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.

___________________________________________________________________________

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…

What exactly is Jello made of?

http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/jello.asp

This mys­tery has been long been over­due for an expla­na­tion. All I can is “Ewwww!”

_______________________________

Where does red food dye come from?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=beetle-juice-is-your-food-bugged-2009–01-09

I knew this one, but nobody ever believes me…Double ewwwww!

________________________________________________

How about blue food dye while we are at it?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=where-does-blue-food-dye

I can speak from per­sonal expe­ri­ence with my son on both red and blue dyes. They have a very pro­nounced effect on his behav­ior. Given that, and their sources, does it make sense to eat it just because it looks nice?

Although bugs are a good source of pro­tein. I think I would rather eat the bee­tle to get the nutri­ents  rather than through M & Ms’ or cos­metic prod­ucts on my skin.