Some Call It Orthorexia Nervosa

Some call it ‘natural’ the way my family (and  most of my close friends) live our life.  Well, now there are others that call it ‘orthorexia nervosa’.

And by others, I mean Dr. Steven Bratman.  He’s the one who coined this term as a new disease.  The label is to be given to those people who are silly enough to read the labels of the foods they buy.  The people who try to buy whole foods… you know, like actual fruits and vegetables as a main part of their grocery list.  The people who avoid certain ingredients in their foods.

Yes, folks if you do those things I just listed, you might just have orthorexia nervosa.  Don’t worry, though.  With a little psychological help, you will be good as new in no time.  You will be eating all the processed foods you want without a care in the world!  Fruits?  Vegetables?  What are those?!  Who needs ‘em?

Silly, right?  Yes, I think so too!

Orthorexia Nervosa means “nervous about correct eating” in Latin.  I originally read about this absurd new disease on Natural News.  Feel free to check it out.  The writers are quite amusing.  Here’s a little excerpt from the article:

According to reports, orthorexics "may start by eliminating processed foods, anything with artificial colorings or flavorings as well as foods that have come into contact with pesticides, and eventually shun other things like caffeine and alcohol."

Imagine not eating anything that has come in contact with pesticides!?  Or avoiding caffeine and alcohol!?  The horror!

It is important to note, that thankfully, this disease has not been added to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM).  I would not doubt that one day it will, though.

Also, if you want to go here, you can read a letter from Dr. Bratman explaining himself and how he only meant for this disease to be a label for those that are obsessive over healthy eating.  Ohhhh, okay.  That makes it all better.

I understand that Dr. Bratman is trying to help those that are obsessed about healthy eating, but come on!  Who is the one that gets to decide who is obsessed and who is not?  Where is that line going to be drawn?

Please tell me I’m not the only one that finds this ‘disease’ ridiculous!

If only more people had this fictitious disease, there would be less people with real diseases!

I wish all of my fellow orthorexics out there a healthy day!

Nashville Whole Foods News!

Anyone from the Nashville area??

The Whole Foods Market in Green Hills has a couple of events coming up you will want to mark in your calendar!

On April 18th, it is Tax Free Day at Whole Foods!  This is the perfect time to stock up on any frozen items or just anything that you will be able to store for any length of time.

On Friday April 29th, they are having an organic strawberry sale!  All strawberries will be $1.99/lb.!!!  Stock up and freeze them or make jam!

Maybe I will see you there on one of those days!

Learn Anything??

Whew.  Okay, I'm finished with the posts that explain why I avoid the 5 things in my Top 5 Ingredients post.

I truly do hope you learned a little something about how to feed your family a little healthier.  If you are new to reading labels, you may find yourself getting frustrated at how many of the products you regularly buy that contain those 5 ingredients.  Please don't let that stop you from starting with just one ingredient!

Pick one ingredient and start cutting it out now.  Even if you can't cut out the ingredient completely, maybe just cut out a few of the products that contain said ingredient?  For example, most crackers I have seen contain high fructose corn syrup and/or hydrogenated oils.  Try going to the health food section and buying your crackers from there.  If you want to get really crazy, you could cut out grains completely.  Our society eats way too many grains anyway!  Just so you know, my family does eat crackers.  However, it is a treat, not a daily, or even weekly snack.

Anyway, like I was saying, go to the health food (or natural) section of your grocery store.  Usually, you are fairly safe in that section.  However, don't assume that just because you are in the 'natural' section of the store that you are okay to buy anything.  Please still read the ingredients.  Once you are comfortable with the substitutions you have made with that ingredient (whatever ingredient you decided to start with), move on to the next ingredient.

If you missed the posts, click on them below and you can get all caught up! :)

• Top 5 ingredients to avoid when shopping
• High Fructose Corn Syrup
• Hydrogenated/Partially Hydrogenated Oils
• Sodium Benzoate
• Artificial Sweeteners
• Glutamate

Just take baby steps toward better health!

Then, come back here and comment to tell me how you are doing with your new shopping habits!  I would love to hear your feedback.


Have a great day!

Why I Avoid Buying Foods With Glutamates

Today's post is the last in my series of posts that explain why I try not to consume the ingredients in my Top 5 Ingredients I Avoid When Shopping post.  Today we talk about glutamate (or, more accurately, glutamic acid).

Glutamic acid is the harmful component to Monosodium Glutamate or MSG.

Glutamate (glutamic acid) is the major excitatory transmitter in the brain.  So, wait a minute.  If it is in our brain and has a function, why do I avoid it?

Simple.  My body knows how much I need of it.  If I give my body too much of it, the brain cannot do its job properly.  I don't know about you, but I want my brain to function properly even if that means my food has a little less taste.

