Mmmm... burnt toast. Yum.

My relationship with carbs is love-hate. In the form of veggies and fruits, they’re pretty awesome. So that’s love. But in the form of processed foods, packaged with excess sugars and serving as carriers for excess salts and unnatural fats? That’s hate. In fact, I usually have a violent reaction to carbs in their processed form most days.

I know there are people out there who really champion the “high carb/anti-Atkins diet” crusade, and I hear y’all. I do. However, between the slew of fat-free/low fat products on the market and the onslaught of American cooking done merely by processed foods (that are high in carb and “low in fat”)… the “high carb, low fat” diet isn’t working very well for us, is it? At what point do we tell the emperor that he’s a little naked?

Like I mentioned the other day, fats are an integral part of our diet. Many of the vitamins that our bodies use can only be properly taken into the blood stream in conjunction with a small trace of fat. (I mean, really – the average carrot even has a little fat in it.) They’re full of calories that, when not eaten in excess, are burned by your body (it’s the body’s job to burn fat, and it’s quite efficient at doing so.) Carbohydrates serve as a secondary source of energy. Secondary. A diet with enough fat in it will cause the body to simply store the excess carbs, right? Orrrrr maybe a diet with enough carbs in it will store the fat?

Comprehending Calories: The Role of Carbs In Your Diet is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Comprehending Calories: The Basics
2. Comprehending Calories: How To Properly Read A Nutrition Label
3. KFC’s Double Down Reminds Us: All Calories Are Not Created Equal

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Post tags: atkins, carbohydrates, carbs, dieting, fat, food pyramid, minerals, the lipid hypothesis, vitamins

Yeah, that’s kind of this processed food thing. And I know, in advance, that this is long. Frustratingly long, even. I’m breaking it up into bits, though, so don’t worry if you can’t take it all in at once.

What are processed foods? Allow me to shed some light.

A “processed food,” in general, is something that has had to endure a process to make it what it is before it is turned over to you. Almost everything that comes in a box… is processed. Almost everything that comes in a zip-sealed bag… is processed. Almost everything that comes from a big giant brand or huge corporation or massive factory plant somewhere… is processed. Almost everything that you purchase from a grocery store… is processed.

I mean, that includes a lot – that’s all the aisles in the grocery store! You’d have to scale the perimeter of the store to avoid that, right?

Let’s look at the history of food in this country over the past one hundred or so years.

Once upon a time, before food was big industry (meaning: before processed foods) and we were dealing with the fear of famine, people were much smaller. Being overweight was a rich person’s dilemma. Why? Because you have to ingest an AWFUL LOT of whole foods (as in, not processed) on a regular basis to develop and maintain an overweight physique in that day. So being overweight simply didn’t make financial sense. Things like bread, pies, cookies, cakes… they were rare – couldn’t always buy them at the store, so you had to make them at home. Highly unlikely that you could or would be able to bake sweets every single day for your pleasure.

Because they were concerned about famine, portions were rationed carefully. They didn’t want to be caught out there not being about to get food, and having little at the house. Sometimes, you’ll hear our elders talk about when whole grains were once rationed out to the masses because not only did they need to make sure they had it for the soldiers, they needed to make sure the supply could cover everyone in the event of emergency.

To sum it up, food wasn’t presumed to be plentiful, and it caused people to skimp, penny pinch, and exercise portion control.

Now, in comes the push toward larger food distributors – less focus on local, more focus on “getting big.” “Get big or get out,” I believe was the actual line. The US Gov’t honestly feared that they wouldn’t be able to feed everyone without food production going factory, and took every effort they could to try to get it there. With food production being taken to the factories, we were separated more from how our food was made. The further the process was taken from us, the less oversight we had in regards to what was in it. We used to have the milkman, right? You made arrangements with a local farm to have your milk delivered to your door, right? Now, if you drink milk, you’re buying a gallon that comes from a farm that you have no knowledge of. You’re buying from a brand.

I’m a small business owner, so while I could interject right here about what it does to our local communities to not be able to buy our food locally and keep our money in our communities… I won’t. Just know that I could.

As I said, the larger food manufacturing grew, the more we were distanced from it’s production, and the less oversight we were granted to it’s creation and ingredients. Because (in my opinion) the government wanted to simply do what it could to ensure that the US had a consistent food supply, lots of leeway was given to big food factories to help ease them along their way in supplying our supermarkets with food – glorious food! Want an example? The food industry was able to get the FDA to change the law – imitation foods that weren’t nutritionally deficient in comparison to their whole counterparts didn’t have to be clearly marked as “imitation.” (You can skip the below quote if you like because I’ve quoted it before, but it’s valuable enough to read twice.)

The 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act imposed strict rules requiring that the word “imitation” appear on any food product that was, well, an imitation … [And] the food industry [argued over the word], strenuously for decades, and in 1973 it finally succeeded in getting the imitation rule tossed out, a little-notice but momentous step that helped speed America down the path of nutritionism.

… The American Heart Association, eager to get Americans off saturated fats and onto vegetable oils (including hydrogenated vegetable oils), was actively encouraging the food industry to “modify” various foods to get the saturated fats and cholesterol out of them, and in the early seventies the association urged that “any existing and regulatory barriers to the marketing of such foods be removed.”

And so they were when, in 1973, the FDA (not, note, the Congress that wrote the law) simply repealed the 1938 rule concerning imitation foods. … The revised imitation rule held that as long as an imitation product was not “nutritionally inferior” to the natural food it sought to impersonate—as long as it had the same quantities of recongized nutrients—the imitation could be marketed without using the dreaded “i” word. — In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto

Families who survived the rationing and the famine were happy about this! No more struggling, breaking their backs to stretch food. They could eat like the rich folks! They could also gain weight like ‘em, too. Alas, the way men and women were employed in this era, they weren’t granted the same amount of time for leisurely activity like the rich. In other words, we were eating “like the rich,” but not burning the weight off like ‘em. This part of the story, can be evidenced by Katharine Flegel’s study of weight gain from the sixties to the present. This New Yorker article summarizes it briefly:

In the early nineteen-nineties, a researcher at the C.D.C. named Katherine Flegal was reviewing the results of the survey then under way when she came across figures that seemed incredible. According to the first National Health study, which was done in the early nineteen-sixties, 24.3 per cent of American adults were overweight—roughly defined as having a body-mass index greater than twenty-seven. (The metrics are slightly different for men and women; by the study’s definition, a woman who is five feet tall would count as overweight if she was more than a hundred and forty pounds, and a man who is six feet tall if he weighed more than two hundred and four pounds.) By the time of the second survey, conducted in the early nineteen-seventies, the proportion of overweight adults had increased by three-quarters of a per cent, to twenty-five per cent, and, by the third survey, in the late seventies, it had edged up to 25.4 per cent. The results that Flegal found so surprising came from the fourth survey. During the nineteen-eighties, the American gut, instead of expanding very gradually, had ballooned: 33.3 per cent of adults now qualified as overweight. Flegal began asking around at professional meetings. Had other researchers noticed a change in Americans’ waistlines? They had not. This left her feeling even more perplexed. She knew that errors could have sneaked into the data in a variety of ways, so she and her colleagues checked and rechecked the figures. There was no problem that they could identify. Finally, in 1994, they published their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In just ten years, they showed, Americans had collectively gained more than a billion pounds. “If this was about tuberculosis, it would be called an epidemic,” another researcher wrote in an editorial accompanying the report.

Food was becoming way more accessible to us. I do want to go back to the point about the FDA’s law about imitation substances, though. It does a lot more to the food industry than you think it does. Take a loaf of bread, for example. Bread has maybe five ingredients in it – flour, water, sugar, salt, and yeast – but if you look on the label for the bread in your house right now? You see what – hyphenated chemicals. The food industry now has the ability to put anything in your food, so long as it is not deficient in the nutrients that science recognizes are valuable… in comparison to the food it imitates.  Remember this part. No, really – remember this part.

So, if the foods aren’t nutritionally deficient, why is this a problem?

Well, how much credit do you give food science? The rule is simply that the foods cannot be deficient in nutrients that science recognizes as valuable. What about what science hasn’t spotted yet? What about all these hyphenated chemicals that science hasn’t identified (or is prevented from identifying) as harmful to our health?

And before you call me a conspiracy theorist, consider this: it took science decades to recognize that trans-fats – once a massive part of margarine and other major foods – were hazardous to our health. Believe it or not, the government still allows trans-fats in foods, and actually allows food manufacturers to lie about how much trans-fats are in their foods. (More on that later.)

What else, in these foods, is doing us in? Science doesn’t know yet. And really, since most of our food science studies are funded by the very industry they affect… do you genuinely expect science to find out? I’m not telling you that they’d intentionally fudge numbers to present favorable results – trying to remain unbiased, here – but I am telling you it’s easy to divert funds elsewhere… as in, another study. Maybe even… a study attempting to debunk something claiming their products are harmful.

That’s not the conspiracy theorist in me. That’s just smart business on their part… regardless of what it does to the consumer. Keep the consumer far enough away from the research, and they’ll never know the downfall of buying my product. It just happens that way.

So since this is all cyclical, let’s go back to that availability of food thing. Now, all this food (food, mind you, that seeks to NOT be nutritionally deficient although it admits that it is) is available to our families. We, knowing what it’s like to have to worry about food not being available, begin to indulge. Factories – and factory jobs – are springing up because industries are blossoming. Longer work hours, both adults in the household are now working, and all this super convenient food at hand. We’re eating what we can, when we can, and eating a lot of it… since we’re enjoying the ability to eat at our discretion, not at the discretion of a ration.

Keep in mind, also, at this time… a new generation of children are being born under this new understanding of food. Family tradition might lend to certain dishes being made a certain way, but lots of dishes are being replaced by the magic elixir in the box. Some of us have that Grandma who insists on cooking everything from scratch. We tend to write her off as crazy or paranoid because “Times have changed” and “No one has time for all that cooking,” or maybe because “This is the [insert decade]s, Nana, we don’t live in the kitchen the way you used to!” Things that are all true, but come with consequences.

I asked you, dear reader, to keep in mind the point I made earlier about hyphenated chemical ingredients in our food, right? I hope you did. The interesting loophole in the FDA’s policy about imitation foods is that there’s very little limit to what can now be put INTO food. That’s an important point.

You know how, if you leave food sitting out, it will attract flies? Why? Because flies and rodents are attracted to the same things that our bodies are attracted to in food – nutrients. Ever notice that with ALL the food in a supermarket, there’s rarely any ants or bugs in the aisles, but you have to swat them away from the tomatoes or kiwi in the produce area? That’s not because every area in the grocery store – except the produce – is sprayed down. I can only offer theory as to why that is. For starters, the processed foods have to be processed to maintain shelf life. They have to be able to handle being transported to the facility. They have to be able to withstand sitting on a shelf until purchased. They have to be able to withstand sitting in your cabinets until you cook them.

Can you do that with your home made cooking? I doubt it.

Here’s another question: What do you think they’re putting in these processed foods to ward off insects and rodents?

Last question: Do you think it’s a good idea to ingest the same chemicals that are put in food… food that flies don’t even want? The same chemicals that prevent flies from desiring our food, are the same chemicals we’re ingesting when we eat this stuff anyway. How healthy can that be? Nothing in the world can debunk what feels like logic to me.

Taking that one step further for those of us who DO indulge anyway, what about the fact that the average processed food contains more calories than it’s “real” counterpart? Remember my ranch dressing recipe that I shared? My recipe was 300 calories a cup. Kraft’s ranch dressing was easily 1400 calories. Let me tell you a secret I learned from working in restaurants. Foods that have to be reheated to be cooked are pumped with extra fat, because it helps maintain the flavor through the reheating process. Chemicals – like monosodium glutamate, found in processed foods with rich, thick, almost meaty tastes – help reheatables that have to be pumped with extra fat taste more pleasing to you. The convenience that the food offers may be a welcome benefit, but it comes at the cost of a massive excess in calories and unnecessary additives and preservatives.

So here we are, living in the new millennium. For breakfast, we’re eating cereal. For lunch, we give our kids lunchables. For dinner, we heat up a pot pie. (If you want a laugh, look at the ingredients list on the back of any of those.) For a drink, we have a capri sun or a coke. Instead of nutrient-filled calorie-light whole foods, we’re now indulging in calorie-heavy nutrient-light foods that’ve been mainly cooked FOR us. When we take in foods, our bodies are expecting a certain amount of nutrients and vitamins. If our body doesn’t get what it’s looking for fast enough, what happens? It compels you to eat more! Yes! Have you ever inhaled half a bag of wafers, only to be hungry again moments later? All that work your body put in to digest this vitamin-free food, only to find that there are no vitamins in it? Yes, it’s going to tell you to try again and eat something else.

The problem for many of us, is that because it’s so much easier and quicker to grab another processed food item instead of cooking.. we try to fix the problem with something that’d only make it worse. All the while scarfing down the calories, forgetting all the nutrients, and packing on the pounds while we’re at it. The convenience, the fact that very few of us know how some foods are cooked, let alone what the foods SHOULD consist of, has allowed us to eat much more with much less effort. Is that a bad thing? If you know how to moderate yourself, of course not. Many of us, apparently, don’t.

Having said all that (2600 words, and STILL not a record for me), I have to say this. I know we all lead busy lives. If you managed to read all of this in one sitting, I give you kudos – I couldn’t even write it all in one sitting. We have to scale back in a major way if we want to be healthy. In writing this, I’ve decided to break this up into a series, continuing it on with how I managed to wean my family off of processed foods and what it’s taught me about how my body interacts with food, and how it wants to interact with food. Big difference between the two.

