Toxic Living – Is Your Food Just Food?

How often do you actually check the labels of foods you buy, including all the little extra words you cannot pronounce? The reality is, shopping would take hours if we did.

What’s in our food that we unknowingly “indulge in” everyday?

To be honest with you, you might not want to read this. This stuff always makes me depressed and then angry. Why can’t we just have “clean” food on our plate?—basic, great, healthy good-tasting food. Why is that so hard?

Well the good news is, we can. But it does mean staying away from packaged food, and maybe even learning how to cook … and you do need to keep up the job of mindful attention when choosing your food.

To help you with that, please read on.

Food additives are legal, but do you want them?

In the U.S., about 3000 additives can be used legally in our foods. They are used for food preservation, coloring, texture, increasing taste, and so on.

Avoiding processed and packaged food is of course the easiest way to omit these unwanted “extras.” That not only means choosing whole foods, but also staying mindful of the pesticides and fertilizers used in non-organic foods. And yes, it is a bother to have to pay attention to all of this, I agree. Unfortunately, with our overconsumption comes production, and with that comes all the extras to keep yield up for the food manufacturers. That’s also why supporting local farmers is a really good idea, as is insisting on organic produce as much as possible.

One of the most important things to know first is how to read the nutrition label. Be mindful of serving sizes. Most packaged food contains more than one serving size but the label only gives you the nutritional information for one serving. Often we think one muffin or one bagel is one serving—this isn’t always the case. A regular sized muffin is actually two servings and most bagels are more than two servings. (And that’s without the topping.)

The ingredients.

Ingredients are listed in descending order, so what there is most of comes first. Often that also means that all the little additions come toward the end of the label. Many people will have stopped reading by then and miss them. Ingredients that make up less than 2 percent can be listed in any order after the heading “contains less than 2 percent of the following.”