drop a bunch any time the congress started investigating why cereal prices were so high. High prices may be part of the reason now that their sales are soft. The economy stinks, wages are stagnant, and the price of fueling your car is at or near all time highs, all the time. There is only so much you can buy with your never growing paycheck.
I would like to think that in part, though, the growing awareness of the dangers of processed food consumption is playing a role. That reason is featured as a good guess by the Times:
Cereal sales have long been subject to dips brought on by food fads like the Atkins diet or bagel mania. And many cereals are neither gluten-free nor protein-rich, so they fail to resonate with the growing number of consumers who are gluten-intolerant or adherents of the so-called paleo diet.
Some of the lower sales of sweet breakfast candies are probably due to the lower number of people who can afford them, some due to the growing awareness that they are candies, despite what the health claims on the labels say. Most breakfast sweets are eaten by kids and young adults, I would think, by people that don’t buy their own foods, but eat what is ‘prepared’ for them by whoever feeds them in the morning. Myself, I quit buying breakfast cereals soon after my kids were grown enough to not eat breakfast any more. If they ate cereal I really didn’t pay too much attention. Back then I didn’t eat breakfast at all.
The common observation by a lot of companies facing declining cereal sales is that this is a kind of death by a thousand cuts,” said Nicholas Fereday, an investment analyst specializing in food and agriculture at Rabobank and author of a report, “The Cereal Killers: Five Trends Revolutionizing the American Breakfast.” “This is frustrating for food companies because they’re faced with people making choices and they’re not really sure which trend to blame.”
Mr. Fereday noted, for instance, that the birthrate was declining — and children traditionally have been the largest consumers of cereal. Other demographic factors are at play as well: Many surveys have shown that Latinos and Asians prefer other breakfast foods.
Don’t you wonder like I do what the Latinos and Asians prefer to eat? The growth of that community is helping us to get rid of sweet breakfast deserts without sin taxes or government regulation. We can get rid of dangerous artificial ingredients in our foods the same way, by buying only single ingredient foods, located on the outside walls of your local supermarket. Buy nothing in bags, boxes, or bottles and you will be doing a great service to your family and to your community. It takes forever to get laws changed, and there is no guarantee that they will stay changed, but it only takes a couple of lousy quarters to change a corporation’s mind on what is profitable, and that doesn’t change back until we say it does. Change them with your wallet.
More bacon and eggs this morning, because I failed to do either thing I wanted to do yesterday, couldn’t make muesli, couldn’t make Canadian bacon. Endeavor to persevere! I will get one of those things done tonight. There was lots of great news in the news today concerning foods and the things we discuss on here all of the time.
Let’s start with this article from Salon.com, where the average child’s school lunch is compared to a school prepared lunch for a child from France. Personally, I think that the French feed their children properly because the French are also responsible for the health care of their children socially, so they have an interest in giving them healthy foods. Here in the US we are interested in giving the children ‘what they want’ as if that is a real thing…
Then in the NYT today, there is an article that describes a study where people who drank more sugar sweetened drinks and exercised were compared to people who drank sodas and laid around.
As one of two new studies based on the research, published in May in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, reports, after two weeks of fructose loading and relative inactivity, these young, healthy volunteers displayed a notable shift in their cholesterol and health profiles. There was a significant increase in their blood concentrations of dangerous very-low-density lipoproteins, and a soaring 116-percent increase in markers of bodily inflammation.
Finally, there is word from Mother Jones magazine that raw sugar is sugar. The greater expense for what you get in exchange looks like a pretty bad bargain. I recommend just laying off the sugar.
I really don’t hate bacon. I really do hate trying to cook bacon for breakfast before I go to work, though. Bacon is too long to fit on the hot spot in my skillet. The edges don’t get as hot, the bacon overcooks in the middle, under cooks on the ends. I have to cut the strips in half so that I can evenly cook them. I have to plan on about five times as much time devoted to breakfast as what I am now used to. Muesli takes about thirty seconds to get ready. Canadian bacon, because it is precooked takes just as long as eggs to cook, about two minutes. Bacon takes from six in the morning to about six-twenty two. That is actually eleven TIMES longer than Canadian Bacon, and WAY longer than cereal. I love bacon though, but it doesn’t taste so much better than either of the other two that I would choose it.
So, why am I choosing bacon, you might reasonably ask?