So, keep your eyes peeled for the breakdown of this topic, and the continuation… that I’m opting to call Food 101. I look forward to your thoughts below!

Food 101: The Problem With Processed Foods is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part I: What Is Processed Food?
2. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part II: The Change In Food Manufacturing
3. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part IV: The Conclusion

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Post tags: black girls guide to weight loss, calorie counting, mentality, overeating, processed foods, saving money

Most Americans have heard that red wine has health benefits, but many don’t understand the need to limit consumption, finds an American Heart Association survey.

The majority of respondents also mistakenly believe that sea salt is a low-sodium alternative to table salt, the survey found. The poll was conducted to assess awareness about how wine and sodium affect heart health.

[...]

The survey results, released Monday, also indicate that most respondents don’t know the primary source of sodium in their diets and are confused about low-sodium food choices. Consuming too much sodium can increase blood pressure and boost the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Forty-six percent of respondents incorrectly said table salt is the primary source of sodium in American diets. In fact, processed foods such as soups, canned foods, prepared mixes, condiments and tomato sauce account for up to 75 percent of sodium consumption in the United States.

Sixty-one percent of respondents believe that sea salt is a low-sodium alternative to table salt. But sea salt and Kosher salt are chemically the same as table salt (40 percent sodium).

People should consume no more than 1,500 milligrams of sodium per day, the AHA says. In order to limit sodium intake, read nutrition and ingredient labels on prepared and packaged foods, experts advise.[source]

I’m always curious about the amounts of salt that the average person is eating every day outside of their processed food intake. That feels like a silly statement, but I’m being honest. In all seriousness, I wonder if people realize just how much salt it takes to meet the 1,500 mg a day amount that the AHA suggests – a little under a teaspoon of table salt – and I wonder if people realize that it’s hard as hell to meet that number if you’re not eating processed foods.

I suppose I’d be naive to ignore the fact that people who are processed food eaters have pushed the “settling point” for their taste buds, so to speak. If all you eat is salty foods because you desire that pinch that salt gives you, the reality of this is that your taste buds eventually become dulled to that “pinch,” and you have to eat more salt in order to get that same “pinch.” The funny thing about this is that it ruins your ability to enjoy flavor – you’re too busy chasing the tang of salt that you miss out on the flavor of what you’re eating, or worse – you think that what you’re eating has no flavor, when in reality the processed food is what lacks flavor and only has salt to cover it up.

The cycle gets worse, though.

When a surplus of salt enters the bloodstream, the body is forced to store the salt between the cells until the kidneys can filter it. Salt then causes a caustic, burning effect on the surrounding tissue. For protection, the cells release water into the intercellular fluid to dilute the excess salt. As the cells give up their water, they lose elasticity and shrink. This, in turn, causes an imbalance of the cell’s chemistry through a loss of potassium.

Low potassium levels cause more sodium to penetrate the cell walls. When the sodium level of the cell rises, water then enters to dilute it, causing the cell to become swollen. The continuous disruption of the cell’s fluid balance can, in time, calcify, scar and destroy the muscles, valves and arteries of the entire coronary route. It may culminate in congestive heart failure. In this way, salt becomes an accomplice to North America’s most voracious killer, cardiovascular disease!

In China, a traditional method of suicide was drinking water saturated with table salt. One ounce of salt causes the body to hold six pounds of excess fluid. Salt in large quantities can be lethal.

When you eat salty foods the body has to compensate to maintain homeostasis. If you eat salty foods for a long period of time, as with caffeine, heroin and nicotine, the body becomes dependent on salt to maintain balance. Therefore reducing salt intake can create physical withdrawal. [source]

There’s also this issue of sea salt. Everyone makes the statement “Ohhh, use sea salt – it’s good for you!” but what does it mean that it’s good for you? What benefits does sea salt have to offer?

Salt is salt. Sodium (Na, 40%) and Chlorine (Cl, 60%).

Sodium is the problem. We are consuming way too much of it. The excess sodium in our diet leads to hypertension, high blood pressure, and ultimately heart disease.

Sea salt comes from the sea, table salt is mined from places that used to be oceans and dried up millions of years ago.

Sea salt does contain traces of additional minerals (0.01% of things like magnesium) but they do not lessen the impact of the sodium consumption.

Even if the minerals in a given sea salt are important nutrients for the body, why take them with all the added salt? Why not from other naturally occurring sources in food? [source]

Sea salt doesn’t offer you anything that isn’t found in other food naturally. The “benefit” that sea salt has over other salts is the fact that it can be less processed, and even then, it’s not guaranteed because it can still be bleached and minerals can still be lost during the bleaching process. So even still, your sea salt would have to have multi-colored granules in it.

And, while I know that a lot of people – myself included- prefer the sea salts with the larger granules simply because it compels us to use less, the fact remains that we’re still using salt. We still have to be careful.

So, how can you get flavor without using [so much] salt?

Use the naturally bitter juices and flavors in fruits and vegetables to your advantage. Lemon, lime and grapefruit come to mind. Squeeze out some flavor, then use the pulp in a marmalade or in preserves. Use vinegar. Red wine, apple cider or plain – all flavorful options. Use your herbs and spices gratuitously – either fresh or dried, whole or ground, they provide nutrients and tons of flavor. Get creative. Go digging! (And keep the salt use to a half a pinch!)

The Realities Of Cooking With Salt is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Identifying – And Eliminating – Excess Salt In Your Diet
2. Q&A Wednesday: Cooking For Picky Little Eaters

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Post tags: american heart association, salt, sodium

Meet Robert Lustig, MD. He’s kind of a big deal.

Dr. Lustig is a childhood obesity expert… and recently, the NY Times posted a write-up about his presentation – a lecture given a few years back that has garnered almost a million views – to further detail what makes his argument so compelling.

Now, I’ve seen the video several times – believe it or not, I actually have it on DVD and watch it regularly to remind myself – so I’m very familiar with what he’s talking about, here. Of particular interest to me – and should be of extreme interest to those of us with type 2 diabetes – is where, at a little past an hour in, Dr. Lustig talks about the reversal of type 2 diabetes. Not living with diabetes, but reversing the condition.

Who, out there, has a doctor who explained that process to them?

Earlier this month, Gary Taubes – writer of “What If It’s All A Big Fat Lie?” as well as the book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health – penned the aforementioned article, which doesn’t surprise me in the least. Taubes is a relatively predictible source of anti-carbohydrate lifestyling and has, if I’m not mistaken, written a book titled Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It as well as proclaimed his alliance with Team Atkins. I’m simply not surprised to see his name in the byline.

That being said, the question that Taubes’ article asks in the title – is sugar toxic? – is one that I can easily respond to with a resounding YES. Before I get to that, there are a few parts of Taubes’ article that I’d like to highlight, for those of you who’ll see the fact that Taubes’ article is 9-some-odd pages long and decide to turn away from it… like I almost did.

At least I’m honest.

This development is recent and borders on humorous. In the early 1980s, high-fructose corn syrup replaced sugar in sodas and other products in part because refined sugar then had the reputation as a generally noxious nutrient. (“Villain in Disguise?” asked a headline in this paper in 1977, before answering in the affirmative.) High-fructose corn syrup was portrayed by the food industry as a healthful alternative, and that’s how the public perceived it. It was also cheaper than sugar, which didn’t hurt its commercial prospects. Now the tide is rolling the other way, and refined sugar is making a commercial comeback as the supposedly healthful alternative to this noxious corn-syrup stuff. “Industry after industry is replacing their product with sucrose and advertising it as such — ‘No High-Fructose Corn Syrup,’ ” Nestle notes.

Please keep this in mind the next time you watch TV and see a stupid soft drink or juice commercial saying “We use real sugar!” in it. It’s a brand-new day when table sugar is lauded as a “healthy alternative.” Seriously.

The conventional wisdom has long been that the worst that can be said about sugars of any kind is that they cause tooth decay and represent “empty calories” that we eat in excess because they taste so good.By this logic, sugar-sweetened beverages (or H.F.C.S.-sweetened beverages, as the Sugar Association prefers they are called) are bad for us not because there’s anything particularly toxic about the sugar they contain but just because people consume too many of them.

Those organizations that now advise us to cut down on our sugar consumption — the Department of Agriculture, for instance, in its recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans, or the American Heart Association in guidelines released in September 2009 (of which Lustig was a co-author) — do so for this reason. Refined sugar and H.F.C.S. don’t come with any protein, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants or fiber, and so they either displace other more nutritious elements of our diet or are eaten over and above what we need to sustain our weight, and this is why we get fatter.

[...]

Lustig’s argument, however, is not about the consumption of empty calories — and biochemists have made the same case previously, though not so publicly. It is that sugar has unique characteristics, specifically in the way the human body metabolizes the fructose in it, that may make it singularly harmful, at least if consumed in sufficient quantities.

The phrase Lustig uses when he describes this concept is “isocaloric but not isometabolic.” This means we can eat 100 calories of glucose (from a potato or bread or other starch) or 100 calories of sugar (half glucose and half fructose), and they will be metabolized differently and have a different effect on the body. The calories are the same, but the metabolic consequences are quite different.

This should sound familiar.

The fructose component of sugar and H.F.C.S. is metabolized primarily by the liver, while the glucose from sugar and starches is metabolized by every cell in the body. Consuming sugar (fructose and glucose) means more work for the liver than if you consumed the same number of calories of starch (glucose). And if you take that sugar in liquid form — soda or fruit juices — the fructose and glucose will hit the liver more quickly than if you consume them, say, in an apple (or several apples, to get what researchers would call the equivalent dose of sugar). The speed with which the liver has to do its work will also affect how it metabolizes the fructose and glucose.

In animals, or at least in laboratory rats and mice, it’s clear that if the fructose hits the liver in sufficient quantity and with sufficient speed, the liver will convert much of it to fat. This apparently induces a condition known as insulin resistance, which is now considered the fundamental problem in obesity, and the underlying defect in heart disease and in the type of diabetes, type 2, that is common to obese and overweight individuals. It might also be the underlying defect in many cancers.

If what happens in laboratory rodents also happens in humans, and if we are eating enough sugar to make it happen, then we are in trouble.

The highlighted part of this is another reason why it makes very little sense to ditch all fruit in an effort to ditch sugar. Aside from the fact that fruit is a source of nutrition, there’s also the fact that in a lot of fruits, the amount of sugar is nowhere near as much as what’s found in modern sources of sugar.

The last time an agency of the federal government looked into the question of sugar and health in any detail was in 2005, in a report by the Institute of Medicine, a branch of the National Academies. The authors of the report acknowledged that plenty of evidence suggested that sugar could increase the risk of heart disease and diabetes — even raising LDL cholesterol, known as the “bad cholesterol”—– but did not consider the research to be definitive. There was enough ambiguity, they concluded, that they couldn’t even set an upper limit on how much sugar constitutes too much. Referring back to the 2005 report, an Institute of Medicine report released last fall reiterated, “There is a lack of scientific agreement about the amount of sugars that can be consumed in a healthy diet.”

This makes me think of the article I brought up last week, about egyptian mummies having clogged arteries. Perhaps… never mind.

What we have to keep in mind, says Walter Glinsmann, the F.D.A. administrator who was the primary author on the 1986 report and who now is an adviser to the Corn Refiners Association, is that sugar and high-fructose corn syrup might be toxic, as Lustig argues, but so might any substance if it’s consumed in ways or in quantities that are unnatural for humans. The question is always at what dose does a substance go from being harmless to harmful? How much do we have to consume before this happens?

When Glinsmann and his F.D.A. co-authors decided no conclusive evidence demonstrated harm at the levels of sugar then being consumed, they estimated those levels at 40 pounds per person per year beyond what we might get naturally in fruits and vegetables — 40 pounds per person per year of “added sugars” as nutritionists now call them. This is 200 calories per day of sugar, which is less than the amount in a can and a half of Coca-Cola or two cups of apple juice. If that’s indeed all we consume, most nutritionists today would be delighted, including Lustig.

Let me see if I can put this in a different perspective. A teaspoon of sugar is 15 calories. That means you’d be somewhere around 13 teaspoons of sugar in a day in order to make sure you didn’t go over the 200 calories per day limit (15 calories x 13 tablespoons = 195 calories.) There are 210 calories of sugar in a simple 20oz of pepsi.

Couple that with the amount of sugar hidden – or not so hidden – in our processed foods, salad dressing, condiments and fruits (canned fruit, anyone?), you’re quite possibly overdoing it on the sugar.

In the early 20th century, many of the leading authorities on diabetes in North America and Europe (including Frederick Banting, who shared the 1923 Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin) suspected that sugar causes diabetes based on the observation that the disease was rare in populations that didn’t consume refined sugar and widespread in those that did. In 1924, Haven Emerson, director of the institute of public health at Columbia University, reported that diabetes deaths in New York City had increased as much as 15-fold since the Civil War years, and that deaths increased as much as fourfold in some U.S. cities between 1900 and 1920 alone. This coincided, he noted, with an equally significant increase in sugar consumption — almost doubling from 1890 to the early 1920s — with the birth and subsequent growth of the candy and soft-drink industries.

