The “High Fructose” States of “Partially Hydrogenated” America

A post by "Miss Pavla" To see more posts click here

For those that know me, I’m on a constant quest to find an alternative to what big business has to offer us in terms of food and living. It has been said that if a conglomerate makes it, you probably shouldn’t buy it, because somewhere down the line, they sacrificed something of value to you, for their bottom line.

From lead in children’s toys to growth hormones in our milk, I wonder why modern medicine even tries to keep up with curing/treating all the crap that people get instead of going on strike until the business world rules money second, and what’s best for people first (ah, utopia looks so good, doesn’t it!). I’m a firm believer that most of our cancers and diseases are caused/exacerbated by man-made things, so I look to deviate from the social norm when it comes to the things I eat, the things I

put on my body, the things I put in my home, or I suppose most importantly, the things I financially support by purchasing.

So in my hunt to deviate, I turned to the ‘green” world to quench my alternative thirst as I search for the most simple, basic, natural, and healthy alternatives to the things we use and expose ourselves to on a daily basis. At first it was just food. I started experimenting with organic and natural foods, like natural peanut butter and eggs, until I was a full-fledged Whole Foods-aholic. And the interesting thing is, once I started eating the better quality food, and then ate something from a regular supermarket, it honestly tasted bad. (The thought of a spoonful of Peter Pan peanut butter makes me cringe!) But now I use homemade cleaning products and natural skin and hair products as well. If you can’t eat it, you shouldn’t put it on your body!

Quality Counts

Yes, Whole Foods and its counterparts, such as Trader Joes, tend to be pricier (ok, they are pricier) than the regular grocery stores. But what is interesting about most people I know is that they make a good amount of money and will spend a lot of money on their house, car, and clothes, but are pissed off when the store is all out of “the cheapest” bread or canned peaches. This perforated mindset doesn’t make much sense to me. As the old saying goes, you pay for quality.

Food in America is MUCH cheaper than most other places I’ve been in the world, and it wasn’t until I started my independent studies on health and nutrition that I really found why:

The quality of American food is horrible; and the access to quality foods is even worse.

Items such as 100% pure maple syrup, pure unsalted butter (not “I can’t believe it’s not butter”), organic raw milk (the stuff your grandparents actually drank!), and chicken wings that don’t look like pterodactyl wings, are hard to come by in the Washington DC area if you’re at Giant, Safeway, Shopper’s, or a Super Walmart. For every one of these items that are found at these stores, you’ll find 5 processed ( and worse quality) cheaper items.

Foods are over-processed in America, and under-nutritious. Of the money Americans spend on food, 90 percent is spent on processed foods. Food processing is basically done to extend life (i.e. making them cheaper), not to make them more nutritional. In fact, processing reduces nutrition, in some cases, so low, that most the over-processed foods barely contain enough vitamins and minerals for a person to survive. Grains and oils are the most processed of foods (check the label for “hydrogenated”, ”refined”, ”enriched”, “preserved”, “irridated”, etc). To keep it short and simple, during processing, the husk, bran, and germ are removed, leaving just the endosperm (thats what she said). This is home to more than 24 nutrients, most  of which are destroyed during the refining process. Yet, when you buy a box of cereal du jour, it is “enriched” with the standard, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, and iron.

I’m no doctor, but I am an engineer, and what I do know is when you subtract 24 and add 4, you are in negative.

So if your kitchen looks more like this,

Than this, you should really look into what you’re swallowing every day.

Au Naturel

From high fructrose corn syrup to partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, we eat some shitty shit, for lack of a better term. HFCS is found in most of our sweetened packaged products (last I heard, somewhere around 85% of our sweetening in the US is done with HFCS, but don’t quote me!) and in everything from ketchup to salad dressing to bacon. I won’t get into why I think/believe/know its horrible for you, but you can read specifically about HFCS here and here and here and here.

What’s funny is the Corn Refiner’s Association sponsors the website (an agenda – I think not! haha) that was developed to dispel the “myths” about HFCS, and have even made television commercials to “inform” consumers about HFCS, where a young woman tells her picnic partner that it has the same caloric content as sugar and is fine in moderation, covering their legal behinds with the “in moderation” part. As of 2005, soda made with high-fructose corn syrup, was the number one source of calories in America. How’s that for moderation! But I digress…..for now,…and get to my real point….

I prefer to get to the root of things and keep things simple and leave the debating to the lawyers and experts. What I do believe is that real is better than fake

and natural is better than “made in a lab”. Whatever the truth on HFCS is, (even though I do strongly take a side) even if I’m wrong and the stuff is “just fine” for us to consume, I think there is always a hierarchy of good-better-best. So, even if HFCS is good, there are always better options. And to me, better options are natural (really natural, not the vague, FDA-unregulated definition of the word) and as close to the way that the Earth produces them as possible. The Earth produces everything we need nutritionally and in abundance. So I struggle to figure out how we got to a point in this society where most people know very little about food, and couldn’t make a meal if there wasn’t an instruction set on the back of a box.

So I will leave my first health post with this statement: I choose  hormone-free organic eggs and yes, I pay 2$/carton MORE for it. I shop for groceries exclusively at Whole Foods, an occasional trip to the organic section at Wegmans, and at several NOVA farmer’s markets.

I do this because quality is important to me in every facet of life, and I don’t believe that food should be any different.

udothedishes,….with homemade dish soap!