Toxins in My Food

On Tuesday we had an Enrichment Activity about eating healthy. The woman who spoke to us prefaced her presentation with the acknowledgement that she's a fanatic and she was pretty intense about some things: she only eats meat two or three times a month and she is an advocate of raw milk. Maybe raw milk is good for you, but I grew up with the idea that pasteurization was a major break through that saved lives. Of course, I'm also nutritionally challenged. I've never been good at eating all the fruits and vegetables I should eat because I have a hard time with chunks. Yep, it's some sort of psychological issue I have. In other words, I love the taste of fresh salsa, but because I have an aversion to chunks, usually I dip my chip in and out of the salsa so as to get the juice on it, but not any vegetables. I am progressing somewhat in that occassionally I will dip my chip at an angle and leave a few bits of tomato or onion on the chip, but I do best with restaurant style salsa (i.e., pulverized into very small chunks). I've also tried to get more fruit into my diet by putting frozen berries on my cereal. I do okay with raspberries, but the frozen blueberries and strawberries in my mixed berries were grossing me out with their slimy-ness. And the strawberries didn't defrost very fast, so sometimes it felt like I was eating ice cubes on my cereal. But not to be easily discouraged in my new goals, I decided to puree the berries in my food processor and then put them back in the freezer. I know that I've probably reduced the nutritional value just by blending those berries, but at least I feel like I'm eating healthy.

And that's the trick isn't it? Telling yourself that you're eating healthy. On Tuesday, the speaker really emphasized getting away from all toxins and pesticides, or in other words, just buy everything organic if possible. But for me organic and all natural become good excuses for eating food that's still bad for me (like when I justify buying Trader Joe-Joes because they're all natural even though their basically just an all-natural Oreo with chocolate filling). As the speaker pointed out, we should avoid hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrup and look instead for items sweetened by evaporated cane juice. She convinced me that evaporated cane juice really is better for me than table suger, but sugar is still sugar. I saw what happened to kids who chewed on sugar cane all day; their teeth turned black and pointed just like David's teeth. Whereas this woman probably only occassionally eats things sweetened by evaporated cane juice, I can just see myself buying all sorts of goodies and telling myself I'm still okay because there's no fructose corn syrup in them.

She also suggested dark chocolate if we must eat chocolate. And the darker the better because it has more of the chocolate roughage in there, or something like that. I was pretty proud of myself, because she said she can handle chocolate that is 56% dark. I love chocolate as dark as I can get it. Usually that's 70%, but I'm good with 80% too. But then she also added that dark chocolate is more dense so it has more fat than milk chocolate. She can make a regular chocolate bar last an entire month. I usually eat half of one in fifteen minutes (Dan gets the other half). So once again I lose.

She was also a real advocate of grinding your own wheat for bread and suggested that if you can't afford a wheat grinder, consider getting a small coffee grinder. A small coffee grinder could probably do a cup of flour before it got too overwhelmed. I was thrilled. I don't have room for a wheat grinder, but surely I could get a coffee grinder. Then I remembered that my bread recipe usually calls for ten cups of flour. Even if I halve the recipe, I'd be grinding all day, and then I'd only have one loaf of bread. And don't even think about buying that wheat flour at the store, she told us. Apparently it's only good wheat flour if you grind it yourself.

Oh well. I'll just keep putting my berry smoothy on my Kashi Friends cereal and hope for the best. At least it's a start.