Living Healthfully: Blueberry Vanilla No-Milk Shake

During the summer months especially, I crave sweet, creamy, thick, frozen treats.

In years past, when I wasn't as conscious about health and sugar intake and was still consuming dairy, I'd normally satisfy the craving with a Starbucks frappacino or, on special occasion, a Culvers milkshake {I cringe at this now as I remember the shock I'd voiced when I was first diagnosed with gut flora imbalance last year. Back then I asked how such an imbalance could be. Now I ask how such an imbalance could NOT be!}.

So, anyway, though no one could pay me to drink either of those treats now, I still do daydream about healthy shakes, especially on hot days.

After making no-dairy ice cream for the kids this week, I decided to get brave in the kitchen and attempt to recreate a healthy sweet, creamy, thick frozen drink -- without sugar and without dairy.

A challenge, yes, but not impossible with the help of the sweet herb Stevia, a little good bacteria and some high quality ground vanilla beans.

The first try was a dud. Oy was it bad.

The second? So good.


The third? Awesome!


My treat-snob husband who groans at the thought of subbing probiotic milk for real make says this drink tastes more like a custard shake than a milkshake, but he agreed it was good tasting with amazing consistency. I've included alternate ingredients for those who can handle more sweetness. 



Ingredients:
Probiotic Milk:
1/2 Cup of Filtered Water
10-12 Drops of Stevia*
1.5 Tablespoons of Nielsen-Massey Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla Powder or ground vanilla beans
1 Tablespoon of lecithin granules 
1 teaspoon of Maca Root Powder
1 Tablespoon of probiotic powder {like Acidophilus; we use Primadophilus Kids}

1/3 heaping cup blueberries {if you have no sugar sensitivity,  use 3/4 cup of blueberries}
1/2 large avocado
1/3 cup of frozen spinach
1 cup of whole-cube ice



Directions:
First, make the probiotic milk by blending all ingredients expect for the probiotic powder for 30-45 seconds at 10 in a Vitamix or Blendtec or blender of choice.

Add the probiotic powder and blend on low for about 10 seconds.

Add the blueberries, avocado and frozen spinach to the blender and blend on high for about 45-60 seconds, The mixture should turn creamy and thick like a shake. You may need to add additional water to help smooth it out, so have about 1/2 cup on hand while blending.

*John advises those who are not/have not been on a sugar-restrictive diet to add one tablespoon of agave syrup or coconut sugar and omit the Stevia for a truer shake taste.



Lastly, enjoy!

Hey, while we're talking about REAL food that's real good and real good for you, maybe whip up your shake and then head over to the Real Food Summit and enjoy this tasty treat while feasting on some food for thought regarding health, eating real food and preventing/reversing disease. Specifically, I recommend the Joel Salatin talk -- SO GOOD!

Thanks to Neilsen-Massey Vanillas for sending me a bottle of sugar-free and alcohol-free Madagascar Bourbon Pure Vanilla Powder to help me get creative with new recipes while still adhering to my gut-restoring diet! No other compensation was received for a shout-out in this post. 

November Simple Swap: The Skinny on Fats and Body Fat

**This month's winner is Stephanie!** We all want to live healthier, more intentional lives, but sometimes it seems overwhelming and daunting to take even small steps toward our ideals because there are so many steps before us.


Simple Swap was born out of a desire and passion to encourage other women on journeys toward living healthier, more inspired, intentional lifestyles through implementing one simple swap per month. 


Each swap will:
1. Take 30 minutes or less to accomplish
2. Be inexpensive to implement or boast overall, long-haul {health} savings 
3. Focus on improving health/eco-friendliness, being good stewards of our resources and/or fostering a creative and intentional life.

Some weeks, all three will be accomplished in 30 minutes or less!

The beautiful and creative Robin from Diet Coke on the Rocks will make the Simple Swap first each month so as to show ease and perhaps sometimes another way to implement a Simple Swap. Check out Robin's November Simple Swap for more ideas!

*****

Be it fat in food or fat on our bodies, we often feel like we must flee from fat as fast as our legs can carry us.

But what if by eating fat we could actually reduce our body fat and maintain a healthy composition while improving our health?

