Don’t be fooled. Those crunchy flakes in Smart Start cereal contain lethal plastic fats that slowly clog your veins. Read the ingredients. Stop at the subtle three words, “partially hydrogenated oil.” Another word for it is “shortening.” Margarine is nothing but a big tub of this fat.
It’s called “trans fat.” Perfectly fine oil (cottonseed, sunflower, vegetable oil, sesame or fish) has been stripped of its saturated fat to make imperfect oil. It is solidified to preserve the shelf life of whatever ingredient it is mixed with. Instead of just peanuts, which is what peanut butter should be, Jif has to mix solidified “oil” along with unnecessary sugar.
What does this mean? It means choosy moms should not choose Jif if they don’t want their children to suffer from diabetes, coronary heart disease or cancer. Because of high correlations of hydrogenated oil intake with those three diseases, according to a study directed by a Harvard group, food packagers must list the amount of trans fat in their product’s Nutrition Facts list.
Almost all of Europe has banned the substance from grocery shelves and restaurants. After learning that New York had the most concentrated sufferers of heart disease, all chefs were asked voluntarily to remove it from their kitchens.
A lot of Americans don’t understand the trend in the organic food business and farming or could care less. If non-organic food weren’t such an enemy to the body, then these trendy people wouldn’t run to organic food stores as if they were the only haven (Wild Oats, Whole Foods).
If you are a non-trendy American, I hope you’re asking, “Why is all-natural food better than ‘edible’ material that has been chemically altered or artificially created?” It’s all in the way we were meant to digest things.
Our body “reads” molecules that enter it, getting rid of the parts that it doesn’t enjoy. Non-altered food is better because our bodies read the chemical structure of food from the ground the way it’s supposed to be read.
Human bodies can’t possibly read a molecule that has hardened its fatty acids. Therefore, the “fat” chills out for who knows how long in our veins. Technically, it has consumed plastic masked in fat.
Organic shouldn’t be such a foreign concept. I’ve been asked many times what organic is. I tell them that it’s food I know has grown from the ground without harmful growth hormones, steroids or pesticides. It’s yogurt with ingredients that are less than 10 syllables.
It’s non-aspartamed, non-high fructose corn syruped, non-artificial flavored, non-bleached flowered and non-hydrogenated. If you see that the food you buy has those harmful ingredients, then know that there is an alternative.
Kroger has a comparatively large organic section with unbleached flower, non-hydrogenated packaged cereal/chips and virgin produce. The Kroger brand of a lot of these is cheaper and tastes just as good. Farmers, groceries and chefs are proving to America that just because developed countries have to mass produce and sell, doesn’t mean they have to kill their buyers in the process.
Forty percent of the food in grocery stores contain partially hydrogenated oils. But if it preserves for a long time in a bag, it will preserve for a long time in your body. It preserves in your cereal, pizza, potato chips, tortilla chips, French fries, almost everything you eat at a chain restaurant and later, your arteries.
For this reason, Whole Foods, an organic grocery, will not host any products with trans fats (hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oil). For this reason, neither should your body. Our bodies take a beating every day, and they have enough to deal with without gobs of fatty molecules that sit around and veg out in the tunnels that are supposed to transport blood to all vital organs.
Many Americans are not motivated to act healthy, only to look healthy on the outside. This is why we have a huge market in diet plans that aren’t necessarily healthy. However, if you are eating what you were made to eat and the suitable proportions, while also exercising the heart, then you will look your best, if not amazing.
You will be the size you were meant to be without losing a considerable amount of weight and gaining it all back and more once you are done with your “diet.” Whatever your motivation is to go organic, following the trend could save your life or add years to it. That would be a smarter start.
Categories:
Avoid trans fat; go with organic food
Kelly Daniels
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April 9, 2006
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