I have failed to plan ahead. I need to mix up a batch of Muesli, I am out. I have all of the ingredients except for chopped mixed nuts. That one little stumbling block is holding me up. I have failed to make another Canadian Bacon. This is where making all my own foods is coming back to haunt me. I brine and cure my own Canadian bacon. I have to purchase a pork loin, and I have to brine it for about three days, then I have to smoke it to 150 degrees. This obviously will take days to do, and even more days to do if I don’t go buy the pork. To shorten the wait, all I have to do is just go buy some bacon at the store, but I won’t. I want to control the quality of the pork I use, and I want to control the ingredients in it. On that I won’t compromise.
At some point, the hassle of cooking bacon in the morning will exceed the hassle of making cereal or Canadian bacon and I will get it done. Then I will be back to the carefree days of old, when I could eat breakfast with zero difficulty. Maybe today will be the day.
Here is the recipe for Home Made Canadian Bacon.
Morton Salt Canadian Bacon
Here is the recipe for Home Made Almond Milk.
Here is the recipe for Home Made Muesli Oat Cereal.
Mark Bittman’s Muesli, under construction
So now I know that I have to come up with a ‘Plan B’ for attending NFL games. The idea of going to the game and not eating and drinking sweets there is just not going to happen. They no longer let you carry in your own food, and the food that is available is all of the ‘loaded with carbs’ variety. Yesterday I chose smoked pork ribs, french fries, and we split a large sugary Coca Cola in the souvenir cup. For two let’s say that the cost was ‘expensive’. The food was excellent, but I don’t want to have to spend that kind of money. I could have gotten a large bottle of water, but the cost of that was likewise, expensive.
If I want to eat like I want, then from now on I will have to eat before the game. That is not really that hard to do, and it shouldn’t be that hard to eat and not need to eat again until I get back home. The game is only about six hours of time away from the house. Eating a large breakfast normally holds me over fine until noon, and that is with me eating at six in the morning.
I ended up having two Cokes yesterday, and two orders of fries. One Coke and fries I got on the drive home. Carbs are like that. If you eat or drink a bunch of carbs, within three hours or so, you always feel like you need more of them. We had a nice normal dinner after the game, pork chops, fresh vegetables, cottage cheese, unsweetened tea. After dinner, I was still craving carbs and ate quite a bit of a bag of kettle corn that we got at the art fair this weekend. That is how carbs are. If I hadn’t had the kettle corn in the house, I wouldn’t have went anywhere to get a snack, I would have suffered through my craving.
Changing your habits means changing the location of the trigger points. Eating carbs triggered me to want more. Having them around makes me want them. Not having them around, or planning ahead so that I don’t have to eat them, because they are the only option (like at the football stadium), is the only way to avoid the temptations. Being too full to eat at noon is the best solution to this problem. Next time I will go to the stadium full, and all I will need to get is the expensive bottle of water so that the sun doesn’t turn me into a raisin.
If you are not in the US, when I say it’s the first day of football season, you probably are a little confused. Our football season is only a few months long, but it transforms every Sunday into a day of feasting on sweet or carb-filled foods. The games start at noon, but the eating starts far earlier, and nobody is having brunch. Sweet barbecue, bratwurst on hoagie buns, hamburgers and hot dogs are the entrees at 8:30 in the morning. Potato salad, sweet cole slaw, and snack chips to round out the meal, all washed down with numerous bottles of beer or sweetened soft drinks. It’s not a problem to eat over two thousand calories before noon at the football stadium before the game. If you wait and eat when you go inside it is no better, because stadium food is not there for it’s nourishing qualities. The hot dogs are salty, the burgers are more bun than meat, the drinks are all very big and loaded with ‘energy’.
Not going to the games is just as bad at home. People will gather in ‘Man Caves’ all over the country. The exact same kinds of tempting, sugar or carb-loaded foods will be on offer and no one will give eating a second or third sample a second look.
It’s all fun, but it’s a habit. Not doing it this year will be another chance for me to break a habit that I have formed over a lifetime of living in a society that encourages over-consuming sweets and carbs. Last year I went all year without buying a beer for a football game. Still had soda back then to drink. This year I will be trying to not fall into the old habits of eating with abandon, eating and drinking sweets because it is available and everyone around me is doing it. It will be a good test of how easy it is to live healthy in an unhealthy crowd of 78,000. I will let you know.
These days, just about everywhere you look you can find scientists, dietitians, and popular celebrities that are advocating that we all eat less processed foods and care less about eating fats. Today I read in the New York Times that a new study has studied the effects of eating carbs but not highly processed carbs, eating fats, but not processed ‘transfats’. One study group was on a low fat diet, one group was to eat a diet low in processed carbs.