Largely, we've been conditioned and educated to view fat as the enemy, particularly when it's nestled inside our food or beneath our skin.

And while I agree wholeheartedly that we must be vigilant about maintaining a healthy amount of body fat, I think we've been sorely miseducated on how to go about doing so.

In the past, if a label held promises of being low fat, I assumed naively so, that it was healthier than the other options that contained the full amount of fat. I'm pretty sure I thought that all fat was bad and was probably the culprit for making me fat.

In reality, that's no more true than any other outrageous generalization.

Eating the right fat can actually help our bodies shed unwanted fat cells.

Instead of slicing fats from our diet we should be consciously working on making healthy fats part of our meals. But how do we know the difference between the two?

Trans fats {hydrogenated oils or partially hydrogenated} = never! 

Saturated fats {coconut oil and animal products like cheese, yogurt, butter) = diligent moderation 

Mono and poly unsaturated fats {nuts, fish, avocado and olive oil; I don't recommend using any other oils} = healthy servings a few times per day

{Read more about dissecting fats at the Mayo Clinic}

Aside from helping promote healthy Body Mass Index levels and weight loss, the consumption of good fats like those found in avocado, olive oil, fish and coconut oil also aid in health by decreasing inflammation {like allergies, arthritis, heart disease} in the body while helping maintain insulin levels, regulate blood sugar and decrease the risk of coronary heart disease.

The list goes on and on, but I think you get the point I'm trying to make:

Switching out our unhealthy fats to healthier ones promote wellness, weight loss and prevent disease {and preserves the money you'd use caring for such disease}.

Here are a few ways you can Simple Swap the unhealthy fats for healthier ones:

Mango Chicken Chili

* Replace a few red-meat centered meals every week with a fish or bean entrees like black-bean tacos, mango chicken chili or hummus veggie wraps.

*Use ground turkey for burgers or spaghetti instead of ground beef. 

* Use hummus or avocado on sandwiches instead of using cheese 

* Replace butter with coconut oil in all baking recipes like muffins, cakes, slow-cooker baked apple pie oatmeal, pizza crust, bread, flat bread and toast

Baked Apple Pie Oatmeal

Briefly, I want to land on the last point: Coconut oil is our all-purpose fat of choice because not only because it tastes good but also because actually has been shown to improve immune system function.

We use it in all of the aforementioned baked goods and recipes and we've found it actually enhances the flakiness of pizza crust, the fluffiness of muffins and the consistency of the oatmeal and because coconut oil is one of the only oils that can withstand such high temperatures without losing its antiodidants.

Carrot Cupcakes with Coconut Oil

I was skeptical at first because I didn't really want all of my recipes to have a hint of coconut, but to my surprise nothing has had that coco-nutty flavor. And for someone who just cannot stomach dairy, coconut oil is a recipe saver!

With Thanksgiving and Christmas quickly approaching, I would love if you would share a recipe you've Simply Swapped out the unhealthy fats for the healthier ones using coconut oil.





Of course, you can swap out any unhealthy fat for a healthier one and share your findings to be eligible to win a really wonderful addition to your kitchen.

As an incentive to make the Simple Swap, I asked my absolute favorite coconut oil maker, Nutiva, to sponsor November's Simple Swap and giveaway one jar of high-quality, super healthy and really yummy coconut oil. 

And Nutiva happily obliged!



So let's do this! Let's make this holiday season {and our bodies} much healthier by Simple Swapping out the unhealthy fats for healthier ones.

{No purchase necessary. Giveaway is open to all U.S. residents who are 18 years and older. The winner will be selected randomly Dec. 1, 2011 from the link up pool.Nutiva is only providing the giveaway item; I have not been compensated in any way or gifted with any product to talk about Nutiva}


This post is linked with The Green Resource at A Delightful Home, Sorta Crunchy, The Greenbacks Gal and Live Renewed.

Share the Love: The Unhealthy Truth

**THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED. The winner chosen by random.org is Michelle.**

We're not eating the same food that graced our grandparents' plates.

Heck, we Americans aren't even eating the same food as our European and Asian counterparts.

Surprised?

