Time For Change

It's time for a few changes in our home and lifestyle. To date....I have always been very much interested in good nutrition and health. From the time I was young I loved to cook and read cookbooks for fun, knowledge and adventure in good eating. I was the first person in the family to eat or make whole wheat bread. Whole wheat pizza dough was a foreign concept, but was relished with delight. In deed, pizza dough was the only beneficial use for whole wheat flour. How was it that I could have been raised on white Sunbeam bread? So I sojourned through life filtering out the education I received in cooking and nutrition and have since adopted new politically incorrect information. The results?

Everything I once believed to be true about nutrition and our government regulating agencies that are "supposed to look out for the welfare of the American people" is untrue. The regulating agencies: EPA, USDA, FDA have revolving doors with the big agri-businesses and the policies that are supposed to be made for the benefit of the health of our country and its people are only policies that benefit big agri-business. So great is the corruption in our government that our country is face with illness in epidemic proportions.

So what kind of changes do I intend to make immediately. For starters.....I will not buy anything that contains high-fructose corn syrup. Almost all the corn produced in this country is Genetically Engineered. That means that the very corn itself is considered a pesticide/herbicide. Why would I want to eat that? All studies performed outside of Monsanto have been discredited and only the Monsanto studies are used by our government regulating GE crops. Since when do we allow a company with a financial gain to do the studies? Outside peer reviews on these studies show that the studies were lax and were not searching for anything negative. Why would they want to prove that GE crops are unsafe? It wouldn't benefit their company. Indeed, most countries now believe that these crops are very unsafe to eat and are watching the people in our country get sicker and sicker like researchers watching rats in a laboratory experiment.

What is a replacement for high-fructose corn syrup? Sugar. But buyer beware......Genetically Engineered beets hit the market this year and since most of the sugar used in processed foods and candies comes from beets you aren't safe there either. Now you have to look for cane sugar....frustrating isn't it. Perhaps the time will come when the entire food supply is contaminated. It will be if people don't do something about it. At least if Genetically Modified foods were labelled we could make a choice, but since our government won't give us that choice, we have to make the only choice we can....go organic.

Soy is the other big no-no. Most of the soy produced in our country is also Genetically Engineered. I wonder how many Americans know that 70% of our food supply is contaminated with Genetically Modified foods. I know I didn't until recently and I just happened to stumble upon this information with a lot of digging......it's not in the mainstream media....that's for sure.

Third.....no rBGH. That means reading labels labels labels and calling companies. I will only buy milk if I know the company can tell me no growth hormones are used. That means all dairy.


So what is a person to do? Well, for me it means taking advantage of buying clubs, co-ops, and other health food stores. I wasn't as fanatical about organics before even though I grew a lot of my own organic food and organics are important to me. But......now I will only buy organic dairy, soy, cottonseed, corn, canola (don't like canola anyway which is another story, but if something is fried in it, it has be organic). That means no more shopping at the local grocery for the most part as most of those do not have any organics (or very little).

The inspiration to each more local fresh foods is increasing with each page I read in Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle book. Investing in good nutrition and good health is much easier than forking out money to doctors and insurance companies for illnesses that probably could have been avoided in the first place. I have always thought "you are what you eat." I totally embrace that statement even more now.

The government is not going to take of you. The only person that is going to take care of you is you. You.....that is the place to begin change. This does change my thinking.....so what do I feed my kids? That means no more go-gurts, animal crackers, happy meals....wow, this is extreme.

I'll be sharing recipes that I build over the course of the next year that will become the nutritional counterpart to these fast convenient unhealthy snacks. I have always loved to cook and I love to cook from scratch (the more extreme sort of "from scratch" that most people can't relate to), but I have relied on quick conveniences like crackers, sweetned yogurt cups, sweetened canned fruits, and such. Now....to find replacements....and fast....the kids are starving!

Stayed tuned.....recipes to follow.