Glutamic acid is very good at hiding within other ingredients.  This is why I said in my post listing my 5 ingredients I avoid that glutamate is the hardest ingredient to avoid.  Refer to this helpful chart to find out what other ingredients contain (or can contain) glutamic acid.

That chart is extremely helpful, because you will realize it is not just as easy as looking for Monosodium Glutamate on the ingredient list.  Avoiding MSG is a great starting point, but it would be great to branch out and avoid the rest of the ingredients on the list as well.

And here is a list of reported symptoms from ingesting MSG.  It's a long list, right?  That is why I don't ingest it or let my kids ingest it.  That list of symptoms is why my kids (aged 2, 7 and 9) have NEVER had Doritos. 

I apologize for not giving you all of that in my own words, but as you saw if you clicked on the links, the lists are quite long.  I thought there was no point in rewriting it all when those two sites did it so beautifully!  No point reinventing the wheel! ;)

Well, I hope this weeks posts get you started on a new healthy track with your family's diet!  If you missed them, you can go back and read them by clicking on the ingredients below.

• High Fructose Corn Syrup
• Hydrogenated (and partially hydrogenated) Oils
• Sodium Benzoate
• Artificial Sweeteners (with a concentration on Aspartame)

Again, if you are new to reading ingredients, please don't feel overwhelmed with this list.  You will find that these ingredients are highly prevalent in the foods most Americans eat!  Start with just one item on the list if you don't think you can do all of them.  Anywhere you start will be beneficial for your health!

Good luck!

Note: As stated in the link with the list of ingredients that glutamate can be in, "Glutamic acid found in unadulterated protein does not cause adverse reactions.  To cause adverse reactions, the glutamic acid must have been processed/manufactured or come from protein that has been fermented."

Why I Avoid Artificial Sweeteners Like The Plague

On to the next ingredient in my series explaining my Top 5 Ingredients I Avoid When Shopping post. (If you missed it, just click on the title in that last sentence and you can get caught up.)  Today we talk about artificial sweeteners.  This can include aspartame, sucralose, saccharin, acesulfame K, neotame and probably more that I'm not remembering or that are still in the lab and will come out any day now!

In 'studying' to write this post, one of the most disturbing things was at the very beginning of my search.  If you type "artificial sweeteners" into your google search bar, the first page of links are all health related and contain the terms, "cancer" and "most dangerous".  Not good!

For the purposes of keeping this post as simple and easy to understand as possible, I am going to concentrate on aspartame.  The post would be 5 pages long (or longer) if I went into each one!

According to an article on Medicine Net , it was concluded after numerous studies that aspartame was safe with a daily intake of 40 mg/kg/day, except for people with phenylketonuria.

I'm sure you've seen the word before.  There is a phenylketonuria warning on all packages of things with aspartame... you know, the usual, "I'm covering my hind end warning".  Just like the warnings on cigarettes.

So, what it is phenylketonuria?

It is a genetic disease in which you are missing an enzyme needed to break down phenylalanine.  If phenylalanine builds up in the body (due to it not being broken down) it is harmful to the central nervous system and causes brain damage.

The reason you can't have aspartame if you have this disease is because aspartame is made up of phenylalanine, along with aspartic acid and methanol.

If you don't have phenylketonuria you might be wondering why you need to bother avoiding aspartame.  Here's why...  there have been reports of aspartame causing the following problems (this is just a sampling of the problems it can cause):

• Aspartame disease (yes, you read that correctly.  Apparently, someone knows this stuff is bad if they are willing to name a disease after it!)
• Headaches 
• Birth defects
• Depression
• Cancer
• Increased hunger (interesting, seeing how they put it in diet drinks)

Here is a great article on the rest of the side effects of aspartame (the side effects are lengthy!).

I hope this gives you a little insight as to why it would be a good thing to cut this out of your diet... or at the very least try to avoid it.  I know this was all about aspartame and how it's evil, but remember sucralose, saccharin, acesulfame K, and neotame are all on that nasty list as well.  When you are in a restaurant and need a sweetener, stay away from the yellow and pink packets and go for the white... or the brown if the restaurant has raw sugar.

Tomorrow's post is the last of this series and will talk about glutamates.

See you then!

Why I Avoid Buying Foods With Sodium Benzoate

As promised in my post about the Top 5 Ingredients to Avoid, here is more information on Sodium Benzoate so that you will understand why it doesn’t enter my house.

There have been some health concerns about the combination of sodium benzoate and ascorbic acid or vitamin C. When the two are mixed, they can form the chemical benzene, which is carcinogenic (cancer causing).  However, sodium benzoate on its own is not considered a carcinogen, and you would have to consume a huge amount of it in order to have toxic levels in your body.  In mice studies where the animals were fed sodium benzoate, no adverse effects were reported, and the life expectancies of the mice were not shortened, nor was their health affected in any way.