Take macaroni and cheese for example. Kraft actually sells a cleaner, healthier {if mac and cheese could be considered healthy} version of macaroni and cheese without the added food dyes and made with whole food ingredients other countries that have deemed dyes and artificial growth hormones and genetically engineered crops too risky for human consumption; after all, no human studies have been conducted on the safety of such practices or consumption.

Just compare the list of ingredients*:
U.S. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese

Enriched Macaroni Product (Wheat Flour, Niacin, Ferrous Sulfate [Iron], Thiamin Mononitrate [Vitamin B1], Riboflavin [Vitamin B2], Folic Acid), Cheese Sauce Mix (Whey, Modified Food Starch, Whey Protein Concentrate, Cheddar Cheese [Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes], Salt, Calcium Carbonate, Potassium Chloride, Contains Less Than 2% of Parmesan Cheese [Part-Skim Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes, Dried Buttermilk, Sodium Tripolyphosphate, Blue Cheese [Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes], Sodium Phosphate, Medium Chain Triglycerides, Cream, Citric Acid, Lactic Acid, Enzymes, Yellow 5, Yellow 6) 

U.K. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese

Macaroni (Durum Wheat Semolina), Cheese (10%), Whey Powder (from milk), Lactose, Salt, Emulsifying Salts (E339, E341), Colours (Paprika Extract, Beta-Carotene) 

I was first introduced to this little tidbit of information during a luncheon with Robyn O'Brien, sponsored by Stonyfield.

While I wasn't shocked, the facts fueled the fires in my heart to continue to talk about what we are feeding our bodies, working together with people like Robyn to educate and motivate. Robyn herself is an advocate for food safety having penned the book The Unhealthy Truth, which details her experiences and findings about the relationships between food allergies and illness in relationship to the way the U.S. allows its food to be grown, raised, handled, enriched and genetically modified.

Robyn shared with a group of Chicago bloggers how she was initiated into her food advocacy role by fire when her youngest suffered a violent allergic reaction to eggs, spurring her to create the Allergy Kids Foundation as a resource and education group to increase awareness about what we are consuming.

The whole foods advocate in me mostly believes that if we simply moved away from consuming processed foods like macaroni and cheese, we would have much less with which to be concerned.

But that's not entirely true anymore -- because we're not eating the tomatoes or beef or yogurt that our grandparents ate when we purchase many of these conventionally grown, raised and formulated foods. 

Take for example the little cups of yogurt we buy in the store and deem healthy because, gosh, it IS yogurt after all. Once I discovered all of the artificial ingredients in the low-calorie-but-yummy yogurts I'd been consuming and taking note of the brands whose farmers have not pledged to treat their dairy cows with growth hormones or been certified organic by the USDA, I realized that I needed to look more closely at ingredient lists used to produce the foods my family was consuming.

We've now switched to brands like Stonyfield and Nature's Path, two companies that are committed to partnering with farmers who farm the way our great-great grandparents and all of the generations before farmed -- and who are committed to using only real food ingredients that have not been genetically modified or chemically altered in their foods.

I know what some are thinking. There's too much ground to cover, too many battles to be fought considering how far many of our farmers have ventured into conventional practices like using pesticides and GMO seeds and companies that have taken to using artificial ingredients.

But we all have a voice.

As Robyn said at the lunch -- she was just a mom of four who was serving her kids frozen waffles for breakfast before she started digging into the facts. She didn't want to know about our food supply and she was totally happy with what her family consumed. But when health was compromised for one of the little people she loved most, she was spurred to action, to knowledge, to advocacy.

Many of us don't have a health crisis to spur us to action. There is power, though, in being proactive with our health!

And can I just say -- our votes count. 


We women have the power to band together and change what companies put on the grocery store shelves.

Every time we spend a dollar on food, we vote. 


Every time we make one small change toward the better in our grocery purchases, we vote. 


Companies are getting the message. Let's keep soaking up information, making better decisions in doing so, continue sending the message loud and clear.


After all, we have little lives that are counting on us to send it.

