Helofuud.com

I hope that peo­ple will at least some­day rec­og­nize that their cats and dogs shouldn’t be eat­ing corn, soy, and rice based foods col­ored with Red 40. Even if they don’t rec­og­nize this point for their own health, at least most can see the logic for their pets. Does this even make sense? There are good pet foods out there but you have to seek them out and you will pay a lit­tle more for them. Read the ingre­di­ents on your pets food and ask your­self if it sounds like foods they would eat if they had a choice in the wild. I promise you they wouldn’t pick high fruc­tose corn syrup over a piece of beef. Isn’t Fido worth it?

I am often asked to pro­vide a list of (click here->) the foods we eat and do not eat. Here is that list.

I am sure I have omit­ted some things but the major foods are there. It may seem extreme but it really isn’t. It is a lit­tle chal­leng­ing at times only because the bulk of mass pro­duced foods are not tai­lored to this lifestyle.Even so, it is quite easy to stick to once you under­stand the effects that cer­tain foods have on your health.

If you are inter­ested, do a lit­tle research. I did. It is no coin­ci­dence that this lifestyle is a com­mon choice amongst can­cer patients. It is easy to see why when you start tak­ing a close look at what is in the foods you are eating.

I have been doing some research into this in an effort not to sound like a paranoid-hypochondriac when I finally do post, but I hon­estly don’t think the infor­ma­tion can wait.

Besides this recent news arti­cle I have found that this phe­nom­e­non isn’t iso­lated to apple juice and peo­ple need to know about it.

Below are links to the news arti­cle, pod­cast, and a research study on arsenic in bev­er­ages that I am still review­ing. You can decide for yourself.

Arsenic Lev­els High in Apple Juice, St. Peters­burg Times Finds — Audio Version

St. Pete Times Article

Arsenic in Com­mer­cial Bev­er­ages Study

con­tinue reading…

Do I Eat This?

Some­times we just need some­thing easy to remem­ber to help us make bet­ter choices when it comes to food. Com­pli­cated diets and menus are not prac­ti­cal. You need to be able to make deci­sions on the fly when­ever you are faced with the deci­sion to eat, or not to eat. I love acronyms so D.I.E.T. Rules seemed as good as any to use. 8). A sim­ple, easy to fol­low set of guide­posts to help you along the way through daily life.

If you make small con­scious choices like this one each time you eat it becomes an effort­less habit in no time. Then you can add to it and really build some momen­tum with your eat­ing habits. Weight comes off eas­ily and you feel bet­ter too.

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Take the helo­fuud chal­lenge and try fol­low­ing this one small guide­line for just one week.

D.I.E.T. Rule #1:

If you can­not pro­nounce it and/or you do not know what it is, do not eat it..

Start by read­ing the ingre­di­ents label on every­thing you eat. I will warn you now, if you are eat­ing a lot of food from a box or can you will have a lit­tle work to do.

Pretty sim­ple rule to fol­low right? Just because some­thing is sold as food and just because the FDA or some sci­en­tist tells you that it is okay to eat, doesn’t mean that it is.

Smok­ing cig­a­rettes was once con­sid­ered okay by experts too. In fact I recently found a num­ber vin­tage news­pa­per arti­cles (pre-1950) not­ing the ben­e­fits of smok­ing by experts includ­ing med­ical doc­tors. Hope­fully we can learn some­thing from his­tory since we all know how the whole “smok­ing is good for you” thing worked out. Let’s not make the same mis­take with the foods we eat by lis­ten­ing to experts who tell us that things like Polysor­bate 60 and cal­cium sul­fate are okay to eat. (FYI — those are just two of the ingre­di­ents in Twinkies.) Coin­ci­den­tally both ingre­di­ents are also used in rocket fuel. Mmm…mmm!

If you really want to eat some­thing you can’t pro­nounce, at least do some home­work and find out what it is first. Then if you still feel safe doing so, go ahead. Try doing a search for Polysor­bate 60 and ask your­self if you would still eat it if it wasn’t in a Twinkie.

Also make no assump­tions if you can pro­nounce it. Red food dye sounds sim­ple enough right? Click here to find out what it really is.

Unfor­tu­nately most fruits and veg­eta­bles are not required to include ingre­di­ent labels yet. With­out an ingre­di­ents label you have no way of know­ing exactly what was used to grow your food. Hence you don’t know its true ingredients.

For more on this check out my post on Organic vs. GMO & Con­ven­tion­ally grown fruits and vegetables.

Remem­ber, if it sounds too sci­en­tific or you need to Google it to know what it is, don’t eat it. If every­one did this I am will­ing to haz­ard a guess that the world­wide can­cer rate would begin to drop.

I recently read the results of a study that was con­ducted to deter­mine the pos­si­ble health effects of the com­mon every day food dye referred to as Red #40. Like so many of the count­less reports pro­duced to scare us into some type of mass pho­bia about the foods we eat, this one is no dif­fer­ent. This study, in which rats were fed a diet con­sist­ing of up to 10% Red 40 for two weeks, concluded

Red-40 sig­nif­i­cantly reduced repro­duc­tive suc­cess, parental and off­spring weight, brain weight, sur­vival, and female vagi­nal patency devel­op­ment. Behav­iorally, R40 pro­duced sub­stan­tially decreased run­ning wheel activ­ity, and slightly increased post­wean­ing open-field rear­ing activ­ity. Over­all, R40 pro­duced evi­dence of both phys­i­cal and behav­ioral tox­i­c­ity in devel­op­ing rats at doses of up to 10% of the diet.

Once again it seems we are fed infor­ma­tion from a half baked study from some fly by night orga­ni­za­tion called the Amer­i­can Jour­nal of Med­i­cine, in an effort to scare us. We have been eat­ing this stuff for years. For that mat­ter I am sure many peo­ple con­sume more than the pre­scribed 10% noted in the study with rats. I have per­son­ally been con­sum­ing foods with things like red 40 since I was a kid and I am still breath­ing.  Big deal, so what if it is red. Besides I am not a rat!

That, was the old me talk­ing. The “me” that existed less than a decade ago. The one that often let reports about things like food dyes, go in one ear and con­tinue reading…