Sounds convincing, right?  No not really because the research never tested the affect of sodium benzoate combined with Vitamin C on the health of the mice.  That is the real kicker.  That is what forms benzene which is carcinogenic.  What does carcinogenic mean?  Plainly, cancer causing.  It has also been known to destroy the DNA of the mitochondria in your cells.  Your mitochondria are also known as the ‘power centers’ of your cells.  This can lead to a number of neuro-degenerative diseases (including Parkinson’s).

Now, I suppose if you know without a shadow of a doubt that whatever you are buying with sodium benzoate does not also have Vitamin C in it, then maybe you could consider buying it.  Part of the problem is that most of the time (if not every time) I have seen it on an ingredient list, that product also contains Vitamin C, either naturally occurring or added.

I’m sure there is a lot more information out there about sodium benzoate.   Please do the research yourself to see if it is something you would consider eliminating from the ingredients you bring into your house.

In the end, when I am choosing what to buy at the store that is prepackaged I like to err on the side of caution.   If the ingredient doesn’t sound natural to me or if I’ve never heard of it, I won’t buy the product.   I will sometimes look it up when I get home, too. Then, I know if I can buy the product next shopping trip.  Generally, if I’m buying something prepackaged it’s not a necessity anyway, so it can wait.

I hope this helps you.   Check back tomorrow for the next ingredient on my list and why I avoid it.

**** Note: Upon further research, it appears that any ingredient that contains the word benzoate, is a potential threat to your health.  (Thank you Robert for asking me the question to prompt the research!)****

Why I Avoid Buying Things With Hydrdogenated Oils

Today's post will be my explanation of why our family avoids partially  hydrogenated and hydrogenated oils as pointed out in my post about the 5 ingredients we avoid.

Let me just start by saying that oils are not necessarily bad for you (at least some oils). However, when man...or woman, I'm not trying to discriminate here ;) ...comes in and changes the natural state of that oil by significantly increasing the temperature of that oil, it is now in a state that is unhealthy for human consumption.

The website, Natural News, has a wonderful article about hydrogenated oils. Here is an excerpt of it that will explain better than I ever could how the state of the oils are changed and what they do in our body:

"They take these naturally healthy oils such as palm, kernel, soybean, corn oil or coconut oil and they heat it anywhere from five hundred to one thousand degrees under several atmospheres of pressure.  They then inject a catalyst into the oil for several hours. The catalyst is typically a metal such a nickel, platinum or even aluminum. As this bubbles up into the oil the molecular structure changes and increases in density and rearranges it's molecules so that instead of a liquid at room
temperature we now have either semi-solid or solid oil. This creates either partially hydrogenated or fully hydrogenated oils.

The molecules in this new product are now closer to cellulose or plastic than to oil. In fact hydrogenated oil is only one molecule away from being plastic. When you eat anything containing this material, just as the oil is now thicker and more viscous (dense), so too does your blood become thicker and more viscous right along with it. The heart now has to work so much harder to pump blood throughout the system. This is one of the major ways that consuming hydrogenated oils contributes to high blood pressure.

As you can imagine, this thicker blood with this gummy substance flowing with it can easily lodge in the arteries and build up the arterial plaque.  It doesn't take anywhere near as much time as you may think for this to occur. Some studies have shown that negative health effects of eating processed foods occurs within only minutes of consuming such foods."

I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like a good thing...

Bottom line... we shouldn't be eating foods with this stuff in it.

Manufacturers put it in our foods because it makes it so that it can stay on the shelf longer and that increases their profits.

This is just a taste of why I don't like to have this in my family's diet.  If you would like to read a very detailed article on hydrogenated oils I highly recommend you read the full article quoted above. You can find it here.

Tune in tomorrow for the next ingredient on my list!

Have a great day!

I'm Behind...

At the beginning of October, I posted the top 5 ingredients that I avoid at the grocery store.  At the end of my post, I told you that I would write something up about each ingredient individually so that you could understand WHY I avoid them.

Well, over the past few months, I got a little caught up on… well, life, and haven’t posted them yet.  I apologize.  I did post on High Fructose Corn Syrup and why I avoid that ingredient.

So if you missed it, you can go back and read it if you'd like and be ready for the rest of the ingredients!

Tomorrow, I will continue on with the ingredients.

I will go in the order that I listed them in the original post, just because it makes sense (even though the order of the ingredients has nothing to do with which one is worse than the others).

The post tomorrow will be on hydrogenated and partially hydrogenated oils.

See you tomorrow!

High Fructose Corn Syrup and Why To Avoid It

In my last post, I listed the top 5 ingredients to avoid when shopping.  In my next few posts, I will give you a little insight as to WHY those five ingredients don’t come in my house.  Today, I will discuss High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS).