***Giveaway***

Stonyfield has generously offered to give away a copy of Robyn O'Brien's book The Unhealthy Truth. Also included: a Stonyfield canvas bag, the Stonyfield Yogurt Cookbook, Stonyfield coupons and a few other goodies. 
Simply leave a comment sharing what small change her family could make in grocery purchases so as to promote overall wellness.  {Or you can say a change you've already made toward healthier eating!}
For an extra entry {and to help spread the word about food integrity in our country while motivating other parents to get involved}, tweet:
"The food we eat should be REAL food! I'm taking a stand for food integrity w/ @Stonyfield @TheUnhealthyTruth @HyacynthW http://bit.ly/opaCPM"

*special thanks to Robyn O'Brien for listing out these ingredients as published on Healthy Child.
Full disclosure: I was not compensated for this post or asked by Stonyfield to write about my lunch experience. Simply, I am passionate about helping further education about our food while advocating for how we can all live the healthiest lives possible. No purchase necessary to win. Winner must be 18 years or older and live within the United States. A winner will be randomly selected October 10, 2011.


This post is linked with The Green Resource at Sorta Crunchy, A Delightful Home, The Greenbacks Gal and Live Renewed.

Bigger Picture Moment: Brought to You by Chemically-Infused Grapes and Exploding Watermelon

Every Thursday, we share the harvest of intentional living by capturing a glimpse of the bigger picture through a simple moment.

Want to join us? Simply capture your moment in whatever fashion speaks to you. Then:
1.Grab the Bigger Picture, Simple Moments button {code to the right}.
2. Link your piece.
3. Encourage the two {or more} people who linked their moments before yours.

After linking, you might find your moment shared at our community site for Bigger Picture Blogs.

Live. Capture. Share. Encourage.

That's the essence of Bigger Picture, Simple Moments; we're looking forward to walking together in intentional living this week.

****
He drapes small arms covered in angry red welts heavily over my shoulders as I carry him upstairs.

“But I didn’t think the grapes would make me sick, mom.”

Anger wells in my throat, threatening to escape through hot tears.

I’m almost certain it wasn’t the actual grapes; rather, I’m pretty sure it’s what was sprayed on the grapes that’s causing his little immune system to swell and attack, rendering my normally energetic boy lethargic and wholly uncomfortable.

We wait, watch to see if the swelling spreads to his face, and when it does, we resign to giving him antihistamine as a last resort to curtail any bigger allergic reaction from exploding.

My heart hurts as I watch him fall asleep, finding relaxation from the reaction.

And I think of the mothers who have children with life-threatening allergic reactions or who are really sick.

This isn’t the way our bodies are supposed to react after eating food.

Adding another log onto the fire burning in my mind about why we choose locally grown or organic products, I resign in my head to sell our house, buy a plot of farm land and begin my own organic non-commune commune.

Because what our bodies are really rejecting when they develop diseases like cancer and diseases and in some cases even allergic reactions, are the toxins that are slathered, sprayed and doused across our food, sown into our soil, saturated in our streams.

****
Maybe I sound a little melodramatic?

Maybe it seems like I’ve jumped off the end of the "sort of crunchy" pier straight into a pit of sustainably grown, organic granola?

I’ve been mulling these thoughts in my mind – whether I’m over reacting.

Are some alergic reactions and cancers and disease actually stemming from what we’re doing to our land with the use of chemicals and growth agents and overuse of antibiotics?

Is it all blown out of proportion?

My gut says to trust these instincts, these thoughts to avoid chemicals and food that’s been altered from its original state – but maybe I don’t have enough organic soil upon which I can build some sort of natural foundation.

****
I open Twitter and come face to face with a study.

Dr. Greene tweeted about how the President’s Cancer Panel acknowledged that “we face ‘grievous harm’ from chemicals that surround us every day and that we have ‘grossly underestimated’ the amount of illness caused by these exposures – illness ‘that could have been prevented through appropriate national action.’”

Like with cancer, I have to wonder if we’ve also grossly misunderstood the link between chemicals and allergic reactions – since allergies are the immune system’s over-response to things like corn, soy, cow’s milk, peanuts and wheat, all of which are some the most altered and sprayed crops, the likelihood of the immune system wanting to fight when those things are ingested seems highly probable to me.

I mean, think about it. Really, really think about it.

What are we eating?

It’s a lot more than just food.

****

Watermelons are exploding in China from the over use of growth-inducing chemicals.

They have been deemed unfit for human consumption.

So the exploded melons are being fed to pigs and fish, both of which will be consumed by humans.