Moving on:

Until Lustig came along, the last time an academic forcefully put forward the sugar-as-toxin thesis was in the 1970s, when John Yudkin, a leading authority on nutrition in the United Kingdom, published a polemic on sugar called “Sweet and Dangerous.” Through the 1960s Yudkin did a series of experiments feeding sugar and starch to rodents, chickens, rabbits, pigs and college students. He found that the sugar invariably raised blood levels of triglycerides (a technical term for fat), which was then, as now, considered a risk factor for heart disease. Sugar also raised insulin levels in Yudkin’s experiments, which linked sugar directly to type 2 diabetes. Few in the medical community took Yudkin’s ideas seriously, largely because he was also arguing that dietary fat and saturated fat were harmless. This set Yudkin’s sugar hypothesis directly against the growing acceptance of the idea, prominent to this day, that dietary fat was the cause of heart disease, a notion championed by the University of Minnesota nutritionist Ancel Keys.

Onward, again:

Rather the context of the science changed: physicians and medical authorities came to accept the idea that a condition known as metabolic syndrome is a major, if not the major, risk factor for heart disease and diabetes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now estimate that some 75 million Americans have metabolic syndrome. For those who have heart attacks, metabolic syndrome will very likely be the reason.The first symptom doctors are told to look for in diagnosing metabolic syndrome is an expanding waistline. This means that if you’re overweight, there’s a good chance you have metabolic syndrome, and this is why you’re more likely to have a heart attack or become diabetic (or both) than someone who’s not. Although lean individuals, too, can have metabolic syndrome, and they are at greater risk of heart disease and diabetes than lean individuals without it.

Just as an extremely superficial side note, this further highlights the fact that cutting the sugar causes your waistline to shrink.

By the early 2000s, researchers studying fructose metabolism had established certain findings unambiguously and had well-established biochemical explanations for what was happening. Feed animals enough pure fructose or enough sugar, and their livers convert the fructose into fat — the saturated fatty acid, palmitate, to be precise, that supposedly gives us heart disease when we eat it, by raising LDL cholesterol. The fat accumulates in the liver, and insulin resistance and metabolic syndrome follow.

Michael Pagliassotti, a Colorado State University biochemist who did many of the relevant animal studies in the late 1990s, says these changes can happen in as little as a week if the animals are fed sugar or fructose in huge amounts — 60 or 70 percent of the calories in their diets. They can take several months if the animals are fed something closer to what humans (in America) actually consume — around 20 percent of the calories in their diet. Stop feeding them the sugar, in either case, and the fatty liver promptly goes away, and with it the insulin resistance.

This goes back to Lustig’s point, about an hour and 10 minutes into the lecture, about reversal of type 2 diabetes.

Diabetics, have your doctors discussed this with you? No? Oh, okay.

Moving on, though.

One of the diseases that increases in incidence with obesity, diabetes and metabolic syndrome is cancer. This is why I said earlier that insulin resistance may be a fundamental underlying defect in many cancers, as it is in type 2 diabetes and heart disease. The connection between obesity, diabetes and cancer was first reported in 2004 in large population studies by researchers from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. It is not controversial. What it means is that you are more likely to get cancer if you’re obese or diabetic than if you’re not, and you’re more likely to get cancer if you have metabolic syndrome than if you don’t.

My totally non-scientific opinion on this topic here? Look at the vessels through which a lot of sugars – the item that causes insulin resistance – are served… and that’s chemical-laden processed foods.

Thoughts?

The [Extremely Thorough and Rather Compelling] Case Against Sugar is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The Case Against Soft Drinks
2. The Case Against Agave Nectar
3. Do YOU Drink 93 Packets Of Sugar A Day?

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 15 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: ancel keys, bad cholesterol, cholesterol, dietary fat, fat, FDA, fiber, fructose, fruit, gary taubes, glucose, good calories bad calories, heart disease, hfcs, high fructose corn syrup, john yudkin, ketchup, liver, metabolic syndrome, nytimes, pepsi sucks, pop, processed foods, robert lustig, salad dressing, soda, sodapop, soft drinks, sucrose, sugar, sugar addiction, sugar the bitter truth, triglycerides, type 2 diabetes, usda, what if its all a big fat lie, why we get fat

Some people may see “chewing your food a ton of times” as simply a corny etiquette issue, but outside of the little girly bites and “nibbling” you might think of, there’s a reality to eating this way that’s important to acknowledge. It’s also important to understand why you simply could not eat that way on a processed food-laden diet.

To “process” a food means that it… undergoes a “process” to become what it is when you receive it. There’s usually a chemical involved. Something to help preserve it… something to sweeten it… something to give it flavor entirely… something to “create” favor… there’s always something. There’s always “something” because that “something” usually helps the company manufacturing the product keep that product affordable for you.

Consider high fructose corn syrup (otherwise known as HFCS – my personal whipping boy.) When HFCS is taken into the body, it cannot be handled like regular sugar and is then sent directly to the liver to be dealt with. In the meantime, while other sweeteners trigger the hormone that tells you to stop eating, HFCS doesn’t. Instead, it hangs out in the liver, waiting to be processed as fat. Just so you know.. anything you eat that the rest of the body fails to find a use for (like these additives and random chemicals) is sent to the liver to be processed as fat… and overworking your liver in this fashion can, well… I’m just sayin’.

Let’s take it a step further. What’s in the picture below?

Credit: Fooducate

If you watched the clip above, you already know. Our processed foods are broken down to their most basic parts, mixed in with preservatives (which help, you know, preserve the final product), flavor additives, water, flour, various forms of salt, then manipulated to be whatever they want to sell us. The same ground up chicken carcass (which is what is in that photo) can be chicken patties, chicken nuggets, chicken fingers, “diced chicken,” the chicken in your chicken pot pie, the chicken in your soup… whatever. Just look for “mechanically separated [animal] parts.” You won’t have to look too hard.

Once it’s broken down to create this… goo… chemicals are used to hold it in place to form whatever shape it’s going to take. Once it meets your saliva and enters your body, it breaks right back down to the goo… with no fiber inside to help push it out. It essentially deflates inside of your system, making it easier to consume more calories because you’re “not full yet.” Couple all of this with the fact that it takes approximately 20 minutes for your brain to get the signal from your digestive system that you’re “full,” and you start to see why a food that breaks down this quickly is a recipe for disaster – a breaded chicken breast on wheat bread breaks down much more slowly than a chicken patty sandwich on white bread, takes longer to chew (buying you time until that 20 minute mark… see what that 30 bites was important?), takes longer to digest (thus leaving you feeling fulfilled longer), and keeps you from overindulging. You’re getting that “full” feeling for less calories. You’re not scarfing it down because it’s breaking down faster than it can fill you up… only to find that “all-of-a-sudden-I-feel-like-I-ate-too-much” feeling arrive.

No nutritional value, harmful and fattening chemical additives, unidentifiable sources… sorry, give me a head of broccoli and I’ll make my own, anyday.

The Chemical “Processing” In Your Processed Foods is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part I: What Is Processed Food?
2. How To Spot – And Start To Give Up – Processed Foods
3. Food 101: The Problem With Processed Foods

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 11 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: additives, chemicals, eating, high fructose corn syrup, leptin, preservatives, processed foods

“What the hell? I can’t give up sugar! I can’t ever put these [insert item] down! I don’t understand! It’s okay, I’ll only have a little.”

For me, when it comes to food… if the food in my hand is of pure origins, I can put it down. I can control that. I value that level of control that I have over myself. Can I use those foods to make dishes so delicious that I can barely think straight? Of course I can… however – and this is a big however – they require the most work and effort, especially since I’m making them from scratch, by my own hand. I have to work hard to cook it and since I’m usually not willing to put forth that kind of work, I tend to give up in the middle of it.

Having said all of that, I cringe a little on the inside when people talk about how they “can’t give up” or “can’t live without” or justify use of a certain food… because that is addiction talk. I know… it’s not cocaine, it’s not alcohol, it’s not heroin. I get it. But I’m not certain that it’s that different. In fact, science has long said that the reaction that sugar causes in the brain is equal to that of heroin or cocaine, and causes us to crave it for the high… crash when it’s low. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s a vicious cycle… and every time I give in it, it makes it that much more difficult to say “no” the next time I encounter the opportunity to give in.

It’s even more strange when people acknowledge that they go through “withdrawals” when they don’t get their “daily fix,” but don’t acknowledge that cycle as an addiction. That is particularly strange. Perhaps that’s because so much of society is addicted to sugar and exhibits the same behaviors, that it seems so common. That’s the only reason I can guess.

That’s a big part of why emotional eating exists – because sugar (in proper conjunction with fat and/or salt) provides a high that is comparable to that of any other narcotic. And because we become used to the high, it causes us to eventually crave more and more… and more… and before we’ve even noticed it we’re gaining weight and suffering from illnesses we’ve never dealt with before.

I know I’ve talked a lot about sugar and even more about that “I can’t put this down” feeling… but today, I’d like to scratch the surface of what is called sugar addiction.

Firstly, it does make sense. When sugar is ingested, it immediately hits the blood stream and once the brain registers the sugar in the system, it releases the same opioids as it would if you were snorting something. Opioids are chemicals in the brain that cause us to be more tolerant of pain or even decrease our awareness of pain as well as increases feelings of pleasure and euphoria. The pleasureful feelings are the high we all experience. This, in my mind, is the cornerstone of emotional eating. The high relieves us from the pain we’re feeling and allows us to experience euphoria – a safe haven from our daily stresses. It also explains the withdrawal feelings:

“Recent behavioral tests in rats further back the idea of an overlap between sweets and drugs. Drug addiction often includes three steps. A person will increase his intake of the drug, experience withdrawal symptoms when access to the drug is cut off and then face an urge to relapse back into drug use. Rats on sugar have similar experiences. Researchers withheld food for 12 hours and then gave rats food plus sugar water. This created a cycle of binging where the animals increased their daily sugar intake until it doubled. When researchers either stopped the diet or administered an opioid blocker the rats showed signs common to drug withdrawal, such as teeth-chattering and the shakes. Early findings also indicate signs of relapse. Rats weaned off sugar repeatedly pressed a lever that previously dispensed the sweet solution.” [source]

Now, I used to always say, “Oh, I’m not a sweets person. I just have my instant oatmeal, my buttery crackers, my white bread, the occasional ice cream, orange juice and maybe some [insert sugary cereal here]. That’s it for me.” All of those, mind you, are processed foods. The problem here is that they all contain so much sugar, that – even if you’re consuming them in accordance to their recommended serving sizes (which are usually quite small) – you’re well beyond 150 grams of sugar. Remember – 1 teaspoon of sugar is 4 grams, so 150 grams is approximately 37 grams of sugar.. more than one cup of sugar each day. At 4 calories per gram (for each gram of carbs we take in, we have to burn 4 calories), that’s 600 unnecessary calories. You can’t say that it doesn’t add up. It does.

Next, I often wonder if this plays a role in the development of depression and its prevalence in Black women… if we’re operating on a sugar high, we don’t know how to cope when we crash… since we coped with the problem using a sugar high to begin with. And because so few of us are inclined to visit a therapist, I wonder if it creates a cycle that many of us are never able to escape… possibly explaining a large chunk of that “60% of Black women are overweight” issue. I’m not saying that this isn’t the same for all Americans, but I just happen to be personally aware of how my culture shuns those who seek out mental help… or sound, solid medical advice.

One of the huge reasons I’m so anti-processed foods is because even foods that don’t taste sweet at first are loaded with sugars just so that you’ll still get that “mmm… opioids!” feeling from them. It’s a brain function that food manufacturers are very familiar with, and they use it to their advantage to convince us to eat more of (and, eventually, buy more of) their products. I mean, yeah.. it’s great that you’re creating products that we can love, but…. I can’t help but feel like it’s lazy to use sugar to give an “mmm” feeling to food instead of good flavor. And, really – it’s not like they don’t care about the public… they just care about their profits much more.

I wish you could see the look on my face right now.

I think this also ties into two posts I’ve written recently – “The Myth of Will Power” and “Is There Ever A Reason To Destroy Your Food?” – because both deal with the inability to control oneself when it comes to certain foods, and learning the point where it’s safe to say “I need to remove this food from my presence.”

I think it’s also important to note that it’s not just “sugar,” but the entire “sweet without fiber” family. If sugar is the poison, fiber is the antidote. Fiber keeps us from over-indulging, keeps us full enough to not have to dig back into some more sweet-flavored food minutes later and cleans out our insides all at the same time. So any sweets that don’t come naturally with fiber are problematic. In other words, yes – fruits are okay.

The reality is that sugar addiction is a very real thing, and it requires vigilance to start to cut down. Like I said in my post in favor of calorie counting (instead of intuitive eating), I was learning about what to expect within certain products, and I was always reading the labels to understand how much sugar was in something. If it had more than a certain amount of sugar, it had to go. Is it time for something in your kitchen to go? Let’s talk about it!

Recommended reading:

• The Case Against Soft Drinks
• Q&A Wednesday: Table Sugar vs. High Fructose Corn Syrup
• The Case Against Diet Soda (And Aspartame… And Splenda.. And….)
• No Sugar? Then What Can I Use?
• How To Spot – And Start To Give Up – Processed Foods

What Is Sugar Addiction? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The Four-Week Plan For Curbing Your Sugar Addiction
2. Q&A Wednesday: Sugar, Food Addiction and Backsliding
3. Portraits of Addiction: What Do Your See?

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: brain, mentality, opioids, sugar, sugar addiction

As A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss spends a day celebrating the life of an icon, I’m going to take some time to echo the late great Michael Jackson’s words:

“Tired of injustice, tired of the schemes, kind of disgusted, so what does this mean? Kickin’ me down, I’ve got to get up… As jacked as it sounds, the whole system sucks….With such confusions, don’t it make you wanna scream?”