What’s the big deal?  Isn’t it just sugar?  No.  It is a highly refined derivative of corn starch.  I won’t bore you with how they remove the starch from the corn, but you can go here and read all about it. Once the starch is removed from the corn, it is then mixed with hydrochloric acid and heat to produce corn syrup.  This process converts the starch molecules into a sugar.  The length of the process determines the sweetness of the sugar.  The longer they allow the procedure (called acid hydrolysis) to continue, the sweeter the syrup will taste.  To make the corn syrup into high fructose corn syrup, it goes through something called enzyme conversion which will result in a solution that has a fructose level of 55%.

Your body metabolizes fructose differently than it does glucose.  I implore you to do some research and learn about what it does in your body.  I will give you a little preview.  The following are a few of the resulting effects that HFCS can have on your body.

• Destructive to your liver
• Weight gain
• Increases triglyceride and HDL (bad cholesterol) levels, leading to heart disease

On top of all that, it is produced using genetically modified corn, which brings a whole new myriad of problems.  It has also been found to have high levels of mercury.  Again, the problems that can cause are numerous.

So, why do companies use HFCS instead of good old sugar? 

• Longer shelf life
• It is sweeter than sugar
• Lower cost (due to how much sweeter it is)
• Keeps food moist longer

Long story short, it’s just good business.  So sorry if it causes heart disease and adds to the growing obesity rate in the United States!  I’ve heard rumors that HFCS is banned in some other countries, but I couldn’t confirm that with a quick search on the net.  So, feel free to do your own research. then come back here and leave a comment telling me where to find it!

I hope that this helps clear up why you should take HFCS out of your diet TODAY.  Seriously, go through your pantries and check out all your food.  If you don’t want to waste it I understand, but you will at least know for future shopping trips what products to skip.

I know it will be hard to avoid your usual products, but it will be well worth it for your health and the health of your family.  Good luck on your next shopping trip!

Nicole

Top 5 Ingredients To Avoid When Shopping

If you know me, you know that I am conscious of what goes in my kids bodies.  I have been asked by quite a few people what ingredients I avoid.  So, I thought I would make a Top 10 list of ingredients to avoid.  I thought that might be overwhelming for some people, especially if you eat like the average American, so I decided to do a Top 5 list instead.  The following is a list of ingredients that don’t enter my house.  To get you started eating a healthier diet, try avoiding one or more of these.

Here is my Top 5 list of ingredients to avoid

(In no particular order)

1.  High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) also called corn syrup – This one has been getting a lot of media attention lately, which I love.  I especially love the commercials from the corn industry trying to fool a person into believing that not only is HFCS not bad for you, but it is actually good for you!  What a joke!

2. Hydrogenated or Partially Hydrogenated Oils – You aren’t going to like me for this one.  This is in lots of foods.

3. Sodium Benzoate – Commonly found in things that are ‘pickled’, such as pickles, banana peppers, jalapeño peppers, etc.

4. Artificial Sweeteners – This can include aspartame, phenylalanine, splenda, nutrasweet, and the list goes on.  This is becoming a long list that I can’t keep up with as companies keep on coming up with new ‘sugars’ in their labs.  When I am looking at a label, I will buy it if it says sugar, evaporated cane sugar, honey, molasses, stevia, or no sugar at all.  That way, I don’t have to keep up with all the cancer causing sugars they are making in labs!

5. Glutamate – This is the harmful component to Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) – This is probably the hardest ingredient on my list to avoid (and why I listed it last).  The reason I feel it is the hardest to avoid is because it is in so many things and it’s not as simple as looking for ‘Monosodium Glutamate’ in the ingredients list.  Click here for a list of other names/ingredients that glutamate can be found in and you will see what I am talking about.

I will post about each of these individually so you can see why I avoid these like the plague!  

*Update: I have now linked all my individual posts so all you have to do is click on each ingredient above and it will go to the post.  That way you don't have to search through my archives to find them.  I'm all about making things easier for you. :) 

Even though this is just a top 5 list and not a top 10, it may still be overwhelming to some.  That’s okay.  If that’s the case, just pick one.  Start wherever is easiest.  Getting one of these ingredients out of your diet and the diet of your family members will still be beneficial for your health.

The great thing about picking just one is that you will find that by just taking one of these out of your diet you will be taking some of the others out as well, because they travel in packs.  You’ve heard the saying, “Birds of a feather, flock together”, right?  The same usually goes for bad ingredients.

I hope this helps you to get your family on the road to better health!

Note: For my readers who are already going in this direction, I’m sure that you have others to add to this list.  You may even be thinking there is an ingredient or two that is/are more important to avoid than these.  Please remember I am talking to the readers that have never altered their diet in this way and that this is just a starting point for them.  Feel free to leave a comment with your opinions on these ingredients or others that you feel are detrimental to our health.  I welcome feedback.

Nicole