A Dose of Health

The Killer Birthday Cake

My daughter decided that she wanted to have a sleep over birthday party. It was a last minute thing so the preparations were done quickly. We decorated downstairs, came up with a theme and invitations went out the week of the party (it really was a last minute thing).

I ordered pizza and picked up a cake and ice cream from the local store.

It wasn’t until after the party was over that I happened to read the ingredients in the cake that I realized that I was killing my daughter and her guests. I almost called each of the parents to have them take their daughters to the local hospital to have their stomachs pumped, but I realized that was overkill.

Here are the first three ingredients listed on the cake container:

• Sugar
• Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil
• Enriched Wheat Flour (it wouldn’t need enriching if the manufacturers used whole grain flour instead)

YIKES! The total trans fat grams per serving: 3 grams. That’s right, 3 grams of trans fat per serving. The 10” round white cake was supposed to squeeze out 26 servings (according to the nutrition label).. That means that each piece of cake should have been cut .38 of an inch thick to get away with consuming only 3 grams of trans fat (ONLY 3 Grams!) per serving.

I probably should have given the girls a plastic bag to eat as it had the same nutritional value as the cake.

Lesson learned, no more last minute parties. It’s detrimental to the health.

Natural Sweeteners

After reviewing my last entry I realized that my writing style had taken on the same style of the American news media. American news media tends to go for blood and gore. The glass is half empty rather than half full, if it bleeds it leads.

My last post on high fructose corn syrup was rather gloomy. Don’t get me wrong, high fructose corn syrup is not a pleasant thing to consume and people should stay away from it but rather than approaching it from the negative, I really should approach it from a positive point of view.

I’m not going to ramble on about the ills of high fructose corn syrup. Rather, I’d like to share healthier alternatives. Yes, there are natural sweeteners that are a much healthier alternative to high fructose corn syrup. Items such as stevia, maple syrup and date sugar, to name a few, are healthier and natural sweeteners.

Since Thomas Stearns Lee, NMD, in his article Natural Sweeteners has done a nice job in describing alternatives and Fran Costigan explains how to use them, I won’t reinvent the wheel. Check out their articles.

Personally, I’m partial to maple syrup while my hubby likes stevia. To each his own, just as long as it’s not the dreaded high fructose corn syrup.

When it comes to high fructose corn syrup, it’s best to stay away from processed foods and man-made juices. I know it’s easier said than done, but if you eliminate and substitute one product at a time, eventually you will significantly reduce your high fructose corn syrup intake.

We’ve got to take our health back one choice at a time.

High Fructose Corn Syrup - Don’t Bring it Home

Discovered in the 1970’s by Japanese scientists, high fructose corn syrup seemed like the answer to manufacturers prayers. Not only is it cheaper to make, it is sweeter than sugar and thus less is needed to achieve the same amount of sweetness. Additionally, high fructose corn syrup has a long shelf life. What manufacturer wouldn’t want to use it as a substitute for sugar?

If that sounds too good to be true, guess what? It is. High fructose corn syrup is currently having its way with consumers. Because it is in so many products and we are consuming it more and more each day, the ill effects are rearing their ugly head.

High fructose corn syrup is blamed for problems such as the obesity, diabetes, heart disease and high cholesterol. The fact that fructose occurs naturally in fruits and some vegetables, consumers are fooled into believing that it’s ‘all natural.’ After all, it occurs in fruits and vegetables.

What they don’t understand is that fructose occurs naturally in fruits and vegetables, but high fructose corn syrup doesn’t. High fructose corn syrup is a man made sugar. The nutritional value and health benefit of HFCS is pretty much non-existent.

And the Medical/Scientific Community Says…

The medical and scientific community cannot agree whether HFCS is actually making folks fatter. They’re not sure if it’s because the HFCS converts to fat faster and suppresses the production of the “tell the body I’m full” hormone, or if its because the foods that contain high fructose corn syrup is inherently high in calories, very tasty and serves to encourage folks to eat more of it.

I’m not a scientist and am not here to figure out the reasons why. All I know is that when man gets his grubby little hand on a food and tries to improve on God’s perfection, we end up with stuff like high fructose corn syrup, obesity, diabetes and all the rest of the stuff.

The foods that contain high fructose corn syrup are usually fast foods that are supposed to help us save time. The way I look at it, it saves us time up front, but we lose it on the back end. No, I didn’t have to take the time to bake the cake from scratch, or cook the French fries from whole potatoes, but a steady diet of Mc Big Meal and packaged cake will come back to haunt me in the long run (penny wise and pound foolish).

It’s time to change the way we purchase

Gone are the good old days when a trip to the grocery store was enjoyable. Now we must to read those tiny nutrition labels (which is not getting any easier with my advancing years) to look out for high fructose corn syrup and it’s unattractive cousin trans fat (disguised as hydrogenated oil of some sort).

Slow down, read labels and, just like exercise, try working a little from-scratch cooking into your life. At the very lease, leave the high fructose corn syrup on the grocery store shelf. With the current health care crisis in this country, you don’t want to continually eat something that has a good chance of making you sick!