Our Daily Bread

"The less ingredients, the better." (And the closer to its' natural state). My husband said this last year, and I've heard it said a lot that if you can't easily pronounce the ingredients on your food labels, then it's probably not very good for you. We try to live/eat by this simple rule. I was shopping for bread today and kept reading the labels only to find more and more pesky artificial, modified and chemical additives like mono and diglycerides, yellow No.5, high fructose corn syrup, modified corn starch, etc. Why would I want modified corn in my bread? It's not needed if I make bread at home, but all of these extra ingredients found in our every day food, cereal, drinks, ice cream, even fruit which is sometimes injected with coloring to make it more appealing... why can't we let our food remain in its' natural state? Well, because it needs to last on the shelves that it sits on for months, stay cheap for manufacturers, and needs chemical preservatives to keep it "fresh"; but how fresh is it if it needs so much intervention to make it seem that way?

To make bread you only need salt, flour, water and yeast; and for ice cream: milk, sugar, cream, and flavoring like fruit or vanilla, but look at the ingredients on the label at the store and you'll see that it's filled with long, unpronounceable words. Studies now point to synthetic preservatives and artificial coloring agents as aggravating ADD and ADHD symptoms, both in people with these disorders and in the general population. By some estimates, over 75% of all processed foods sold in the U.S. contain a GMO ingredient: Corn, soy, canola, cottonseed, sugar, beef and dairy products are among the most likely to have been genetically modified. There is an obesity epidemic in the US, highly due to the huge increase in high fructose corn syrup in our daily diets in the last 35 years which is a cheaper and more commercially produced replacement for sugar. This began in the 70's, and US corn prices are kept low by our government paying subsidies to corn growers, while cane sugar is expensive as import tariffs are placed on it. Our bodies do not process corn syrup the same as sugar, and it leads to stored fat and metabolic syndrome. Soft drink makers, Coca-Cola and Pepsi use sugar in other nations, but switched to HFCS in the U.S. in 1984. In 2010, the Corn Refiners Association (CRA), the industry which manufactures High Fructose Corn Syrup, petitioned the U.S. FDA to change the name of HFCS to "Corn Sugar" so it would seem less unhealthy, by "confusing" consumers... ARE WE THIS PASSIVE about our health as a nation? Read labels, make informed decisions, vote with your dollar about what should be kept on and off the shelves. Take care of your family's health, because the FDA, the pharmaceutical companies, and the health care system in this country WILL NOT DO IT FOR YOU. (And I won't even get started on our over-use of cell phones and wireless technology ... we are probably giving ourselves and everyone around us tumors from the huge amount of time spent using these convenient accoutrements.
http://hubpages.com/hub/Health-concerns-over-wireless-technologies



(I loved Jamie Oliver's cooking shows before this, but now... he's my hero;)