Skull Spoon Photo Artistic Drawing edit by Ben
This is a little bit of an opinion piece but also backed by science and doctor recommendations. Sugar is your enemy, learn about your enemy! We all need to eat healthier and so do our kids. It’s easy to grab for the kids’ favorite sugar-laden cereals and you probably already know that almost all cereal is loaded with the stuff. How you start your day is how your day will be and starting with sugary cereals sets you up for failure in eating for the rest of the entire day. You feed the bad gut microbiome which has a strong effect on your cravings for the entire rest of your day. Those bad gut bacteria send signals to your brain to feed them what they like. Drinks like artificially sweetened soda will also destroy much of your good probiotics. I wish I knew that back when I was drinking 2 to 4 liters of diet orange soda with my large bowl of salad when I was dieting and not succeeding!
If you read the About Me page, then you also know that I am a type 2 diabetic who weened himself off of the insulin. My favorite food in all the world is sushi and I was sad to give that up, or so I thought. Although your local supermarket sushi is a killer for your diet, I have enjoyed fresh Sashimi dipped in soy sauce and wasabi and it’s been heaven. I even order the hand rolls that I love and ask the Sushi chef to hold the rice. It’s an awesome treat and I don’t miss my favorite food anymore!
Anything in a can is processed and sugar is usually a part of that process. I love chili beans and make my own in a slow cooker and it’s always way better than the stuff you buy at your local grocery store. READ THE LABELS!I can’t stress that enough, you want to know what’s in your food before you pop it into your shopping cart. There are so many names for “sugar” that the food labels hide that junk behind these strange chemical sounding words. Fructose, sucrose, dextrose, lactose, are all examples of sugars but this isn’t even the entire list (so you see a commonality between these names?) in general, you want to be able to identify the ingredients in what you eat, if you can’t, leave that crap at the store. Don’t bring it home.
Anything reduced or none fat? Yuck! Your body needs fat, don’t do that to yourself! The food companies found ways to make these foods unnatural and subtracted the fat just to add something that doesn’t contain fat in processing to add flavor. You guessed it, it’s sugar or some form of it. Bread, yogurt, muffins, cookies, crackers, condiments, might as well rewrite these as sugar, sugar, sugar, and sugar.
I nutritionists once told me, eat as the caveman did 4,000 years ago. What would you see when you left the cave? Nothing in a can for sure or processed in any way. You couldn’t even get honey easily without getting stung. The diet of the caveman was mostly vegetables, nuts, and berries and this is what our bodies have evolved over time to digest and get the most nutrients out of the easiest!
For more information, I would pick up the book, “Always Hungry?”, by renowned endocrinologist Dr. David Ludwig who covers this subject and how best to eat healthily.
I hope this helps you make wiser choices when you next visit your local food markets.