She mad, he mad, I'm mad... you mad?

Now that I’m all fired up… let’s get down to business, shall we?

There are a few things that I hear, when people ask me questions about food, that are all too common. We all, when confronted with information that forces us to change how we address food… we push back a little. I mean, I live this way for a reason! And I deserve to present my reasons to you before I just give up my way of life, right? That’s to be expected. No one should just blindly follow anyone when it comes to nutrition, but I often wonder – do we think about where we got our own philosophies about food? I think some of us might be surprised if we really traced them as far back as they go.

Having said that, here are a few food myths that make me wanna scream. [insert obligatory crotch grabbing here]

“If it’s so bad for you, why does the government allow it to be sold?”

Contrary to popular belief, the FDA doesn’t really have the power to tell someone to stop selling something. I know, I know, the next line is always “But they’re the government – they can do anything.” The government tries to keep its hands out of food production as far as imposing limitations because of three reasons:

1. Telling people they cannot sell something limits capitalism. You’re essentially cutting off a potential industry for people to make money, thus limiting the amount of taxable income floating around, thus, thus, thus.. they’d be out of bounds.
2. The FDA’s purpose is to ensure that there is food accessible to the public. That’s it. Determining the quality of the food.. mehhhh, they’re not interested in that.
3. Since “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” includes allowing me to make choices for myself (be they healthy or not), the FDA would be overstepping its bounds by preventing me from “enjoying what I like, even if in moderation.” (And, really – considering how many poor decisions the FDA and the USDA have made regarding food in the last, oh, 30-40 years… I want to be able to make my own informed decisions.)

Realistically speaking, the most that the FDA can do is issue press releases and conferences telling you how certain ingredients are absolutely harmful (see: trans fat), but they cannot keep companies from using those same harmful ingredients in foods (see: yes, trans fat.) We are supposed to make those decisions for ourselves, even though there are people who work hard to ensure we never get the information necessary to make informed decisions.

“I can eat this TV dinner. It’s healthy.”/”I can buy this – it says low-fat/low cholesterol/real blueberries!”

One of my favorite lines from a book goes as follows: “If it has a “healthy claim” on the label, chances are it’s the last thing you want to buy for better health.”

I know that I’ve written this before, but I’m always tickled by food in grocery aisles that says “Look at me! I’m made with real food!” Well, shouldn’t you be? I mean, you are food, aren’t you? Why on Earth would you not be made of real food?

If you are in pursuit of better health, the best options for you are foods that can’t talk to you through pretty labels – your fruits and vegetables. Your beans and nuts. Even your juices and berries. Don’t get suckered by claims on pretty – or, not so pretty – boxes. Especially when you consider what’s hiding behind that label. It’s not worth the money, the fleeting joy or your health.

“Ugh, I can’t stand her – she can eat anything she wants.”

Um, naw – she can’t.

I know that when people say this, the full sentence sounds more like “…she can eat anything she wants and not gain weight.” But really, no one can “eat anything they want and still avoid some kind of consequence. It’s just not possible.

Firstly, a lifestyle that consists of “eating whatever you want” will bite you in the tail eventually. ALWAYS. Why? Our metabolism decreases by approximately 0.5% every year. Think about that. Every ten years, we lose five percent of our ability to metabolize food properly. If I, at age 17, develop a habit of eating whatever I like without ever learning proper nutrition, by the time I’m 22 – after college and the dreaded freshman 15 – I have bad habits, excess unnecessary weight and a decreasing ability to deal with my bad habits. It goes downhill from there.

No matter how much one may workout to burn off excess calories, the fact remains that we may not always have that time to devote to getting in some extra time on the treadmill. That’s why it’s so important to have our eating habits in check. If you never have the extra calories to begin with, you don’t have to struggle so much with feeling forced to burn it off.(Hence, why calorie counting is so important.)

I probably could’ve shortened this entirely with just one sentence, but then I couldn’t rock out with the awesome video at the beginning. But really, if there is only one take away from this, let it be this:

“Focus on you and your eating habits, don’t let anyone’s health claims or supposed “responsibility” guide your lifestyle.” Your body will reward you over and over again for it.

3 Food Myths That Make Me Wanna Scream is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. No Myths Here: Food Stamps, Food Deserts and Food Scarcity
2. Hierarchy of Food Needs: How Do You Get GOOD Food When There’s No Food?
3. Q&A Wednesday: I’m Not Gonna Make It Through Labor Day!

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: fake food, FDA, government, health claims, health food, healthy food, michael jackson, nutrition

We eat the foods, but how often do we take a look at the stuff on the side? Yes, all those numbers, lines, and percentages… they’re supposed to mean something, but… must.. hurry.. purchase… yummies…

Well, with any luck, we have a better understanding of the nutrients that make up our foods. From here, the next step is applying that to our shopping skills to make the best decisions possible for not only weight loss, but better health altogether.

A lot of us may have pretty solid understandings of the nutrition facts label, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I was pretty lost myself at times… and in my frustration, I’d let my hunger overtake my good sense, utter a curse word and throw it in the cart. Hey… no shame in my game.

Well, maybe a little.

Let’s get down to business, shall we?

To the left, you will find the nutrition label found on the side of a box of hamburger helper. I’m personally tickled by the fact that it offers the calorie count for the product “as packaged,” as well as “as prepared.” I mean, I’m sure people use parts of uncooked hamburger helper in other recipes.. I guess.

You’ll also notice that the top of the label lists that there are ten servings per container. This means that the entire contents of this box should be divided by ten to provide you with one serving size. Lucky for you, you’ll have to do any portion dividing on your own. (Or, perhaps you’re like many of the other people I know who eat several servings at a time.. and may need to multiply everything by that number.)

Next, you should see the calorie count, and the calories from fat listed underneath. Remember how I told you that for every gram of fat, you get 9 calories and every gram of carbs as well as protein gives you 4 calories… thus making up our calorie counts? Well, here is that in action:

.5g of fat multiplied by 9 calories = 4.5 calories. You’ll notice that the calories from Fat says 5 calories. So far, so good.

25g of carbs, 4 calories for each gram? 25×4=100 calories.

3g of protein, 4 calories for each gram? 3×4=12 calories.

4.5 + 100 + 12 = 117.5calories. If you’ll notice, the calorie count is listed as 120. How considerate. They rounded up. (Or, there is some rounding down going on in those 25.4g counts…)

Moving on.. you may also notice the “% Daily Value**” (or PDV) directly beneath the “Calories from Fat” line. You’ll also see two rows or numbers directly beneath that. The “% Daily Value” simply tells you “Of the amount recommended to you by the federal government, this serving will give you this percent.” So, yes, this one serving of hamburger – 1/10th of what you’ve cooked – will give you a little more than 1/3rd of your recommended daily serving of salt.

If you follow the double asterisks (**) to the near-bottom of the package, you’ll read the following: “Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your daily values may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs.” 2,000 may be higher than your caloric goals for the day, so you’ll need to keep that in mind when you look at the percentages.

On each package of hamburger helper, they offer instructions on how to prepare it. The number on the left offers information on what the bare bones package offers you. To the right, you’re looking at the information for the meal, if prepared by their instructions to a tee. The items listed – sodium, fat, carbs, cholesterol, etc – are pretty much the bare minimum of what has to be listed on the label. This one lists potassium on its label because anyone conscious about sodium will know that you can balance its effects with a good dosage of potassium. Leave off and round down where you can, but shine as much light on yourself as possible when it helps.

The next section lists the PDV of the essential nutrients you’ll get from one serving of this stuff. It may also tell you – as it does here – “not a reliable source of protein/vitamin c/vitamin z.”

The next two sections are particularly interesting – well, to me, at least… but I like these kinds of things. They’re basically giving you basic calorie/nutrient requirements for a person living on either a 2,000 calorie (presumably for women) or a 2,500 calorie (presumably for men) daily diet. You’ll have to determine for yourself if that’s too high, too low, or a good base for yourself.

Lastly… the ingredients list. This one, to me, deserves it’s own post on its own.. but I’ll be nice today. Just know a few things: 1) If you skim back up to the “Total Fat” and see “0.0g trans fat,” then skim back down to the ingredients list and see “partially hydrogenated something oil,” there’s trans fat in it. That “0.0g” merely means there’s “less than .5g of trans fat in this serving.” You didn’t know that “rounding down” is considered acceptable by our government? As I’ve written before, what makes this especially challenging is the fact that people will easily – easily – eat more than one serving of this stuff in one sitting.. so 3 servings in one sitting means three servings of 0.49g of trans fats, which EASILY turns into 1.47g of trans fat. I find that appalling, but whatever. If trans fat is in the item, it has to be listed in the ingredients list.. so you can spot it. I’ll definitely have to do a more in depth post about the ingredients list but that’s the most important thing, at least to me, about that list.

My philosophy on it is this – if it has to have a nutrition label to tell me what’s going on inside of it, chances are I shouldn’t be eating it anyhow. But for those times that we have to bite the bullet and dive in, hopefully this will serve as a quick (is it ever really “quick?”) little handy guide to understanding the labels.

But really… stop buying stuff with labels and packages.

Comprehending Calories: How To Properly Read A Nutrition Label is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Comprehending Calories: The Basics
2. Comprehending Calories: The Role of Carbs In Your Diet
3. Can We Really Trust Nutrition Labels?

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: calorie counting, clean eating, government, grocery shopping, nutrition, nutrition label, processed foods

Credit: avlxyz

I’m always confused by when I get e-mails or messages on the BGG2WL FB page that ask me questions about the fact that my recipes contain fat. I’m confused – are we supposed to be avoiding fat or something?

Oh, so you mean that the fact that after almost 30 years of “low-fat/fat free” products, the country is even more overweight now than it was before… that fact didn’t teach y’all that the “low fat/no-fat” philosophy isn’t the way to go?

Oh.

I abandoned conventional wisdom on fat a long time ago. It just… doesn’t make sense to me.

If I think about what our ancestors ate, it included fruits, vegetables, and animal flesh and byproducts. It’s one thing to sensibly monitor your intake of animal flesh (read: portion control), but to cut it out entirely after sustaining on it for centuries?

No. You’ll take my fat from me when you pry it from my bony little fingers.

A little while back, Civil Eats posted the following:

This past December, the Los Angeles Times reported that excess carbohydrates and sugar, not fat, are responsible for America’s obesity and diabetes epidemics. One of the lead researchers in this field, Dr. Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said, “The country’s big low-fat message backfired. The overemphasis on reducing fat caused the consumption of carbohydrates and sugar in our diets to soar. That shift may be linked to the biggest health problems in America today.” Another expert, Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, said, “Fat is not the problem.”

[...]These are clear indications that an important tipping point in the mainstream understanding of fat and nutrition is underway. But it did take some time. Back in 2002, Gary Taubes wrote about it in the New York Times magazine, laying out a fine deconstruction of the low-fat premise presented to the American people. He pointed out that the science behind this recommendation was never proven and was actually based on “a leap of faith”.

I interrupt this reading to just excerpt what Civil Eats is referring to in this section regarding Taubes’ article, because I’m painfully familiar with it and its’ length. (It’s long… lonnnnnnnnnnnnnnng.)

In the intervening years, the N.I.H. spent several hundred million dollars trying to demonstrate a connection between eating fat and getting heart disease and, despite what we might think, it failed. Five major studies revealed no such link. A sixth, however, costing well over $100 million alone, concluded that reducing cholesterol by drug therapy could prevent heart disease. The N.I.H. administrators then made a leap of faith. Basil Rifkind, who oversaw the relevant trials for the N.I.H., described their logic this way: they had failed to demonstrate at great expense that eating less fat had any health benefits. But if a cholesterol-lowering drug could prevent heart attacks, then a low-fat, cholesterol-lowering diet should do the same. ”It’s an imperfect world,” Rifkind told me. ”The data that would be definitive is ungettable, so you do your best with what is available.” [source - page 5 if the link doesn't take you directly to it]

But…. onward, we go:

In 2001, Dr. Hu, writing in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, noted, “It is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health problems.” Or, as Michael Pollan pithily puts it in his In Defense of Food, “The amount of saturated fat in the diet may have little if any bearing on the risk of heart disease, and the evidence that increasing polyunsaturated fats in the diet will reduce risk is slim to nil.”

This brings up several important issues in the fat debate. It is still widely held that what matters are the types of fat we consume. Even in Shulman’s article on her fat re-education, there are contradictions—it’s clear she just can’t get her head around the idea that saturated fats may indeed be healthy. She writes, “Saturated fat—the kind found in animals and dairy products, as well as in any hydrogenated fat—is also regarded as a less healthy fat because it raises L.D.L cholesterol, or ‘bad’ cholesterol in the blood, and this kind of cholesterol is related to heart disease. But even saturated fat is not so bad compared to refined carbohydrates, the doctors say, and if we were to eliminate it from our diet we would also be eliminating many foods that are also rich in healthy fats, like fish, whose omega-3 fatty acids are vital to good health.”

But as Pollan points out, the idea that saturated fats are a less healthy fat just isn’t true, as the picture is fairly complex. Indeed, most foods are composed of a many different types of fats. For example, half the fat found in beef is unsaturated and most of that fat is the same monounsaturated fat found in olive oil. Lard is 60 percent unsaturated and most of the fat in chicken fat is unsaturated as well, according to Taubes 2008 book Good Calories, Bad Calories.  In his New York Times article he writes, “Even saturated fats–AKA, the bad fats—are not nearly as deleterious as you would think. True, they will elevate your bad cholesterol, but they will also elevate your good cholesterol. In other words, it’s a virtual wash.” Taubes continues, “Foods considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you actually look at their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it’s true that the remainder will raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your H.D.L. The same is true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease.”