Have we forgotten the concept of food chains?

Cows across the vast expanse of our United States are being fed genetically-modified, subsidized corn, which they cannot naturally digest, instead of prairie grass.

Grass neutralizes the acidity in the cow’s gut; corn doesn’t.

So e-coli actually builds up in the cow’s gut, giving way to e-coli outbreaks in our beef.

Our smallest, weakest suffer and fall.

Have we neglected nature in favor of science and production?

Last year, the journal Pediatrics releases a study citing that the U.S. could save $13billion dollars per year if 90 percent of mothers nursed their babies for the first six months instead of feeding them formula.

What does that say about the diseases that can be prevented by feeding babies a milk that’s specifically designed for them AND a milk that kills cancer cells?

Have we allowed Who-Code Violators like Nestle to push an agenda more focused on profit than health?

A young woman is diagnosed in 2003 with a rare, incurable stage four cancer.
She researches chemicals and food and cancer and places herself on a Crazy Sexy Diet.

She survives and is thriving.

Have we lost our allegiance to our bodies and replaced it with feeding our cravings?

And in a small town, in the most northern suburbs of Chicago, a small boy innocently eats grapes from the bottom drawer of his refrigerator after his mother bought them, ignoring her gut instinct regarding the purchase of non-organic, mass produced fruits and vegetables.

And his body rejects them in an angry flare of hives; he recovers.

His mom returns the grapes to the store, only to learn that they are cleaned with a chemical agent while on display.

Have we downplayed our instincts, ignored our gut feelings to the point of detriment?

In a succession of bigger picture moments, her instincts are realized, embraced, no longer to be ignored.

Chemical residue on grapes – a gentle reminder noticed and taken with gratitude that ignorance of instinct {and even nature's way} is only bliss until the body begins to break.

And I've got to learn to listen before the weight of it all, the stress of the overload begins to break the bodies we feed.

Healthy Living: An Experiment in Eating

After G. tried to con me into feeding him processed, packaged "unfood" last weekend, I wrote about making the hard and often unpopular decision to eat mostly real foods -- non-processed, un-enriched and preservative-free foods {though we have our moments, just like everyone else, where we've been known to eat a Frosty or something}.

And Jade, a smart, witty writer who is currently working to stop sex-trafficing of women in Thailand, left an amazingly insightful comment on that post detailing her struggle with weight and experience with food of both America and Thailand.

Totally intrigued, I asked her if she would please fully share her experiences here. And thankfully for me {maybe you, too?}, she obliged. I think you'll be happy you stopped by today.

****

Do you ever feel like, despite your best efforts to be healthy or lose weight, there is something beyond your control sabotaging your efforts?

That, no matter how hard you try to make informed decisions about the food that goes in your mouth, there is some hidden power greater than yourself working against you?

Meanwhile, you’re left beating yourself up for the times you “slip”?

I do. All the time. And I’m kind of thinking that maybe I’m not the only one who does.

Hyacynth most graciously asked me to write a post on this topic because I, like she, have come to distrust what the American food industry tries to tell us is “food”.

Let me explain the angle I’m coming from here. If you knew me in real life, you’d probably know that weight is an issue that plagues me.

I’m one of those people about whom well-intentioned family members might (and did) say, “If she just lost a few pounds, she could be pretty.” Almost there, but not quite. I used to try really hard to eat healthily, choosing fresh fruits and vegetables from the local Farmer’s Market, cooking a lot at home so I could weigh and calculate every bite, and fighting with myself to exercise regularly.

I also had an insatiable sweet tooth, and every night was a battle with myself between soothing the beast craving sweets now and hating myself or being plagued with guilt later. I could be good all day, and then lose it come 8 p.m.

I blamed myself. A lot.

But there was a quiet part of me that kept popping up and saying, “Being a healthy weight shouldn’t be so friggin’ hard.” And a suspicious part of me noticed that when my skinny Thai cousins came to the U.S., they all started putting on pounds.

They all started having to do exercise and watch what they eat. Meanwhile, everyone I knew who spent a significant amount of time abroad came back having lost weight. And we’ve all wondered about the French who consume a steady diet of cheese, and bread, and cream and wine and still manage to walk around looking svelte.

