High Fructose Corn Syrup

Let’s talk about High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)

The commercials tell you not to worry about it and that it is the same thing as sugar.  You can see it in a lot of different products such as soda, yogurt, frozen foods and ketchup.  So what is it?

High-fructose corn syrup is made by converting the glucose in corn syrup to fructose, then mixing it with pure corn syrup. It’s a sweetner added to foods and beverages to provide a sweet like sugar taste, it enhances flavors, it gives breakfast bars their chewy texture and gives food a longer shelve life as well as constant moisture.  HFCS is chemically similar to table sugar, it’s a mixture of fructose and glucose and it’s cheap.  If you were a soda maker wouldn’t you want to be able to charge the same but make a cheaper product?  The resent concern is how it is processed.  Well in my new world the word “processed “ isn’t something that I want in my belly!

Our bodies as amazing as they are cannot process the fructose in the HFCS.  We process it differently than cane sugar or beet sugar, it alters our automatic way of regulating our hormones.  It forces the liver to kick more fat into the blood stream, tricking us into eating more and storing more fat.

And it isn’t only the fact that we can’t process the stuff there is so much of it in anything we touch.  A can of soda can have as much as 13 teaspoons of sugar in it in the form of HFCS!!  To make it worse most of us have 31 tsp of sugar a day without knowing it, hidden in our foods.  Yogurt can have up to 10 tsp.  HFCS is even in bread, it makes it brown nicely as well as English muffins and hot dog buns it also makes the breads stay fresh longer.  Read the labels on the gogurts you have in your fridge!  Tomorrow we’ll chat about another bad ingredient that can also be found in yogurt.

It’s found in…..

• Regular soft drinks
• Fruit juice and fruit drinks that are not 100 percent      juice
• Pancake syrups
• Popsicles
• Fruit-flavored yogurts
• Frozen yogurts
• Ketchup and BBQ sauces
• Jarred and canned pasta sauces
• Canned soups
• Canned fruits (if not in its own juice)
• Breakfast cereals
• Highly sweetened breakfast cereals

It’s causes….

• It can lead to higher caloric intake
• It can lead to an increase in bodyweight
• It fools your body into thinking it’s hungry
• It increases the amount of processed foods you eat, thereby decreasing your intake of nutrient-dense foods
• It may increase insulin resistance and triglycerides

It is called

High Fructose Corn Syrup, HFCS, or corn sugar.

Check out www.sfgate.com/sugarcoated or just google the words above

What I got rid of in my kitchen

I’m going to give you one ingredient a day to look into. You decide if you want to continue to feed it to your family. Let me know what you think!

Ingredient #1 MSG

So now that I told you what really started my food revolution!  Let me tell you what I did next.  I cleaned out my pantry!  This may seem to be overwhelming to some so I’m going to give you one do not eat ingredient a day for the next week.  Today it’s MSG!  You’ve all heard of it right?  Panda Express posts on the front of thier window that they are now MSG free.  Do we really know what MSG is?  If we eat it just once a month is it a big deal?  I’ll tell you what it is and you decide.  MSG (Mono Sodium Glutamate) is a food additive, it’s added to chinese food, fast food, canned foods, frozen foods, processed meats, sauces and much more.  The FDA has ruled it as safe but requires it to be added to the ingredient label on the back of our foods.  It is a added preservative that increases the insulin in your pancreas.  What does that mean, obese people!  And to top it off the FDA allows a bunch of different names to be added to the back of our food to confuse you.  What does MSG do to you besides make you fat?  Headaches, Nausea, vomiting, hives, itching are most common but it can be mistaken for an allergy.  But what if you found out that it could alter your DNA, cause hormone imbalances, cause endocrine problems and much more?  Would you allow your children to eat it?  Research it yourself and then check all your soups, meats and dressings for the following names and toss them out.

Textured protein
Autolyzed yeast
Yeast extract
Yeast food
Glutamate
Glutamic Acid
Autolyzed plant protein
Sodium caseinate
Calcium caseinate
Hydrolyzed protein
Hydrolyzed vegetable protein(HVP)
Hydrolyzed plant protein (HPP)
Soy protein extract
Natural flavors

Google slowly poisoning america, great information.

 

Back to the beginning of everything Goodness!!

