Don’t ask me how but I got started watching this show on one of the Discovery type channels that centered around healthly lifestyles. One of those make over the obese type shows. They sent some type of doctor out with these folks when they went grocery shopping and he made suggestions as to which foods to avoid. One of the things they were really against was hydrogenated oils. In fact they flat out said don’t buy anything that contained them and they are either banned or on the way out in European countries. So that afternoon I head out to the grocery store to stock up and think “this can’t be that hard, I’m not going to buy anything with hydrogenated oils.” Holy shit! They are in way more products than I thought.
Here’s a challenge for you: find one edible product that has at least 5 ingredients that doesn’t contain corn.
Good luck.
mostly stuff you shouldn’t be eating anyway. what were stocking up on?
Peanut butter of all things. For some reason it never occured to me that it would be in there. I promptly put down the Jiff and picked up this organic brand that’s 100% trans fat free Pretty good actually - and you don’t have to put it in the fridge. After I saw it in PB as we walked down the aisles I just started looking at random products.
It pretty much boils down to prepared foods vs food you cook yourself. In general, prepared foods are loaded with lots of junk to make it either last on the shelf longer or cheaper to cook. When you cook most of your own food it isn’t very hard at all to avoid bad ingredients.
I like the Skippy Natural creamy peanut butter -I think they’ve got it in chunky now too- but that’s got Palm Oil listed as an ingredient. Is that bad too?
I’ve never been much of a fan of the all-natural ones that have to be refridgerated.
there are better peanut butters, there is no reason to have to have palm oil. maybe they put it in there to make it spread. yuck.
A lot of effort is being made by food companies to get rid of that stuff. It is our of a lot of snack foods now. Most cookies and cracker type items such as wheat thins, cheese its and oreos are transfat free. Two years ago it was carb mania. Now it is transfat mania. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Screw the hydrogenated oils ,its in everything . Sugar as well , people play the fruit game "Natural sugar " , complex carbs .
The chemical symbol is the same for sugar in -honey - sugar - brown sugar - molasses - grapes - watermelon -sodas- apples, its just the concentration.
Keeping your intake level low and even ,Some eat all day 6 am to 10 pm small hand fulls and stay slim. 3 squares a day only works if your on a farm / labor .
But in the real world asking the waiter at a business dinner " ah is this hydrogenated oil " on the side dish ? Is the squid Kosher ? is the water bottled or tap. It tells everyone Viagra pills will only make you taller.
hee hee. I had four pieces of toast smeared with the stuff for breakfast this morning 
the jar ought to be gone after breakfast tomorrow, then maybe I’ll try to find a natural brand I like.
we’re running out of nutrients to obsess over!
I absolutely LOVE natural peanut butter. Make sure you get the salted variety. The unsalted is less delicious. Any brand is okay. I got hooked with Smucker’s natural. It’s hard to stir, but very tasty. Trader Joes has the cheapest- it’s $1.70 per jar. I never refrigerate my peanut butter. But it also never sits in my cabinet for too long.
Jodi
the hydrogenated oil keeps the PB from separating. I get Adam’s PB. The only ingredient is Peanuts.
On a similar note, we quit buying soda or anything with high fructose corn syrup in it about a year ago and now if my daughter has a coke at a friend’s house she can’t drink it because it’s so sweet. Fructose tastes much sweeter for the same concentration as sucrose but it requires much more processing to produce it. IZZIE soda is pretty good. It’s just fruit juice and soda water.
I just picked up the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan. The first chapter is on industrial corn. I heard an interview with the author on NPR a few months ago and I think the book is going to be really interesting. Here’s a blurb on it:
From Publishers Weekly
Reviewed by Pamela KaufmanPollan (The Botany of Desire) examines what he calls “our national eating disorder” (the Atkins craze, the precipitous rise in obesity) in this remarkably clearheaded book. It’s a fascinating journey up and down the food chain, one that might change the way you read the label on a frozen dinner, dig into a steak or decide whether to buy organic eggs. You’ll certainly never look at a Chicken McNugget the same way again.Pollan approaches his mission not as an activist but as a naturalist: “The way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world.” All food, he points out, originates with plants, animals and fungi. "ven the deathless Twinkie is constructed out of… well, precisely what I don’t know offhand, but ultimately some sort of formerly living creature, i.e., a species. We haven’t yet begun to synthesize our foods from petroleum, at least not directly."Pollan’s narrative strategy is simple: he traces four meals back to their ur-species. He starts with a McDonald’s lunch, which he and his family gobble up in their car. Surprise: the origin of this meal is a cornfield in Iowa. Corn feeds the steer that turns into the burgers, becomes the oil that cooks the fries and the syrup that sweetens the shakes and the sodas, and makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients (yikes) in the Chicken McNuggets.Indeed, one of the many eye-openers in the book is the prevalence of corn in the American diet; of the 45,000 items in a supermarket, more than a quarter contain corn. Pollan meditates on the freakishly protean nature of the corn plant and looks at how the food industry has exploited it, to the detriment of everyone from farmers to fat-and-getting-fatter Americans. Besides Stephen King, few other writers have made a corn field seem so sinister.Later, Pollan prepares a dinner with items from Whole Foods, investigating the flaws in the world of “big organic”; cooks a meal with ingredients from a small, utopian Virginia farm; and assembles a feast from things he’s foraged and hunted.This may sound earnest, but Pollan isn’t preachy: he’s too thoughtful a writer, and too dogged a researcher, to let ideology take over. He’s also funny and adventurous. He bounces around on an old International Harvester tractor, gets down on his belly to examine a pasture from a cow’s-eye view, shoots a wild pig and otherwise throws himself into the making of his meals. I’m not convinced I’d want to go hunting with Pollan, but I’m sure I’d enjoy having dinner with him. Just as long as we could eat at a table, not in a Toyota. *(Apr.)*Pamela Kaufman is executive editor at Food & Wine magazine.
beer.
"The chemical symbol is the same for sugar in -honey - sugar - brown sugar - molasses - grapes - watermelon -sodas- apples, its just the concentration. "
Not quite true:
honey - fructose (5-member hemiketal ring) and glucose (6 member hemiacetal)
sugar, molasses and brown sugar(sugar with molasses) - sucrose which is a disaccharide of glucose and fructose
fruits - fructose
soda - high fructose corn syrup HFCS (usually a 55% mixture of fructose and 45% glucose)
but you point that they are all the same is not really wrong. They are all quickly metabolized, and very little data supports benifits of one vs. the other. (although if you ask some people HFCS’s are evil!)
Damn. I just checked my Funnel Cake Mix. It has Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil. Now what am I going to do?
Hydrogenated oils and HFC’s ie high fructose corn syrup … are the two no-no’s cuz they are both chemically altered and therefore are not metabolized by the body efficiently for energy and instead take a short-cut to becoming fat deposits particularly around the midriff. … Well at least that’s what I seem to get from my reading.
So my supermarket shopping and home cooking has altered drastically over the last couple of years. Problem is when I eat out which is quite often. I still try to eat healthy, but I wonder just how much of this junk I am ingesting that I don’t even realize.
Corn sugars are used in the fermentation process in many, if not most, breweries.
Should be making cakes out of a mixture of your own basic ingredients and recipe and not one that comes out of a box. - This way you can add in some goodies like wholemeal flour and skimmed yoghurt, depending on the recipe. … Healthy Cake!