[source]

Now, I’ve read Taubes’ article from 2002, I own Good Calories, Bad Calories… but most importantly, I’ve lived this stuff. My fats come from sources found in nature, not trans-fats or interesterified fats. My avocadoes, my cashews, creams and cheeses provide me with fat, and the occasional fish or poultry dish doesn’t hurt me, either. I balance my daily intake to the point where if I want a fat-heavy dish for dinner, I prepare for it in advance – I eat light on the fat during the day.

As the saying has always gone, when nature creates the poison, it pairs it with the antidote. All I’m gonna say is… consider this another reason to ditch the processed foods and embrace clean, well-grown foods. If your sources of fat are natural, the only thing you have to worry about is caloric intake throughout your day. Otherwise? No, fat doesn’t deserve the evisceration it has received over the past 20-30 years.

And certainly, let’s not forget the problem that “avoiding fat” actually led us to in the first place:

There are quite a few things worth noting, here. For starters, the fat-free version of the cream cheese is true to its label – it has reduced the fat content of the cheese down to nothing. There’s also 70 calories less in the fat-free version than there is in there regular. Well, I’ll be. [insert applause]

But look at the number of ingredients in the fat free cheese in comparison to the regular version. Better yet, how many of those ingredients are actual real food items and not the result of a chemistry experiment?

Cheese is made from milk, and let’s face it. Milk is supposed to be fattening. Let me repeat that. Milk is supposed to be fattening. The reason mammals produce milk (cows, goats and YES, humans) is to nourish their young and help them grow. It fattens them up. So needless to say, a cheese made from the milk of a mammal is going to have some fat in it. In order to create a cheese with the same consistency as regular cheese but remove the fat? A manufacturer has to add all those chemicals to it. Just to prevent the cheese from doing what it, technically, is supposed to do.

Look at how much sugar is in the regular version in comparison to the fat-free version. The natural “mmmm” that comes from the fat in cream cheese is now gone, so the manufacturer has to add it back by adding excess sugar. Interesting.

Check out how much sodium is in each version. Again, adding a little more salt to help the cheese get back that “mmmm” feeling it once had. I mean, I’m just sayin’. It’s something to think about.

I’d also like to compare the contents of the ingredients lists. In the regular version of cream cheese, it’s straight-forward: “Milk, cream, cheese culture, salt, carob bean, guar gum (a thickener, similar to cornstarch).” In the fat-free version? There’s… tragedy. And shame. And two “kinds” of salt (salt and sodium tripolyphosphate, a preservative derived from triphosphoric acid.) And twelve more ingredients than you can find in the regular version.

It takes a manufacturer 18 ingredients (many of whom not found in nature) to present you a cream cheese with the same taste and as close to that “mmm” feeling as possible. Sure, it has twice as much sugar and almost 60% more salt, but hey – at least you get fewer calories.

Why does this matter? It matters because in the quest for hunting for “fat free,” we’ve neglected the primary purpose of food – nourishing our bodies. If you change the structure of the milk used – from regular to skim – then you change the nutrients available. You change what the dish can do for you. You change its ability to nourish you and fill you up. You’re sticking more chemicals in your body.

Excerpted from Supermarket Swindle: Fat, Low Fat, Fat Free? | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

I’m just sayin’. Stop avoiding the fat. Your body actually needs it.

That’s not a green light to go all “Paula Deen” on me every day, but if you decide to drop some nice butter and lemon juice on your broccoli? I won’t be mad atcha.

It’s Always Been A Big Fat Lie is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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Post tags: civil eats, fat, fat free, gary taubes, los angeles times, low fat, no fat, nutrition

1) Note how long this has been going on.

2) Pay special attention to the tidbit about locavorism (eating locally) and what happened once we started creating more distance between us and who created our food.

3) Pay even more attention to the Congress’ reluctance to pass any real legislation regarding the food supply.

From my trusty, rusty Oxford Encyclopedia Of Food and Drink:

Adulteration is the practice of adding unsafe amounts of chemical preservatives to foods and drinks, or adding color to conceal inferior or deteriorated food and drink products, or mixing inexpensive foods and drinks with expensive ones so as o reduce costs, or substituting inexpensive foods and drinks for expensive ones. Adulteration has played a large role in the history of American food and drink; the public’s demand for federal protection from unscrupulous and dishonest producers and manufacturers at the beginning of the twentieth century led to the breakthrough passage in 1906 of both the Pure Food Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

Industrialization and Fraud

Although adulteration of American food and drink existed during the eighteenth century, it was not prevalent until the end of the nineteenth century, after dramatic changes had taken place in the nation’s food industry. Before the end of the Civil War in 1865, most food was obtained locally; bread came from the town baker, meat from the local butcher, seasonal fresh fruits and vegetables from nearby farms and milk from a neighbor’s cow. Americans knew where their food was made and who made it. The distance between producer and consumer was usually the length of a handshake – a distance that ensured the quality of most food products by means of the producer’s personal guarantee. Preservation of food was primitive; sophisticated forms of chemical preservation were unavailable and unnecessary. Most farms had a root cellar to store vegetables, and a springhouse – a small building constructed over a spring, in which cold springwater was collected – to keep milk and butter cool. Fresh fruits were dried in the sun, preserved by canning, or conserved in jams and jellies.

After the Civil War, as industry moved people from rural to urban areas, ciies grew and Americans became distant from the producers and manufacturers of their food. By 1875 a nation railroad system transported food from farms and ranches to centrally located urban processing locations; in turn, the railroads carried jarred, tinned and paper-packaged food to distend consumers.  America had developed a national commerce in food.

The distance food traveled and the time that elapsed between production and sale created significant problems with respect to preservation. Food producers hired chemists who addressed these problems by using various chemical additives to prevent decomposition, hide decay, restore natural color and modify flavor.  As the food industry grew and food became big business, few consumers knew how their food was produced, manufactured or handled. Taking advantage of this situation, many food companies directed their chemists to develop inexpensive goods as fraudulent substitutes for more costly ones, thereby decreasing costs and increasing profits. For example, apple stock was jarred and sold as blackberry, currant or plum jelly: the cores, skins and rejected portions of apples were made into an apple stock or juice, which was then artificially colored, flavored and jellied.

Fraudulent suppliers would package and price inauthentic produces as if they were the real thing. It was said, for example, that if every square food of Vermont was planted with sugar maple trees, there would not have been enough trees to account for the amount of “Pure Vermont Maple Syrup” sold in America. American drinks were also adulterated. Caramel color was added to fresh raw whiskey in order to mimic the amber color of barrel-aged whiskey. Sugar and caramel color were added to make inexpensive young brandy look and taste like expensive aged brandy.

Over time, dishonest manufacturers were profitable, while many honest competitors failed. Consequently, by the the end of the 19th century, most American food and drink was adulterated. Against this wave of corporate irresponsibility there arose in the united states a movement supporting a return to pure food. The leader of this effort was Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, the chief of the department of agriculture’s bureau of chemistry. he was joined in the crusade for pure food by other chemists who had been hired by state governments to help enforce state pure food laws. These chemists had designed analytical tests to determine if a food product was pure. Their analyzes proved that most of America’s food was adulterated for producer’s economic benefit. These chemists and their supporters concluded that the only solution to this widespread problem was a national law prohibiting adulteration.

For approximately 25 years, between 1879 and 1905, the pure food movement was unsuccessful in its attempts to get a national pure food law passed by Congress. During that period more than 100 bills were introduced in Congress; all of them failed under lobbying pressure from big business in the form of food and liquor manufacturers.
Forces of Change

Just after the turn of te 20th century, however, three significant events ultimately resulted in the enactment of a pure food law. First, adulteration of food became a hot topic at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. Although this 7-month event, which drew 20,000,000 visitors, is important in American food history for the introduction and popularization of ice cream cones, iced tea, peanut butter and contain candy, there was an important pure food presentation at the fair as well.

In one of the exhibit halls, food companies set up impressive displays of their canned and bottled foods– but many of these foods were artificially colored. Chemists from the National Association of State Dairy and Food Departments opened a booth nearby with their own exhibit. They had extracted the dyed from many of the artificially colored foods on display and used those dyes to color pieces of wool and silk. They attached a certificate to each piece of cloth, documenting the properties of the dye and naming the food that contained the dye. The brightly colored cloths were disturbing to most visitors and became a vehicle for the chemists manning the booth to educate people about the need for a national pure food law.

The state chemists’ exhibit attracted the attention not only of the general public but of legislators and newspaper and magazine writers. In the words of one of the state chemists, the exhibit “kindled a fire of public interest which no power on earth will be able to put out.”

The second significant event focusing attention on adulteration of food was Dr. Wiley’s study of the effects of chemical preservatives on healthy people. Twelve young men volunteered to eat their meals at the Bureau of Chemistry in Washington, D. C. They agreed to eat pure food only; however, the volunteers also took capsules that contained increasing doses of chemical preservatives. For this reason, the press gave the volunteers the melodramatic title “the Poison Squad.”

When Dr. Wiley testified before the House of Representatives in February of 1906, he reported that the volunteers suffered various degrees of illness, including stomach pain, dizziness, nausea and significant weight loss. Nine of the twelve had to drop out of the experiment because of illness. The poison squad experiments proved to many Americans that chemical preservatives were harmful to their health.

The third significant event was the publication of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle in February 1906. In The Jungle, Sinclair exposed the evils of immigrant victimization in Packingtown– the stockyards and slaughterhouses of Chicago. His fictional account shed light on te fact that immigrants from European countries were paid [grossly inadequate] wages and required to work long hours in unsafe and unhealthy conditions.

Although Sinclair’s novel was not about pure food, American readers focused their attention on the dozen or so pages of the book that described the evils of the meatpacking industry. Sinclair vividly portrayed the unsanitary conditions in the slaughterhouses, the limited scope of federal meat inspections, the ineffectualness of inspectors, the hush money paid to have diseased animals removed and processed elsewhere, the potted (canned) meats dyed to conceal spoilage or inferior quality, and the poisoned rats and poisoned bread ground with meat to make sausage.

At the time The Jungle was published, a pure food bill was in dire trouble in the house of representatives. The bill had been introduced in the senate in December 1905 after President Theodore Roosevelt recommended that Congress try again to enact a law “to regulate interstate commerce in misbranded and adulterated foods, drinks and drugs.” While the new bill was pending in the senate and facing strong opposition, the American medical association notified the senate leadership that America’s physicians planned to ask their patients to pressure the senate to pass the bill. Shortly thereafter, on February 21, 1906, the bill was brought to the floor and passed. The pure food bill was sent to the house, but republican leadership decided that the bill was too controversial and slated it to die quietly in committee without reaching the floor for a vote.

President Roosevelt read The Jungle in March, 1906. Concerned about the impact of Sinclair’s novel of American meat exports, Roosevelt sent investigators to Chicago; these investigators confirmed Sinclair’s account of adulteration in the meatpacking plants. They found filthy conditions in the workrooms: meat contaminate by dirt, splinters, pieces of rope, rubbish, and the “expectoration of tuberculous and other diseased workers.”

Roosevelt decided that a law was needed to increase the scope of meat inspections at the plants, so that federal inspectors would exercise complete control over the meatpacking process. A new law, solely focused on meat inspection, met with significant opposition in Congress, particularly in the House, but a compromise amendment ultimately passed, called the Meat Inspection Act. President Roosevelt obtained its release from committee, where it had been languishing. pushed along by Roosevelt, the impetus of the meatpacking reform legislation, and the pure food reformers, te pure food bill finally passed congress. It was signed into law on June 30, 1906.

The Pure Food Act prohibited the introduction into interstate commerce of any food that was adulterated or misbranded. The statutory definition of adulteration was broad. It included the addition of any substance that diminished the food’s quality or reduced its strength; the use of a fraudulent substitute; the removal of any valuable part of the food; the concealment of any damage or inferiority by coloring, coating of staining; the addition of any poisonous or deleterious ingredient; and the incorporation of any filthy, decomposed or putrid animal or vegetable substance into the food.

Enforcement of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and its successor, The Federal Food, Dug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, greatly decreased the adulteration of food during the 20th century. Adulteration has not been eliminated, however. Some specific foods are recurring targets of this activity: honey and maple syrup adulterated with ‘high fructose corn syrup”, sugar beet syrup or sugarcane syrup; chicory, cereal or other fillers added to coffee; other food oils blended in with pure olive oil; synthetic vanillin substituted for real vanilla bean extract. In addition, uninspected imported food presents a significant risk of illness from unregulated, excessive amounts of chemical preservatives. In the early 21st century, it remains to be seen whether the federal government will muster sufficient resources to defeat the continuing problem of adulteration.

My contention with this blog – and always has been – is that the more unadulterated our food is, the more able we are to return to our original natural instincts with food: less snacking, far less overeating, less excess weight, more control, more “will power.” I feel like this excerpt offers up a pretty good portion of why such is true. At any point in time where an entity can make more money by adding chemicals – whether that be by skimping on the ingredients or by adding chemicals to make food “addictive,” you can trust them to do that. I, personally, prefer to not have to trust them at all. Perhaps with this upcoming series on the blog, more people will do the same.

