Clutter In Our Life, Part 5

Clutter #5 - Food Choices

Part 5 of 10

In our lives, we clutter our bodies with very poor food choices. Before you start thinking and trying to convince me that you are the healthiest eating human alive, consider how many aisles in the store are for absolutely healthy eating and how many are questionable to say the least. If you don't know, take a trip to any local grocery store and you'll quickly see what I am talking about. Of course, you might be one of the rare people who do eat healthy and if so, I applaud you for it.

We as humans tend to fill our shopping carts up with the processed stuff and we rush past the produce section of whole vegetables and fruits. We pay little attention to the ingredients in the food we buy including such things as amounts of sugar, salt, high fructose corn syrup, additives and preservatives among other things.

We think that frozen vegetables and processed foods are just as healthy as the natural stuff but of course, we are only kidding ourselves.

There is much we should pay attention to in the food we buy and what we eat. The more conscious we are of this, the more healthy our body will be in the long term. What we put in our body is what fuels us through our day so if we put garbage in, we get garbage out.

Come back tomorrow for part 6 of this series, Clutter In Our Life. Below are the various parts to this series that you can read as well.

Clutter In Our Life Series
- Introduction
Part 1: Spending our hours watching TV news
Part 2: Keeping Ourselves Constantly Busy
Part 3: Numbing Ourselves
Part 4: Following Blindly
Part 5: Food Choices
Part 6: Health care, Doctors, and Medicine
Part 7: Hydrating Our Bodies
Part 8: Thinking We Have The Answers
Part 9: Exercise Is For Another Day
Part 10: We Fail To Evolve
- The 30 Day Challenge


Blog Post & Images (c) 3/20/11 Don Shetterly - use by permission only
http://www.donshetterly.com

NO High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)

If High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is so healthy, beneficial and good for us as the "corn sweetener industry" would have us believe, why is this ketchup product being sold in the way it is. On the label (see picture with this blog post), it clearly states that there is NO High Fructose Corn Syrup.

If this was such a healthy product for us to consume, wouldn't you think the manufacturer would be highlighting that point? They would not go to all the trouble of making a special label on a specific product that everyone uses to say, "hey our product does not have HFCS in it!"

I applaud Hunts for making a Ketchup product that has no high fructose corn syrup. Maybe by them doing this, it will push the other manufacturers to follow its lead and do the same thing.

We all know that the food industry makes claims of fact when it is nothing but organized branding and marketing campaigns. You can say all you want to about how great HFCS is but in the end, you're only fooling yourself. You can discount all the wisdom out there while pushing your claims of how it isn't really bad for you like you see in the commercials on TV. In the end, you're only fooling yourself.

I get appalled when I go grocery shopping and see just how many products have this sweetener in them when it is a product that should not have sweetener of any type in it. We wonder why diabetes and obesity are problems in this country? Do I need to say more?

In fact, it is difficult to find products these days without all the High Fructose Corn Syrup in them. When we go shopping we read the labels and if possible, we buy products without it. If you begin to read the labels of all the products you buy, you'll quickly see just what some of these corporate manufacturers put in the food we consume.

I hope that consumers in this country wake up to what is pushed upon us by corporations who are just out to make another dollar. Most of these corporations talk a good talk but they don't walk the walk.

It is up to each one of us to open our eyes and become aware of what we consume. Only then can we make the choices that are best for us. Don't just follow what the Corn Sweetener Industry or advertisements try to get you to believe. Be smarter than that and do your own homework.

For more information on this subject, check out a blog post I wrote in June 2010 called, "Agave Nectar, The High Fructose Health Food Fraud".

Become informed because the more you know, the better off you are!



Blog Post & Images (c) 12/13/10 Don Shetterly - use by permission only

Glucose and Fructose

According to an article published by Reuters and found on the website, rawstory.com, corn byproduct fructose literally fuels cancer cell growth a recent study finds. A team at the University of California, Los Angeles published their findings in the Journal of Cancer Research. The specific study or publication this research is in was not stated in the article so it is hard to verify any of these claims.

One quote from this article sort of sums up what the article is all about. Please read the entire article for the full context of this quote and all other information.

The industry has also argued that sugar is sugar.

Heaney said his team found otherwise. They grew pancreatic cancer cells in lab dishes and fed them both glucose and fructose.

Tumor cells thrive on sugar but they used the fructose to proliferate. "Importantly, fructose and glucose metabolism are quite different," Heaney's team wrote.