Back in November of 2008, Thanksgiving Day we were in Las Vegas with my in-laws. My sweet little 9 year old got out of the shower and came into have me blow dry her hair for dinner. She picked up her bangs to show me a circular bald spot right under her bangs on her front hair line. As I was looking through her hair I noticed that her part line on top of her head had separated a little, more scalp was showing. This is a little girl that not only had a thick head of hair but she had a ton of it. I had never noticed any hair loss previous to this maybe because she had so much to cover it up. I got on the computer immediately and started my google search. She has an uncle on her biological dad’s side that has hair loss but at the time I didn’t really remember why or what it was caused by. Everything I searched came up as Alopecia Areata. Most of the sites said that when it happens at a young age it usually leads to permanent hair loss with limited to no re-growth. I really didn’t say anything to her and didn’t want to show her that I was really concerned.
We scheduled an appointment with a dermatologist for a few days later. He confirmed Alopecia Areata, she was crushed! We were both crying in the doctor’s office as I was trying to keep it together she said “Mom, I don’t want to be bald”! What do I say to that? How am I supposed to make her feel better? I felt helpless. That was the first of December 2008 by April 2009 she was completely bald from head to toe eyebrows, lashes and all! In the meantime I was looking for answers why? Genetics? What could I do to make this go away, what could I do to give her hope of hair growth? I was on a mission! I spent hours a day online looking at what items are sold, doctors explanations and as many books and blogs as I could find to help me. Auto-Immune disease is what all the sites and doctors say but they really don’t have any hard science to back that claim up. It is usually secondary to another underlying auto-immune disease such as Lupus or MS. We went in for testing, nothing showed. The dermatologist said he would recommend oral, topical and injections of steroids in the head. I gave them a shot, all but the oral. I don’t really love the idea of steroids. We decided that I didn’t need an upset, oversized 9 year old that was puffed up on steroids and since we saw no hair growth anyway we only did that once and quit. I went back to the library and the computer.
The most amazing thing of all, at this point she didn’t care. She went on like normal, threw a wig on put a smile on her face and skipped off to school. I was torn apart trying to put this all together and find answers. I remember one morning she got out of the shower devastated because she had so much hair fall out in the shower. She was crying, she came in my room we chatted a bit and I finally said to her, “ you can stay home with me today if you want or you need to leave for the bus in 10 minutes”. She dried her eyes and took off out the door! That whole day I was a mess! Stayed in my pj’s all day and got back on my computer searching, I even called some company in the UK looking for answers. She got home after school, stuck her head in the front door asked if she could go to a friends and ran off! WHAT?? I was more upset that she was! I guess that’s my job. My efforts are paying off but we’ll get to that later!
She is now turning 13 this year, still wears a wig and some lashes from time to time but she has hair!! She has about ¾ of her head covered in fuzz and about ¼ of that being long black circle patches of hair. It’s starting to fill in all over her head. She has body hair now which she doesn’t love and half a right eye brow! It’s coming back! Slowly but surely! The most important part of this is that it hasn’t fallen out again. Not common for a person with a diagnosis of Alopecia .

Let’s start here

I’ll start out telling you how my journey started, it didn’t start with cancer.  I’ve always been interested in whole foods and natural healing, I just didn’t know how.  I know a lot of people that are in that same spot today.   Most don’t know that what they are eating may be affecting their family’s health.  And a lot of times even if you do know we are stuck in a routine, we buy the same ingredients and cook the same things in rotation.  Some have a bigger recipe box and others have a smaller one and a lot of us more than not pull a box out of the freezer and cook a pre made meal not knowing that this is what is going wrong with your health.  Do any of you know what is in those premade meals?  I’ll go over it later.  Do any of you have kids with allergies, ADD or ADHD, asthma, stomach or digestion issues?  No matter what medicines you try nothing helps.  Just when you think it is all better and gone for good something sparks it and there you go again, sick!  You aren’t alone.  This is what I hear from my friends and family.  Most people are surprised to know that the 4 of us are not on any daily medications.  I can say that I can’t remember the last time that I had to go get an antibiotic for any of us.  I do have a nebulizer with medicine for emergency asthma for my 2 girls but it’s rare that we have to use it.  It’s usually when we are in a home where a cat or long haired dog lives.  Stay tuned we’ll talk about all of the above and the small things you can do to make changes.

Help!

I have no idea how to do this!  Decorate a blog, make it look cute and give you what I want.  It’s all too confusing.  Please be patient while I learn.  If any of you would like to assist me, be my guest! Thanks!!

Let’s talk

This blog is hopefully going to help you as much as it will help me. I’ll blog about my lifestyle changes, how I did it, who inspires me, the roller coaster ride it has taken me on and much, much more. You can share your ideas with me, show me your path and we cab give each other advice. Let’s change the way we eat, think and behave, together we can achieve lots!!!