The “Adulteration” of Our Food Supply is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. No Myths Here: Food Stamps, Food Deserts and Food Scarcity
2. Hierarchy of Food Needs: How Do You Get GOOD Food When There’s No Food?
3. Does Your State Allow Fast Food Purchases On Food Stamps?

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I’m a believer in a simplified life. It’s like, I appreciate the fact that processed foods allow us the ability to eat more complex dishes at less of a cost to our time… but you can’t get “something” for “nothing.” It *has* to cost us in other ways, right?

Well, apparently, in the factories that help create these items (opens a PDF file), the cost is that they use outdated techniques that create two key chemicals used to make high fructose corn syrup.  These outdated techniques use mercury. And remember, they said the stuff was safe, right?

Mercury is one of the more toxic elements found in nature – it is toxic. Period. The interesting thing about this is… even if one manufacturer said “There’s not enough mercury in our product to cause that kind of damage,” (he’d probably be right) the thing is – high fructose corn syrup is everywhere. Ketchup, yogurt, salad dressings, syrups, almost any processed item with an iota of sweetness in it. It has it. So while one item might not have enough to harm you, if you ingest enough of it every day, you can feel the effects.

Why would they use mercury in high fructose corn syrup? Why else? The stuff helps extend shelf life. Surprise, surprise.

And since you know the Corn Refiners Association had a response:

This study appears to be based on outdated information of dubious significance. Our industry has used mercury-free versions of the two re-agents mentioned in the study, hydrochloric acid and caustic soda, for several years…

In 1983, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration formally listed high fructose corn syrup as safe for use in food and reaffirmed that decision in 1996.

This tells me two things: 1) for the study to be “based on outdated information” means that it has to have been accurate at one point in time or another; and 2) since the FDA “formally listed high fructose corn syrup as safe” over 14 years ago, there couldn’t possibly be a reason to test it now… so they won’t be doing so.

Everything from Hunt’s Ketchup (the ketchup I used to looooooove) to Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup is on this list. I’m not going to act like I’m not tardy for the party on this information because much of the news is dated early 2009, but to me it only serves as another polite reminder of why I do my best to avoid processed foods.

In short, do a little digging. Check out that PDF with the list of items that were tested to prove they contained mercury. Question why the FDA isn’t hardcore focused on this. Then do your best to limit the amount of high fructose corn syrup you have in your life.

Any surprises on that list for you? Anything you think you’re going to have a hard time giving up? Do share – maybe I can help.

Another Reason To Ditch The High Fructose Corn Syrup is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Saturday Night Live Pokes Fun At High Fructose Corn Syrup
2. High Fructose Corn Syrup Wants New Name: Why You Shouldn’t Care
3. High Fructose Corn Syrup: What’s The Big Deal?

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Post tags: FDA, high fructose corn syrup, ingredients, processed foods

Now… down to business.

A cornerstone of clean eating is limiting your intake of processed foods. What are processed foods? Anything that has to endure a process in order to come to you the way that you receive it. If you have a box of Cinnamon Life Charms Choco Crisp Spacks Crunch on top of your fridge, that’s processed. White bread? Processed. “Smooth” peanut butter? Processed. Sodapop? Orange Juice? Soy milk? Processed. Flour (yes, of any kind)? Processed. Baby carrots? Processed. As you can see, it can get complicated.. that’s why you limit your intake as opposed to cutting everything. Sometimes, that’s simply not possible. (I’m realistic, here.)

For a food to endure a process, more often than not this means that an outside chemical has been introduced to the item. This can be anything from the chlorine your cute little baby carrots were soaked in before they were packaged to the avalanche of ingredients in your white bread. It can be the three kinds of salt – yes, three – in your box of scalloped potatoes… or the powdered cheesy product that you mix with water (or milk, you can get jazzy on it!) to make the “cheese” that coats your macaroni noodles. It can even be that big giant block of cheese you use to make your “macaroni and cheese from scratch.” It doesn’t seem so “from scratch” when you look at it that way, does it?

One of the largest problems with processed foods is the fact that there’s a small handful of ingredients that can be found in all of them. They’re usually very high-carb items. Why? Because that “small handful of ingredients that can be found in all” processed foods are purely carbs. Processed carbs. They’re also the cheapest and most readily available ingredients, as well.

Please never forget that these processed foods are created by businesses that have profit margins to protect, here. In order to provide you with seemingly inexpensive items and still make money, they’ve got to use cheap ingredients. So don’t be surprised by the fact that many of the fast foods that you’re abstaining from this week are made with these same ingredients. Profits are important. That’s just how business works. Health is secondary, sorry to say.

Processed carbohydrates are problematic because the process that they go through in order to be box/can/plastic-wrapping-ready calls for the valuable part of the carb to be removed: the fiber. The part that not only helps you to feel full, but helps you to empty your system to make room for more food, has been pulled out. (No, really – if you have a lot of processed foods in your kitchen, take a look and see how much fiber you find inside.) The fiber is removed from the product because fiber can’t withstand all that time on the shelf. Think of how long the truly fibrous foods – the fruits and veggies – tend to last in your home. Beyond a week or so? They don’t.

When you enter your favorite supermarket, where do you head first? Do you walk to either your direct left or right toward the produce, or do you head for an aisleway? I can assure you, if you’re heading for an aisleway, you’re headed for the processed foods. Unprocessed foods, specifically your produce and meats, are always stored on the outermost walls of the grocery. They have a tendency to spoil if not refridgerated, and the best place to house the refridgerators is the walls of the store. Produce, by default, just gets stuck in a corner somewhere usually near the frozen foods or deli.

If something as innocent as baby carrots and peanut butter can count as a processed food, how do you know what to limit?

Start with the ingredient list. Almost every processed food originated from a traditional recipe – which means it should be easily created in your home – so that means the ingredient list should look like a traditional recipe without the cup/teaspoon/tablespoon amounts… right? Do you keep monosodium glutamate in your house? (I know there’s the random person out there who does.. and really – no, really – shouldn’t.) How about fructooligosaccharides? Do you keep that on deck? If it contains ingredients that you couldn’t keep on hand in your kitchen, leave it be.

Avoid the magic potions. If it has a “just add water!!111!1!1!1″ label on it, leave it be. A problem with processed food is the fact that it usually disintegrates into what it originated from after you ingest it… only to revert back to a congealed blob once digested… a blob that leaves you constipated and angry. No thanks. So if I buy a box of scalloped potatoes (if you notice, I’m always talking about scalloped potatoes) or mashed potatoes, and they come with a powderto mix with water… where’s the cheese? Where’s the butter? For crying out loud, why do my potatoes look like hard freeze dried chips? All I have to do is “add water” and I, too, can have magical scalloped potatoes? Child, please – you wouldn’t buy that spiel on an infomercial, would you? Don’t let your hunger manipulate you into falling for the “magic potion.”

If the flies don’t want it… you don’t want it. Humans are supposed to compete with animals (including flies) for resources. We also have the mental ability to win these competitions. The reason I mention this is because we’re attracted to the same foods for the same reasons. Flies are attracted to our meat, our fruit, our plants because they are nourishing. There are nutrients within those items. If you go to a grocery store,you don’t see flies in the aisles. You see them in the produce. That’s where you should be. You might have to swat a fly or two off of your tomato… but please believe that’s a victory worth winning. (Hippie moment?)

The reality is, you want your foods to come to you as untouched as possible, as light on the chemical interference as possible and as desirable as possible. So yes, friend – that means you’re going to have to embrace those fruits and – heaven and Earth, help you – those veggies. But how on Earth do I eat vegetables? I hate those! Stay tuned for tomorrow’s Q&A Wednesday!

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How To Spot – And Start To Give Up – Processed Foods is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The Problem With Processed Foods, Part I: What Is Processed Food?
2. The Chemical “Processing” In Your Processed Foods
3. Food 101: The Problem With Processed Foods

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Post tags: processed foods

But never fear! Caught this in the NYTimes (y’all know I love the Times):

“Nearly two-thirds of Americans needlessly discard a quarter-gallon of milk each month,” said Ethel Tiersky, the editor of ShelfLifeAdvice.com. “Most people think those dates are telling you that after that, the food isn’t safe,” said Ms. Tiersky, a retired English teacher and self-described “food safety fanatic” who monitors the industry with the help of a blue-ribbon panel of professors. “They’re not. They’re about quality. ‘Past this point, the quality of the food is not at its best.’ ”Virtually nothing in your refrigerator jeopardizes your health, Ms. Tiersky added.

“The pathogens that cause food to look bad, smell bad or taste bad are not the ones that make you sick,” she said.

The real story is even shadier, I’m afraid. Much of the confusion on this issue comes from the tangle of terms applied to food (“sell by,” “use by,” best before”) and their dubious origins. With the exception of baby formula, the federal government (Agriculture Department, Food and Drug Administration, etc.) plays no role in regulating such terms or dates. At least 20 states administer regulations locally, but mostly for dairy products and usually to control how long products can be kept in stores, not how long they should be kept in your refrigerator.

The vast bulk of the dates that appear on the margins of dried, canned or packaged products were put there by manufacturers, who alone determine their decision-making process without revealing their standards. In other words, whom do you want to trust to tell you how long your food is good for? General Mills or general sense? Chef Boyardee or Chef Mom and Dad?

“We have five senses that were given to us that are the best tools for finding out whether food has gone bad,” said Bridget Lancaster, a host of “America’s Test Kitchen” on PBS. “We’ve all opened a carton of milk that has three days to go and it smells bad. Conversely, we’ve all opened one where the date’s three days past and it’s still fine. My dad used to say that a weatherman has only a 50-50 chance of getting the weather right. I feel the same way with food.”

Ms. Lancaster said that to avoid squabbling with her husband, a professional chef who’s a stickler for expiration dates, she uses a “first in, first out” philosophy that many stores employ. When all else fails, she falls back on her personal motto of cooking: somebody will eat it.

“Food is to be eaten and enjoyed,” she said. “You’re not supposed to be a slave for your cooking. You’re not supposed to be stressing over what’s for dinner. There’s probably stuff in your fridge, at any moment, that you can whip into a meal. And better to use it than throw it out. It breaks my heart to throw out food.”

A second look at this quote:

Virtually nothing in your refrigerator jeopardizes your health, Ms. Tiersky added. “The pathogens that cause food to look bad, smell bad or taste bad are not the ones that make you sick,” she said.

So, now that we’ve covered processed food, the question is… what do we do about fruits and vegetables?

The first place I stopped was the USDA’s website:

 

Fruits and vegetables, FIRM (such as cabbage, bell peppers, carrots, etc.)	Use. Cut off at least 1 inch around and below the mold spot (keep the knife out of the mold itself so it will not cross-contaminate other parts of the produce).	Small mold spots can be cut off FIRM fruits and vegetables with low moisture content. It’s difficult for mold to penetrate dense foods.
Fruits and vegetables, SOFT (such as cucumbers, peaches, tomatoes, etc.)	Discard	SOFT fruits and vegetables with high moisture content can be contaminated below the surface.

Soft fruits and veggies – like cucumbers and mushrooms – have to go, but firm ones like carrots and apples… you can cut around any moldy parts.

But since I don’t always trust the USDA… I went somewhere else, too. The FDA says:

Cut away any damaged or bruised areas on fresh fruits and vegetables before preparing and/or eating. Produce that looks rotten should be discarded.

And one more for good measure – an excerpt from an interview with Johnathan Bloom, author of American Wsteland:

Q: Fresh fruits and vegetables seem to spoil as soon as we buy them. Any advice?

A: Fresh produce tends to be quite delicate and easily bruised. Fruits and vegetables are also sensitive to temperature shifts. And then you throw in the beautiful, uniform appearance most stores require, and it’s a wonder that any fruits and vegetables make the cut. We can do a better job storing our produce. Mostly, that means keeping items in our fridge’s crisper. Also, we need to make friends with our paring knives. One bad spot or leaf shouldn’t doom produce to the trash.

What do you do?

Am I Throwing Away My Food Too Soon? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. No Myths Here: Food Stamps, Food Deserts and Food Scarcity
2. Hierarchy of Food Needs: How Do You Get GOOD Food When There’s No Food?
3. The Choice Between Food As Culture and Food As Medicine

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 19 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: best used by, expiration dates, FDA, food storage, fruits, usda, vegetables

Regardless of which one you choose, they’re all wrong to me. Hey, I’m just keepin’ it real.

It’s hard enough to eat clean – buying mainly produce and deli – without breaking the bank. If you grocery shop for clean eating every other night, what are you leaving to rot and waste at home? (And for crying out loud, how much gas are you wasting?) If you’re buying cooked dinners from the deli in the grocery, how much money are you spending per plate per night? (And for goodness sake, how much trash are you accumulating?)

And if you’re going grocery shopping every two weeks, I’m almost certain that you’re buying an influx of processed foods. What else is going to keep that well for two weeks without eventually beginning to wilt? (And as I previously outlined, just how much money are you wasting buying pre-prepared foods, instead of ingredients to create your own good stuff?)

I’m sayin’. There has to be a sensible solution, right? Right?

Right! My answer is to pick one day – usually a nice, lazy, comfy Sunday – and go grocery shopping. Wake up that morning, spend a good 15 minutes thinking about what you’ll eat this week, what you’ll need, sketch out a list, scratch out the [processed foods and] stuff you’ve already got plenty of in your fridge already and get moving!

Why weekly?

For starters, it allows you to avoid your produce rotting. If you dedicate one day to grocery shopping and food prep, you can spend the rest of the week cooking from your fridge, your cabinets and your pantry. It allows you to “shop” from your own reserves. This way, you prevent wasting your money on stuff you “can’t eat” because it doesn’t look quite as fresh as it did when you got it.

