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| Nutritionist and Author |
What’s coming in the new year? Plenty of changes, most of which were put into motion in 2008. A new U.S. president is the most obvious change, but there will also be changes in foods and drinks on supermarket store shelves, finance-driven modifications in eating and lifestyle habits, and research and news about health topics that used to be so underground that they were only covered on blogs on the Internet such as this one!
The annual sugar-fest has begun. It starts with loads of cheap candy hitting store shelves a few weeks before Halloween. People buy candy at “bargain” prices for trick-or-treaters. With lots of candy in their house, many decide to have a piece of candy, then maybe another and another. Their sugar cravings build, and they keep eating sugar, which leads to more cravings, which leads to more bingeing.
Halloween is our culturally acceptable “eat-all-you-want” candy day. It’s fitting that right after Halloween is November, which is National Diabetes Awareness Month. Few people see how ironic and telling this is.
Are you experiencing anxiety about the worldwide economic crisis and wondering how you can tighten your budget? One simple way is to slash the number and amount of gluten-free products you buy. Gluten-free foods aren’t available at most stores so people have to spend more money to drive to locations farther away to purchase them. Even worse, gluten-free products are two to three times more expensive than regular products, according to a 2007 study. That’s a hefty price to pay for people experiencing tough financial times.
Consider also that it’s not just the cost of gluten-free products – it’s the cost of those products to our health. Few people in the gluten-free community or natural food industry like to talk about it, but many gluten-free products are simply junk foods that happen to be gluten-free.
Higher plasma vitamin C levels, an indicator of a high fruit and vegetable intake, is associated with a substantially decreased risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a European-based study of more than 20,000 middle-aged adults.
Many people like to read nutrition information that motivates them to eat better, but they also like to learn information through watching movies. As one client said to me, “Being able to both read information and watch it works really well together, helping to reinforce why we all need to ‘go against the grain’ with our diet for improved health.”
In my previous post, I wrote about “King Corn”, a documentary that explains how cheap corn ends up in most commercial American foods and plays a major role in our widespread and widening health problems. But two other documentary movies to watch are “SuperSize Me” and “McLibel”.
If you rent just one movie to watch at home this year, make sure it’s “King Corn”. Better yet, buy yourself a copy, so you can watch it every so often and remind yourself of the messes that have been created in our farming practices, our system of raising animals for meat, our own health and the health of the environment — all because of growing outrageous amounts of corn.
“King Corn” documents the experience of two idealistic college graduates who decide to grow an acre of corn in Iowa. Viewers follow them through the whole process — government subsidies, genetically engineered seed, and pesticides that kill everything but the genetically engineered corn. Viewers then learn how the surplus of corn seeps into our foods in many ways, and what all that corn does to us, to animals, to the environment, and to small farmers who can’t compete with big industrialized food corporations.
At a gluten-free fair a few months ago, a friend briefly saw me and said, “Oh, Melissa, I am so bloated and gaining so much weight lately. I know it is all the corn products I have been eating lately.”
My friend is not alone. Corn has infiltrated the American food supply in a major, yet mostly invisible way, and virtually all Americans eat corn in some form without knowing it. People who begin a gluten-free diet (free of wheat, rye and barley) often are so focused on avoiding gluten that they substitute corn-based foods in place of wheat – repeatedly having corn tortillas instead of flour tortillas, for example – and end up eating a lot more corn-based foods. They gain weight and develop other health problems and don’t understand the reason why. Corn is the reason.