I began to think that maybe it’s not food that’s the problem. It’s something in the food. We can see all the chemicals and preservatives, corn and sugar, and all kinds of unnatural things listed right on the side of all our packaged foods.

I can eschew the packaged stuff. But I still eat meat. Meat that has been fed on a diet of corn because it’s cheap, and stuffed with growth hormones to make it look plump, and additives to make it look pretty on the shelf longer. (Food, Inc. is a really good documentary that goes into this, if you’re interested in looking into the subject further. I also highly recommend Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.)

So, three months ago, when my husband and I packed up and moved to Thailand, I made a secret deal with myself. I wouldn’t make a special effort to control my diet here. I would eat what I want when hungry, stop when I was full, and when our scale arrived in our package of stuff shipped from the U.S., I would see what happened.

We ate out almost exclusively. This is a big shift for someone who used to almost always cook at home. But we’ve been eating mostly food served at the street stalls or local mom-and-pop style restaurants. A lot of it is fried. I’ve eaten way fewer veggies and way more rice. Meat is probably about the same.

Portion sizes here are significantly smaller, but here’s the kicker: I actually like that. In the States, I would eat until full and sometimes until stuffed. If food is in front of me, I can’t say no to it. But here, the food tastes amazing, but I happily stop at “satisfied”. There’s room for more, but I prefer not to feel full. I might eat less at a particular meal, but I probably eat more over the course of the day.

Meanwhile, we also enjoy desserts (donuts, pastries, coconut snacks…the gelato here is fabulous) on a fairly regular basis. (Before we came, I think it had been at least 5 years since my last donut.) We don’t hold back on the sweets. If we want them, we’ll eat them. BUT I don’t have the crazy sweet tooth I used to have either. Most times, I’m not interested, or I’ll think “maybe in a few minutes.” And then forget about it entirely.

This is not like me.

And also? We’re totally not exercising. By all accounts, the way we eat and don’t exercise, we should have gained weight. I could barely wait for our scale to arrive to find out what the effects were.

And then on Monday, our moment of truth came. Our stuff was delivered and we pulled out the scale. My husband, who is naturally pretty skinny, in three months without even trying lost FIFTEEN pounds. (!) (Full disclosure: he also drinks significantly less beer here.) The pants he sent in shipping? None of them fit anymore.

And me? I lost between 5-8 pounds. And this is me, a person for whom losing weight without trying ranks right up there with unicorns on the scale of likelihood.

I won’t take this as license to eat unhealthily. Because I do care about my health and heart, even if the pounds continue to drop, I will be more circumspect about the food I eat from here on out. But there is definitely something I learned about how the food I used to eat created cravings, while the food here seems to satisfy them.

All right, so we can’t all get too excited because this experiment is in no way backed up by real science.

It has a test group size of 2.

And very little in the way of controls.

But I share this because all my instincts are telling me that all that extra junk our food industry puts in our food has a real effect on our health. These things the industry adds to cut the costs of production or increase sales, I really am starting to believe have an effect on us. Even if they don’t necessarily add calories directly, they may still have an indirect effect.

Particularly, what I suspect could be the case is that they change the nature of cravings. They make us want to eat more, especially of things that contain sodium and sugar.

I don’t blame the farmers. (Ok, maybe I do give an evil side-eye glance towards the mega-corporations like Monsanto.) But I do think the costs for our health could be given a higher weight against the bottom line, even in economic times such as these.

The problem is, honestly, these are tough choices to make. It’s a difficult truth, but often we have to make a choice between nutrition and convenience. It’s made even more difficult when the convenient choice is also the cheaper, more affordable one (at least at face value), especially when you’re raising a family and are short on time and money.

However, the real question is: would we choose differently if we knew more? If we really knew about what effects those extra chemicals and preservatives and additives have on us?

Maybe we would choose differently.

Maybe we wouldn’t.

But at least the power to make that choice would be ours. We would no longer be fighting some unnamable force.

And we wouldn’t be sabotaged by the very hands that feed us.

Jade blogs at Tasting Grace. If you don't already know her, I hope this served as an awesome introduction to a very talented woman.

Living Healthfully: Digesting our Food Choices

It's Sunday morning during our vacation, and G. is lounging around in his underwear while riffling through a basket filled with 100-calorie snack packs.