Secondly, you have to make a list. How is it that we go grocery shopping, spend an arm/a leg/a first born and still… wind up staring at the fridge for five minutes repeating to ourselves, “I have nothing to cook.” Oh, no. Not only do you have plenty of ingredients and not pre-prepared foods that you may or may not have a taste for – for example, instead of buying garlic cheese bread in a box, why not pick up a baguette from the grocery bakery, some garlic powder, cheese and use your butter/oil? – but you have options. A pre-packaged box doesn’t give you options. At all. Ever. That same garlic powder, cheese and oil could be used on bread, macaroni, leafy greens and rice. Options.

Shopping this way forces you to think about exactly what you’re going to realistically eat in a week. For example – I know I’ll need a big container of oatmeal and various types of fruit for breakfast. I know I’ll need bread, peanut butter, apples, strawberries and bananas for lunch. I also know I’ll need lots of rice, veggies/veggie blends, leafy greens, herbs, spices and the like for dinner. In my head, when I do this planning, I’m sketching out my week. I’ll even have a few magazines or good recipe websites on hand to look at what I can accomplish with my potential ingredient list.

Lastly, it re-emphasizes portion control. If you know you’re only going through that whole ordeal one time and you’re adamant about not breaking your rule (and your rule is imposed by someone worth respecting – yourself), then you’ll exercise portion control to ensure that you don’t break your promise to yourself.

For those of you who only go grocery shopping 2x a month, why not split up what you usually purchase and put the other half “under the mattress?” If you’re afraid of that money “turning into shoe money,” then I can’t help ya. Exercise a little restraint. That’s grocery money… not “free money.”

Get into the habit of eating what’s in your house, and stop letting commercials and cravings run you. I’ll never forget the day my Sorority sister and I went grocery shopping together. With all those groceries in the car, I said to her, “You wanna go to Checkers/Rally’s? I’m starving.” She surely did look at me like I had a booger on my face and said, “Didn’t we just go to the grocery store? Any particular reason why you aren’t hungry for what you just bought?”

That’s not exactly what she said. I think I cleaned it up a little bit.

Not like it wasn’t bad enough that just the sight and smell of the fast food joint made me wanna levitate out of the car and into the Checkers’ drive-thru to inhale some fries, but I would’ve easily spent $6 there. $6 is a week and a half worth of frozen veggies! Y’all playin’!

My daughter and I get up early Sunday morning, have breakfast, then hit the grocery stores together. Aside from the occasional hand-swatting (“No, you better not reach for the Booberry… and unless you have a job, you can’t get it.“) and begging for samples, we make it fun. We get home, I do my prep work of chopping and sorting the veggies, and that’s it for the week. It’s literally like making my own “pre-prepared foods.” Give it a shot and see how it works for you!

Other posts in the series:

• Save Money On Groceries: Buy It In Bulk
• Save Money On Groceries: Buy It In Season
• Save Money On Groceries: Go Weekly
• Save Money On Groceries: Buy The Private Label (Go Generic!)
• Save Money On Groceries: Go Frozen!
• Q&A Wednesday: The $50 Challenge
• Save Money on Groceries: Go… Smaller?
• Save Money On Groceries: The Readers Share Their Tips!

Saving Money On Groceries: Go Weekly! is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Saving Money On Groceries: Buy It In Season
2. Save Money On Groceries: Buy It In Bulk
3. Save Money On Groceries: Go… Smaller?

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 18 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: clean eating, Fast Food, grocery shopping, processed foods, produce, saving money, shopping list

That being said, I recently visited another area and – as expected – I crept off into their grocery. I didn’t find anything new, so to speak, but I did find something a little confusing:

What the hell does “USDA Inspect” mean? You know me. I asked.

“It means that this meat, here? It was inspected by the USDA!”

“Ohhh….”

I calmly snapped my photo, and off I went to double check what I thought I already knew.

I was right.

That label was affixed to a 25-pack of chicken drumsticks sold for $5. And under any other circumstances, that might’ve seemed like a pretty good deal to me… but I needed to be sure on what it meant for meat to say “USDA Inspected” instead of “Grade A” or “Prime.”

Again, I was right. In an article written about Yum! Brands – the makers of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC – most recent brochure about the quality of their food, Melanie Warner wrote the following:

There are several worthwhile messages tucked into Yum Brands‘ (YUM) recent “Did You Know?” food quality brochure. For instance, the fast food giant — owner of Pizza Hut, Taco Bell and KFC — highlights the fact that KFC’s Kentucky Grilled Chicken Meal is only 415 calories and that the chain sells corn-on-the-cob, which is a good source of fiber and folic acid.And then there’s this on page 3: “We use only high quality USDA-inspected chicken in our restaurants.” Here, Yum is asking its customers to believe that the official-sounding term “USDA inspected,” which the company also trotted out in January in ads defending Taco Bell’s beef against a lawsuit, actually means something. It doesn’t.

There are several levels of absurdity here. Virtually all of the meat sold in the U.S. is USDA-inspected. Federal inspectors are required in slaughterhouses if the meat is being sold out of state, which is almost always the case. To market your chicken or beef as USDA-inspected is like boasting the potatoes for your fries were grown in dirt.

And having a USDA inspector glance at the meat that will become your fried chicken as it’s whizzing along a conveyor line (usually in carcass form) doesn’t mean it’s going to be free from deadly bacteria or other contaminants. The burger meat that paralyzed Stephanie Smith was USDA inspected, as was the salmonella-infected chicken that went into Marie Callender’s pot pies a few years ago.

This is not to say that federal meat inspectors are worthless. They’re charged with making sure that diseased animals don’t make it into the food supply and that meat processors are following their own food safety guidelines. But while an inspector can point out a cow with a big clump of poop still stuck to its hide, he or she can’t see E. coli or other harmful bacteria.

And for all their usefulness, there have been well-documented problems with the USDA’s meat inspection system. A Humane Society investigation in 2007 showed crippled cows being tormented and sent into the food supply at a Southern California slaughter plant, despite the fact that several inspectors were at the plant every day.

When looking at the USDA’s website for clarification, this is found:

Poultry
The USDA grades for poultry are A, B, and C.

• Grade A is the highest quality and the only grade that is likely to be seen at the retail level. This grade indicates that the poultry products are virtually free from defects such as bruises, discolorations, and feathers. Bone-in products have no broken bones. For whole birds and parts with the skin on, there are no tears in the skin or exposed flesh that could dry out during cooking, and a good covering of fat under the skin. Also, whole birds and parts will be fully fleshed and meaty.The U.S. grade shield for poultry may be found on the following chilled or frozen ready-to-cook poultry products: whole carcasses and parts, as well as roasts, tenderloins, and other boneless and/or skinless poultry products that are being marketed. There are no grade standards for necks, wing tips, tails, giblets, or ground poultry.
• Grades B and C poultry are usually used in further-processed products where the poultry meat is cut up, chopped, or ground. If sold at retail, they are usually not grade identified.

So, is that what’s happened, here? Is the perception that “Grade B” and “Grade C” isn’t a better “marketing pitch” than “USDA Inspected?” Sneaky, sneaky. Don’t be fooled: this is code-language for “It’s sub-prime meat.

But look at the USDA’s definition of the non-grade A poultry: “used in further-processed products.” So even if it IS, in fact, the stuff used in food manufacturing and fast food, why is it being sold to the public at a grocery store?

My first instinct is to say that one should forego quantity for quality, but that’s a hard message to send out to people who may very well be more focused on quantity because they feel as though they can’t focus on anything else. I get that, but if you’re a person who is aiming to prioritize your health a little higher on the list, here’s a hard and fast realization that we don’t like to apply everywhere, but we must: the cheap solution isn’t always the best one, no matter what quantity it offers us, and its much better to learn how to use less of a better quality product in a more effective and efficient fashion.

When it comes to clean eating, we do what we can to emphasize quality of food, here, and the higher up the chain we can go, the better. If you’re going to eat meat, do what you can to get higher quality. Consider this a brief lesson in meat quality, and cutting through the BS to avoid being fooled into spending your money on something you thought was higher quality than it is. The phrase “USDA Inspected” doesn’t mean anything. Don’t believe the hype, and don’t buy into the bull.

What Does “USDA Inspected” Mean On Your Poultry Label? is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Shirley Sherrod, The NAACP, The USDA & Our Black Farmers
2. Save Money On Groceries: Buy The Private Label (Go Generic!)
3. Comprehending Calories: How To Properly Read A Nutrition Label

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

Get BGG2WL delivered wirelessly to your Kindle! Click here for more info!

© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 3 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: chicken, poultry, usda

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not convinced that a $36 salad isn’t, in fact, an exercise in elitism. I’m pretty sure that the restaurant that was serving it was offering a tiny salad – no more than a cup or so of food, a trait that is common in restaurants that are high in “style” and low in, well, food – and, unless every single ingredient in the salad was an exotic one, it probably truly wasn’t worth it. For those reasons alone, of course the salad wasn’t worth it.

That being said, there are salads out there that are worth quite a bit: my salads.

My salads kick some serious butt. Why? Because I follow one major principle:

First of all, a meal is supposed to stave off hunger as well as nourish you and keep you lively throughout your day (at least until your next meal.) They’re supposed to be larger than a snack, but not be so large that you leave your table feeling like you just went up a pants size. While my friend with the purple stuff (which was red lettuce), carrots and iceberg lettuce was trying to make a snack turn into a meal… my other friend with the confusion salad was trying to do everything she could to avoid being hungry because she “just ate leaves” for lunch.
Excerpted from Creating A $36 Salad At Home | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

And since it’s about that time for me to share my hard work once again, I kinda couldn’t wait to share what I’ve got.

My own personal chicken salad recipe – cashews, celery, onions, and red globe grapes served on romaine lettuce.

Avocado, salsa, fage yogurt, onion, sunflower seeds and green onions and panko bread crumbs on romaine.

Ground turkey, tomato, avocado, onion, fage yogurt, salsa, corn, black beans served on red fire lettuce. Oh, and there’s cilantro in there. Looots of cilantro.

The Greek: Cucumber, red onion, olive, tomato, feta cheese, green peppers, lemon juice, black pepper and oregano on top of spinach.

Strawberries, lentils, onions, mushrooms, sunflower seeds, panko bread crumbs and green leaf lettuce tossed in honey, olive oil and balsamic vinegar

Mango, kiwi, avocado, red pepper, red onion, tarragon, sunflower seeds and cilantro tossed in a lemon juice and black pepper dressing.

As I said before…

If you notice, some of these things I only use occasionally (pumpkin seeds, raspberries, mushrooms, ) while others, I use regularly (olive oil, sunflower seeds, cucumbers, tomatoes.) It’s all about whatever’s available at that time in my house, as well as whatever’s available and cheapest at the market. If radishes are only $0.75 a bushel, please believe there will be plenty radishes had during meal time… salads or not. If black beans are on sale for $1 a pound, I’ll be “making it do what it do.” It’s that simple. The more pricey ingredients – balsamic vinegar, for example – I use sparingly. No, really- I’ve had the same bottle for approximately 7 months sitting in my fridge.

Excerpted from Creating A $36 Salad At Home | A Black Girl’s Guide To Weight Loss

And considering the fact that right now, strawberries, mango, kiwi, lemons, lime, and avocado are super cheap at the farmer’s market right now? It’s gonna be a fruity explosion right now. Gotta love it.

That’s what’s on my salads. What’s on yours?

The Salad Gallery, Round 2 is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Weekend WTF: Spot The Problem, Round I
2. Weekend WTF: Spot The Problem, Round II
3. The Pizza Gallery: Who Says You Can’t Have Pizza?

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: avocado, balsamic vinegar, black beans, bread crumbs, cilantro, corn, cucumber, fage, feta, feta cheese, green leaf lettuce, ground turkey, honey, kiwi, lentils, mango, mushrooms, olives, onion, red fire lettuce, red leaf lettuce, red peppers, romaine lettuce, salads, spinach, strawberries, sunflower seeds, tarragon, yogurt

California Feed Lot

I know, I know… someone out there’s gasping for air.

“[insert gasp] You don’t eat WHAT? [insert gasp] Girl, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?”

Trust me… I have my reasons. I’ll share them with you, but only on one condition – promise me that if you wind up agreeing with me, you’ll take my approach into consideration. I’m not issuing any orders… but you gotta promise to at least consider what I’m saying, here.

Deal? Okay.

Everywhere you turn, there’s a burger available for cheap. If you’re lucky, you might even have a $0.35 burger day in your area. Burgers are going for cheap everywhere, but no one asks the question of “why is this meat so cheap? How are they able to offer this for so little?” In fact, I have another question that I think is worth asking: what is the difference between the cheap product and the “cream of the crop” beef, and is the difference really so large that such a difference in price makes sense?

Let’s take a brief look at how beef is raised. Obviously, beef comes from cows. If you pay any attention to the commercials, you’d presume it comes from happy cows. In a pasture. With always-beautiful blue skies. Probably from somewhere out in California. They’ve got lots of wandering room, and lots of little dandelions to chew on if they so desire. I hate to break it to you, but things aren’t quite how they seem… much like most things in the food manufacturing industry.

A cow, raised healthily, does grow in a pasture, eat grass, walk and run at his own leisure and is devoid of antibiotics. He will grow to be a few tons, be big and strong, develop lots of healthy muscle to be divided up and delivered to wherever you purchase your beef.