…those on the low-carbohydrate diet ultimately did so well that they managed to lower their Framingham risk scores, which calculate the likelihood of a heart attack within the next 10 years. The low-fat group on average had no improvement in their scores.
The recent documentary movie “Fed Up”, about low-sugar eating to bend the curve on US diabetes and obesity is being released on DVD. Katie Couric is behind this initiative and later this month people will be hosting watch parties and on the 22d there will be an internet event where the film crew from the documentary will be answering questions for people hosting their parties on that day. Here are the details of that event and the DVD launch.
This article from the New York Times has some great information on dietary fats. Read it after you read the above-cited article, though, because then it makes more sense. A sample of the information in it:
Trans fats are typically found in highly processed and packaged foods, like cookies, potato chips, pastries and some fried foods. If you pick up a package of food in the grocery store and its list of ingredients contains the words “partially hydrogenated,” then it contains trans fats, which are heavily processed, manufactured oils.
Saturated fats and unsaturated fats are found throughout nature. And often they are found together in varying combinations in different foods. Fish, olive oil, nuts, avocado and plant sources of fat contain a lot of unsaturated fats (polyunsaturated and monounsaturated). Meat and dairy naturally contain some unsaturated fat but a higher proportion of saturated fat as well.
We already know all of that, as long time readers, but like I said, the good word is everywhere now. You can still more easily find the bad old advice to eat ‘low fat’. You can’t find the great advice to ‘stay on the outside wall of the grocery’, but the media is catching on that there is better advice out there these days than what they are used to shouting from the rooftops.
I just went in and weighed myself, which is something that I do not do regularly. The last time I did it I was just a bit above 140. I am short, so 140 puts me just at the edge of normal weight for a man my age and height. This morning I weigh in at just about 138. That news made me surprisingly happy, because I have not been religiously keeping my own advice about not eating sugar or processed foods. I have bought potato chips, which contain trans-fats. I have made home made ice cream and ate it until it was all gone. We went out to eat and shared a desert. I have detailed these days here in the blog, and like I said then, I felt no shame for making those choices. I am not in a religion, or questing for a sobriety token, so when I decide to enjoy a treat, that is what it is…a treat. There are no guilty feelings, I experience no shame, I hide nothing from myself or the world. I am having a good time changing my eating habits, and that is easier to do if you change things that are easy to change. No sugar in my coffee or tea was the easiest. Just having the free water at the restaurant was also an easy and inexpensive choice to make. Not turning down any of the aisles at the store was a little bit harder habit to form, and I am still tempted to do it, but that temptation is easy to turn away from.
When I do succeed in recognizing and avoiding a temptation, one brought up by an unexpected trigger in my day, I quietly have quite the internal celebration. I recognize the urge, I contemplate it, I feel what that temptation is like and I mindfully turn away from it. I am then swept by a joyous emotion as the moment passes and I cheer myself for doing the right thing. Pay attention to your victories, they are truly yours.
Today in the New York Times, Mark Bittman discusses the progress that the Chinese are making with regards to obesity and overweight in that country. The Chinese government has a great deal more power over the lives and choices that shoppers in that country are allowed to make at the store. Here in the US, we are free to live and eat and die any way that we see fit. Except that we aren’t really free in that way.
You live in a community, be it your work, family, friends. Your choices are often guided by the expectations of those people in your lives. If you are a child, or you are not the one that makes grocery decisions in your family–perhaps your wife shops and cooks for the family unit, or no one does. Chances are that you eat what other people cook for you. The ingredients were chosen by them, or maybe by even another person, in the case of restaurant foods. If your community is sick, making bad choices of ingredients, making decisions for you that are not best for you, then the community must work together to correct the flaws in the system.
In the case of China, the government there can do powerful things to make it harder for the bulk of Chinese citizenry to damage themselves with foods. Here in the United States it is not possible for our government to help us that way. If your local city tried to pass laws to make it harder to overdose you with soda pop, then the soda pop salesman will get a law passed at the state or federal level to defend his income from the good intentions of your nearest government body.
If you want to protect your family from obesity and mysterious food additives, then it will take work from every member of your family to do it. If your children are little, maybe you get them to participate in the cooking of new foods, let them choose one new ingredient at the vegetable section of your market. Let them pick a recipe, let them help cook, and they will surely help eat. If your spouse shops, help. Start the process of breaking those bad habits that the community has trained shoppers to make in the store. If you read this blog then you know by now that you should not be trusting the words on the boxes and bags from the aisles in the center of the store. Your shopper might not know that. Your shopper might feel that by choosing ‘whole wheat’ over ‘regular’ bread that they are helping, when in fact that is nothing more than a sideways move. You must involve your entire community in your effort to become better. At the same time your entire community will become better as well.
