Archive for June, 2009

Antonella and I decided, in light of the hyperactivity problems we experienced, to modify our diet to remove the following items:
1. High Fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This causes obesity and several metabolic problems, especially diabetes.
2. Dairy. This is largely in part to Sophia’s allergy to dairy. Of course, we will still have the occasional cheese, but for the most part, we have switched to almond and soy milks. It is interesting to see how some things labeled ‘non-dairy’ have dairy in them.
3. Food colorings. We have seen several articles on negative effects of food coloring (www.feingold.com). There are ways to color stuff naturally, and we found some gummy vitamins that do so. Particularly, we try to avoid Red #40, Yellow #5 and #6, and Blue #1 and #2.
4. Partially hydrogenated anything. This is trans-fat, which I don’t consider a good ingredient.
5. Aspartame. (Nutra-sweet)
6. Monsodium glutamate (MSG). Flavor enhancer.

Foods that we had to totally remove that I will miss: Twizzlers, Pop Tarts, almost all soft drinks (save some microbrewed root beers), almost all cereal. Basically, our rule of thumb is to shop the wall of the store, not the aisles.

It is amazing that some things are not available without some of these bad things. For instance, Welch’s makes some 100% fruit juice gummy candy without HFCS, but then color it with the offending dyes.

I think that it is sad how most of the food in the grocery store is junk.