The problem, however, is that most cows in the US aren’t grown this way.

On your average farm, you’ll find cows. Lots of ‘em. You won’t find green grass, though. You won’t find pastures, dandelions or “happy” and “healthy” cows. You’ll find cows packed in tightly in a small space – meant to restrict movement – feeding on corn.

I won’t get into too much deeper detail – because I didn’t set out to gross anyone out with this post – but I will explain what’s so wrong with this.

We, here at BGG2WL, know what happens when you feed someone a lot of something they shouldn’t be eating… and prevent them from being able to move. They’re unable to healthily develop muscle, and equally unable to burn any fat they gain. Since they’re having a hard time developing muscle… the industry doesn’t say “Let’s give ‘em room to play and grow healthily.” They say “Give ‘em growth hormones.”

Take it a step further, though. Because the cows aren’t eating what they’re supposed to be eating, they’re unable to fight off infection (sound familiar?) and illness. So, instead of saying “Ohhh, we’re making the cows sick, let’s go back to giving them what they’re supposed to have,” the industry says “Give ‘em antibiotics.” The anti-biotics can’t take care of everything, so the cows have to have a hole created so that a “ranch hand” (literally) can reach their hand inside the cow and pull out the infectious and indigestible product. Any antibiotics may help with illness, but not infection… so the meat is thereafter cleaned with ammonia.

I’m not making this stuff up. Really, I’m not.

So… am I writing with the goal in mind to turn anyone away from beef? Of course not. I’m a believer in the idea that man has subsisted on meat- though, not as much as we eat today – for quite a long time, and though there are “studies” that suggest man has never eaten meat.. there are also “studies” that suggest otherwise. Either way.. we’ve never eaten as much meat as we do now because it was never quite so cheap.

When it comes to time and money, beef has never been so easy for us to acquire. $0.65 cheeseburger night’ing it. Value meal’ing it. Giving beef away with your purchase of tires. It’s just easy to get… so easy, in fact, that there’s rarely any time to question the quality of the product. When you stop to question the quality of the product, you find out things like the above, though.

The interesting thing about the way beef is produced nowadays is, really, the fact that this has colored society’s perception of the “expensive” beef:

“Beef is beef.”

“Why pay $3,489,879,843,754.35 per pound for ground beef when I can get my sandwiches dollar-style?”

The cheapness and availability of beef nowadays has turned properly made beef into a luxury. Think about that. Cheap food – once again – has turned properly made food into a luxury... to the point where people don’t even want to address issues of quality. That’s a huge problem.

What is my point? My point is, the amount of money we spend on inexpensive beef every day could be saved and used to purchase high quality, properly grown beef. It may cost more, but if you can avoid the excess fat, antibiotics and hormones in your food, why not try? This is where the “eat less” aspect comes in. If you go from eating beef 18 times a week to, maybe, 6 times a week in healthy portions… are you going to feel it that much in your pocket? Now, if you don’t have access to healthful beef, then you have a decision to make. Do you want to limit your intake of beef? Cut it entirely? Do you even care?

That’s a decision that only you can make for yourself… but, as we used to say.. “knowing is half the battle.”

Note: Subscribers, you’ll need to visit the site in order to view the video attached.

The Case Against Eating [So Much] Beef is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. The [Extremely Thorough and Rather Compelling] Case Against Sugar
2. The Case Against… Juice?
3. The Case Against Soft Drinks

The FULL list of meal plans is currently available. Check it out and get your copy today!

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 21 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: beef, beef manufacturing, cattle, cows, food processing

The Cabbage Diet. The Grapefruit Diet. The Cookie Diet. The Cereal Diet. The Mayo Clinic Diet. The Tea Diet. The Seaweed and Coral Diet (better known as The Spongebob Diet… I just made it up, but I bet I could make some money off of it, huh?)

Now, after my post on the Drive-Thru Diet, I’d like to think that my attitude on diets is relatively clear – I strongly believe they’re a band-aid on a bullet wound. They don’t address the core issue (getting the bullet out), they don’t prevent the problem from getting worse (as in, an infection), and they don’t really help you get better… they just help you stop looking at the problem, really.

However, I do realize that because you can get immediate results, it’s easy to opt for a diet. A little discomfort but minimal effort, no need for exercise, quick and easy weight loss. It seems pretty ideal, I guess. We’re just always dumbfounded when the weight manages to pile itself back on. Dumbfounded, and heavier.

So let’s break down the anatomy of the quick weight loss diet, shall we?

What is a diet?

A diet, in general terms, is simply the “list” of foods that you allow yourself to eat during the day. It’s the foods that you limit yourself to – if you were on the cabbage diet, your daily diet consists of boiled cabbage for breakfast and lunch with a regular dinner. Diets are generally named by the food that dominates your day – cereal diet, cookie diet, mashed potato diet. This all seems kind of “duh,” but we’re breaking it down to it’s very core, right? Gotta start somewhere.

Why is dieting so popular?

Dieting is popular because the notion, quite frankly, is that it works. Limiting yourself to only one food that you KNOW you enjoy, eating it all day every day, and losing weight while you’re at it? It’s a painless way to take care of a problem that already makes us uncomfortable to address or even discuss. Not only that, but in some circles, it’s considered common practice and even “trendy” to be on the current “popular” diet.

Taking it a step further, there is money to be made off of pushing diets. The Mayo Clinic Diet required you to purchase a book. All information about the Cookie Diet led to a website that required you to purchase (and, essentially, live off of) one particular brand of cookie. Most diets that tend to gain media steam behind them do so because someone’s pushing it. Why? You have to invest money to make money.. so pay for the diet to get a little exposure, watch that exposure bring you a lot more money.

Why does dieting work?

Dieting works because it is an extremely mindless form of calorie counting. If I’ve only allowed myself to choose from this one low-calorie food to eat, I can’t possibly gain weight, right? You don’t have to think about the food you’re eating and whether or not it’ll cause you to gain weight – you KNOW this one food won’t cause you to put on any pounds, you know exactly what you’re going to do. It’s auto-pilot for weight loss.

However – because it usually involves something that you can only manage temporarily, you tend to come off of it – excited to beat the pounds – by celebrating with what? More food you have no business indulging in in the first place!

Why does the weight ALWAYS come back?

Because… wait for it… auto-pilot doesn’t work for weight loss! That’s right – you can’t do it. Why? Because waking up one day and deciding that you’re going to go auto-pilot eating nothing but grapefruit for breakfast and lunch can’t change the fact that your auto-pilot used to lead you to McDonalds or Krispy Kreme for breakfast every morning. Auto-pilot, unfortunately, does equate to mindlessness. It’s operating without thinking. “Not thinking” before led us to being unhealthy in the first place. It certainly won’t lead us to “healthy,” and if it does, it certainly wouldn’t do it overnight… or in two-six weeks like other diets.

Without a relatively rare medical condition, you cannot put the weight on if you aren’t putting harmful things in your mouth. It simply does not work that way. Dieting might help you drop a few pounds, but if your eating habits are in check you couldn’t put it on in the first place… and you couldn’t run the risk of gaining it back once you “come off” of your diet. It solves the immediate visual problem – if only momentarily- however you’re not addressing the thing that not only ensures that you’ll always have the weight, but in some cases also ensures that you’re doing some damage to your insides, as well.

How can I successfully lose weight?

You have to look at your lifestyle and gauge what you’re doing that is causing you to keep the weight on. Addressing that will not only cause the weight you’ve put on to fall off, but it will prevent the weight from returning. Sure, you can exercise to help keep it off, but thepurpose of exercise is to preserve your body’s range of motion. Weight loss is only an additional benefit to it.

The best way to protect and preserve our bodies is to be conscious of what we’re putting into it. Although it should be a recurring theme by now, a lifetime of bad habits cannot be corrected or rectified by one to six weeks of sacrifice. When you can be real and honest with yourself about the problem, then you can be real and honest with yourself about a practical long-term solution. And that includes, bypassing the trendy fad diets!

Are you a serial dieter? Have you had success with a diet? Share your stories below – I’d love to hear ‘em!

The Anatomy of A Diet: Why They Work, and Why The Success Never Lasts is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. Understanding Calorie Counting: Preparing Yourself For Success
2. What Does A Success Story Look Like To You?
3. Why Don’t Obesity Programs Work For Young Black Girls?

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: dieting, diets, Fad Diets, mentality

In all honesty, there are some really amazing points in this video – namely the lunatic farmer (who I’ve seen on two separate documentaries thus far), advertising and the point about GMOs (genetically modified food… yes, this is real) – but aside from all of that… look at how aware he is and how convinced he is that this is the answer for him and his life. I fully believe he did all that research, learned all that information and happily decided he was over the food manufacturing system. I ain’t mad at him. Thoughts?

You Can “Pay The Farmer or Pay The Hospital” is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

1. How Does A Farmer’s Market Accept Credit, Debit or EBT Cards? Info Inside!
2. Our Trip To The Farmer’s Market

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: advertising, farming, food manufacturing, GMOs, industrialized food system, sustainability

That’s where this excerpt from GOOD comes in handy.

I am a firm believer that desserts have the least room for imperfections. If I’m going to splurge on sweets, they better be worth it. Vegans are restricted from many different foods, making their choices somewhat limited and the search can be discouraging as well as exhausting. Frequently, as a result, sweet-toothed vegans become the Ultimate Dessert Critics and not many recipes can live up to their exacting standards.That is, until now.

Finally, my classmates and I have achieved the long-dreamed-of Pinnacle of Perfection for vegan desserts! On “Conversion Day” at the Natural Gourmet Institute, we baked a single recipe nine times, each time converting an additional ingredient to a more health-supportive or vegan alternative, and ultimately transforming the dessert into a completely vegan, mouthwateringly delicious, less refined version of its former self.

Here’s the order in which we made our conversions:
1. Bake original recipe as is
2. Convert flour
3. Convert milk
4. Convert additives
5. Convert sugar
6. Convert butter
7. Convert eggs
8. Make it better
9. Make it mo’ better

The list starts from easiest to hardest in terms of how challenging it is to replace a key ingredient with a substitute and have the treat still maintain its integrity. Replacing flour and sugar is easier because their key properties are not difficult to find in alternative ingredients.

Forbidden ingredients were unrefined sugar, white sugars, corn syrups, and artificial sweeteners. Conversion ingredients we could use included maple syrup, maple crystals, date syrup, coconut sugar, succinate[sic], rappadura, barley malt, rice syrup, molasses, agave, and stevia.

The conversion task got trickier when it came to finding the vegan counterparts for butter and eggs because they can provide moisture, flavor, fat, shine, work as a binder, leavener, and emulsify a baked good. Since these ingredients contribute many qualities, it is generally more difficult to replace them.

Some good butter replacements are: coconut, canola, olive, sesame, and nut oil (Note: These do not have milk fat like butter, so use 20 percent less than you would butter). Vegan egg replacers that work well are fruit and vegetable purees, starches like kuzu or arrowroot (2 tbs kuzu or arrowroot plus 3 tbs water equals 1 egg) or a “flax egg” (1 tbs flax seed, ground and then added to 2 tbs water equals 1 egg or 2 egg whites).

We converted chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal raisin cookies, peanut butter cookies, black and white cookies, brownies, banana cupcakes, carrot cake cupcakes, and gingerbread cookies from traditional to vegan recipes.

One of my classmates and I were assigned to work on creating vegan banana cupcakes and since my buddy is a vegan, it was on me to be the sole taste tester of our partnership for the first six batches—let the tummy ache begin. Our final batch ended up being more delicious than the one we started with, which was loaded with white sugar and butter. We replaced those ingredients with maple crystals and coconut oil. Instead of using eggs, we used more banana puree. This step perfected our cupcake’s moisture and texture while giving it more of a banana taste that was otherwise dulled out by the dairy in the original recipe.Finally, to make our banana cupcakes “mo’ better,” as outlined in our ninth step, we added chopped walnuts and dark chocolate chips to the batter. Our chef instructor told my partner and me, “You wouldn’t have to tell people these were vegan—they’re that good.”

One of the things that draws me to vegan cooking and baking the most is the fact that if you’re an unprocessed vegan, you are required to be extremely creative with your cooking. No butter? What’re you gonna use in its place? No milk? Oh, tough cookies. Literally.

I mean, unless you were born into a vegan family, you know the goodness of baked cupcakes, cakes, cookies and pastries. And if you don’t know any better, you will think that giving up animal byproduct means giving up all the fun stuff that goes along with it. Not at all, baby!

The thing about approaching baking this way is that it also encourages cleaner eating. I know that lots of vegetarian and vegan cooking options are extremely processed and questionable, but if you restrict your options to only things that are minimally processed you’re still golden.

It just takes a lot of creativity, a lot of patience and a lot of “getting familiar with your google.” That being said, the Babycakes NYC books “BabyCakes: Vegan, (Mostly) Gluten-Free, and (Mostly) Sugar-Free Recipes from New York’s Most Talked-About Bakery” and “BabyCakes Covers the Classics: Gluten-Free Vegan Recipes from Donuts to Snickerdoodles” are both great starts. Almost everything is covered in those two, and as little processed ingredients as possible are used. Give ‘em a shot!

Making It Mo’ Betta: Embracing Vegan Baking is a post from: A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss. Thanks for reading!

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1. Weekend WTF: Accidentally Vegan Meat Product?
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3. Making Foolproof Weight Loss Resolutions For The New Year

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© Erika for A Black Girl's Guide To Weight Loss, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: babycaks nyc, baking, clean eating, cooking, vegan