Even though this is much more work than a new federal law would be in improving the health of the US family as a whole, it will be much better to do it from the bottom up. The fighting that would happen against a law will eventually gut it just like the fights against every other good law that we have benefited from. Everywhere there is talk against unemployment insurance, social security, the minimum wage. Only in places where the workers are protected by an actual union contract with the employer are the workers really secure in their employment and benefits. It doesn’t get more local than that. Your diet changes will be best effected at that same level. In your house, at your place of work, in your local community. You can help get it going as close to you as possible, you can be the motivator, or you can be the cheerleader. You have to change with the help of others.
Here is something for the kids when they visit.
About:
These banana pecan pancakes are not only delicious, but dairy free, egg-free, Sugar free and vegan. This pancakes consists of muesli, whole wheat bread, flaxmeal (ground Linseed) with peanut butter and banana. As I used peanut butter haven’t used any sweetner in my batter.
My little one doesn’t like spices so tried to avoid spices in here, however cinnamon/vanilla/any spices of your choice can be included.
Health benefits:
Muesli is regarded as a healthy breakfast as it is a good source of dietary fiber, or roughage. Found in several muesli components, but especially in wheat and oats, fiber helps to curb high cholesterol and prevent digestive problems
Enjoy this healthy breakfast pancakes with your favourite toppings.
Yields-8-10 pancakes
Preparation time-10 minutes
Cooking time-15-20 minutes
View original post 157 more words
![10-commandments-block[1]](https://dcarmack.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/10-commandments-block1.jpg)
Say what you will about the ten commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/hlmencke161245.html#mIQEEp4Uw2zLPdr8.99
Love that quote. Religion is like that, you have a bunch of restrictions, but if it’s not specifically forbidden, then you can use your own best judgement. Your judgement is what you are using in either case. Lots of people though, feel free to do anything that is not spelled out to them as off-limits, but consider doing something that is off-limits as a sin. You can’t claim to be clean and sober for one hundred days if you took one drink yesterday. The counter goes back to zero for them.
Your diet might be like that. My diet is not. I don’t have a dietary religion. There are no taboos, and I don’t keep any kind of score. If I ate sugar yesterday, then I don’t today. I try very hard to not bring the temptations into my home, so that when I eat all of my choices are on the new list, not old bad habits off of the old list. I eat potato chips, the kind that list ‘potatoes and salt’ on the list of ingredients. I don’t eat bread or pasta because we don’t buy them at the supermarket. I do eat fresh fruits and vegetables without regard for their sweetness or their organicness. It is good enough for me that they are single ingredient foods for which no one ever places a health claim on their labels. I like no labels on my foods.
The journey that I am on is one of change. I have changed my morning routine to include no sugar in my coffee, and breakfast every single day. Those were small changes. They were significant changes. I have started bringing fresh fruit to eat as a snack before I drive home. It satisfies me until I get to eat my dinner. I won’t look for a snack at home if I had a good one at work. Changing when I think about tomorrow’s dinner from tomorrow to today has allowed me to always have an entree thawed out and this keeps me from just going out and getting food or ordering a pizza delivered.
We do still get pizza delivered from time to time. We do still decide to go eat at restaurants instead of cooking at home every day. Nice thing is that it’s no sin to do so. We might even share a desert. Likewise, no sin, but we aren’t going to make a habit of it. Day in and day out we eat smart, local, single ingredient foods. Three meals a day, on average, we are following the plans we made yesterday. We eat foods loaded with real probiotics, fermented in our own kitchen. We eat foods containing natural oils, natural sugars. Very little of what we eat contains any artificial ingredients. When I was a kid, before 1973, foods that were not ‘real’ natural foods were required to be labeled ‘Imitation’. I remember margarine labeled as imitation butter. When they changed the law, now they can label it as ‘low fat’. Low fat mayonnaise is really impossible, for instance. Low fat mayonnaise is imitation mayo. Way back when it would have been labeled as such. Now, they can fake just about any ingredient in your foods and you will never be the wiser. The only clue will be the health claim on the label. Don’t buy foods with health claims on the label.
 | Jenny Hill on Killing in the Name |
 | Brian Grondell on I Wish It Were That Easy |
 | dcarmack on Love Your Food, Even Before It… |
 | Wells Family Farms on Love Your Food, Even Before It… |
| dcarmack on Killing in the Name |
One Small Change at a Time 