I ask him what he's doing.

"I'm reading the ingredients to see if this is a healthy snack, mom," he says.

This is the point where I stop and pause before continuing any external dialogue with my kiddo.

My heart could be doing at a happy dance at the moment with my oldest seemingly displaying a desire to carefully choose his food.

Buuuut, if I'm going to be real, I know that's not what he's doing this time.

First of all, he can't read.

Second, we've had this discussion before about NOT eating these little snack packs of cookies and crackers; he's simply trying to talk me into allowing him to indulge in food.

Well, I use the term food loosely, because a lot of those ingredients, they are not actually, you know, food.

That's a hard concept to explain to a 3.5 year old who has actually seen people {including a younger, unaware version of his mother -- me} eat the contents of those packages before.

Because why on Earth would someone eat something that's not food, he asks?

Sigh. I know, right?

Why would someone eat something that's not actually food?

Speaking from experience, I think I know the answer: Because the definition of food has so radically changed during the past few decades.

Whereas food used to be defined as a digestible, nutritious plant or animal based product naturally found in nature, we now abide by a new definition:
whatever is tasty and technically digestible.

Forget that much of what we consume has been concocted in a chemistry lab rather than harvested in a field or grown in a pasture.

Instead of eating products that are the fat of the land we're consuming science projects that are making us the fat of the land.

And perhaps we're just not passionate about our food anymore.

Let's take, for example, the ingredients in one of the 100-calorie snack packs:

enriched flour, sugar, fructose, glycerol, vegetable oil with TBHQ for freshness, dextrose, meltodextrin, non-fat dry milk, apple powder, strawberry puree concentrate, mineral whey, invert sugar, cornstarch, soy lecithin, leavening, salt, datem, cellulose gel, natural and artificial color, citric acid, mono and diglycerides, cellulose gum, sodium citrate, malic acid, color added, sodium alginate, caramel color, xanthan gum, tricalcium phospate, red #40, vanilla extract, BHT.

I'm not going to go into the fact that two of the three first ingredients in the product are sugar. And I'm not going to spend time discussing how a few ingredients later more sugar is listed. Twice. I'm also not going to get into the whole "enriched" flour thing.

Simply, I'm just going to point out that the items bolded have been chemically created in a science lab. What exactly is red #40 anyway? Or BHT? Or artificial flavors? Or TBHQ?

Really, I won't spend time dissecting what these ingredients do to a body when consumed in larger quantities {which is entirely possible if all you're eating is precessed food} beyond saying that unnatural ingredients seriously compromise the way our bodies were intended to function.

Rather, if we don't know exactly what these ingredients are, why are we consuming them or allowing our children to consume them? Why are we not more passionate about our food and where it comes from and what it actually is?

We wouldn't turn our kids loose in a forest preserve and allow them access to any of the wild berries or plants growing because we know some of them may contain toxins that are poisonous to our bodies.

So why turn them loose in the grocery store aisle where so many of our foods now contain known {and even more worrisome -- unknown} chemical concoctions that react similarly to toxins when built up in the body? {Remember the whole saccharin debacle?}

And why on Earth are we allowing marketers and studies paid for by ginormous processed food companies dictate what we deem safe for our families to consume when those studies' interests are marred by these companies' interests in profit rather than consumer health?

And how is it that we fall for the lie that 100 calorie snack packs are healthy simply because they are 100 calories? So is probably my TSHIRT, and I wouldn't eat that.

And doesn't anybody intensely, passionately care about the food we're eating?! ---

Snap back to reality at the sound of a small voice: "Mommy, what can I have for a snack?"

I collect my thoughts, try to cool my boiling blood and refocus.

"How about some raspberries?" I ask.

"I looooove raspberries!" he exclaims.

As he happily pops the raspberries into his mouth, I realize something -- an epiphany of sorts.

It's NOT that we're void of passion concerning our food; actually, it seems to be quite the opposite -- we ARE emotionally attached to our food otherwise there wouldn't be such a hard and tight cling to these processed foods.

Perhaps, the passion we must learn is one for our bodies, switch our loyalties from what we're feeding ON simply to the very bodies we're feeding.