CrazyBusy Mama! (Dot Calm)

I don’t usually do this when grocery shopping, but the other day a certain product took me so much by surprise that I stopped, stared, and laughed out loud. (It was little embarrassing considering there were other shoppers nearby.) What was the product?

Organic pancake batter.

“What,” you ask, “is wrong with organic pancake batter?”

Nothing, usually, but this stuff was in a – wait for it – SPRAY CAN! You know – the same kind of can usually filled with processed “cheese” or whipped cream.

Being a camera-happy iPhone owner, I just had to take a picture of it, along with the ingredients list.

In case you can’t read them in the picture, the ingredients are:

“Filtered water, organic wheat flour (unbleached), organic cane sugar, organic eggs, sodium lactate to inhibit spoilage, organic soybean powder, leavening (dicalcium phosphate and sodium bicarbonate), sea salt, organic rice bran extract….”

And last but not least, that most organic of all ingredients (please note the sarcasm): “propellant.”

Hmm….

No, thank you.

How are you at reading labels? If you’re new to it, there are some food additives you’ll want to keep an eye out for. If any of the following ingredients are on the label you’re reading, you should really just put the product back on the shelf.

Let’s start with that propellant. The ingredient most often used as propellant in the same type of can containing the pancake batter (and whipped cream, etc.), is nitrous oxide. According to Drug-Forum.com, it’s been known to “leave a residue similar to motor oil” in whipped cream chargers, “which can be potentially harmful to the user.” Yum, right? With motor oil residue on your pancakes, who needs syrup?

MSG is next. Short for monosodium glutamate, MSG is a “flavor enhancer” with a nasty reputation for causing allergic reactions. It’s also a known neurotoxin that, once you eat it, never leaves your body. Never. Almost everyone has consumed MSG at one time or another, but the point is to do your best to avoid it from now on, and that includes knowing the sneaky aliases it goes by. According to the site, The Carbohydrate Addict, you may be consuming monosodium glutamate (and free glutamates, which they go into detail about on their site) if you eat foods containing the following:

enzyme modified
anything fermented
anything protein fortified
anything ultra pasteurized
autolyzed yeast
barley malt
broth
bouillon
calcium caseinate
carrageen
flavoring
natural flavoring
gelatin
hydrolyzed oat flour
hydrolyzed vegetable
hydrolyzed protein
malt extract
maltodextrin
natural flavors,
pectin
plant protein extract
potassium glutamate
sodium caseinate
soy protein
soy sauce
stock
textured protein
whey protein
yeast extract
yeast food

Like I said…sneaky. (For further reading on how MSG is often hidden in your food, check out Truth in Labeling. )

Besides propellant and MSG, be on the lookout for the other usual criminals: sugar, high fructose corn syrup, different types of fat, white flour, unnecessary additives, and artificial sweeteners like sucralose (a.k.a. Splenda). Choose to keep natural foods in your cupboards as much as possible and make your own meals instead of eating out (especially at fast food joints). Your family may give you a tough time about it, but eventually – when they realize how good they feel – they’ll thank you!

©2010 Sally Dinius

Need a little help when it comes to knowing what to cook to get your family healthy? Try the Healthy Urban Kitchen Cookbook. You’ll get some helpful bonuses along with these tasty (and did I mention “healthy”?) recipes.

=================================================
Sally Dinius is writer-in-chief here at CrazyBusyMama.com, a blog created to inspire and motivate busy mamas everywhere to feel healthy, fit, and in control of their lives. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sdinius, and become a member of the CrazyBusy Mama Facebook fan page by clicking here.

If you’re health conscious like me, you read labels. Or you at least try to remember to.

There are quite a few things I keep my eyes peeled for on food packaging, like: MSG (monosodium glutamate, a flavor-enhancer and known neurotoxin that never leaves the body), saturated fats, trans fats, high levels of sodium, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose.

I’m bringing this up because my shortest child just loves Capri Sun juice pouches. We usually buy the original variety, which contains sugar. I know that and am aware of it. I don’t like it, but it is what it is. The good thing about Capri Sun, as far as I can tell from the ingredients listings on their site, is that none of their juice drinks contain high fructose corn syrup. Thank you, Capri Sun and Kraft, for that — I wish more companies would follow that example.

That said, here’s the stinger. I’m upset. Not long ago I decided to buy their new “Roarin’ Waters” variety for my daughter. It is, essentially flavored water…not unlike Propel, et al. I felt okay buying it because it contains no food dyes. HOWEVER…at the store yesterday, I felt prompted to look at the ingredients listed on the side of the box. The following has been copied from their web site:

“CAPRI SUN WATER BEVERAGE ROARIN’ WATERS STRAWBERRY KIWI 10 CT

Size: 10 ct
Upc: 8768400114

Ingredients: WATER, SUGAR, CITRIC ACID, SUCRALOSE (SPLENDA BRAND SWEETENER), NATURLA FLAVOR.”

(Emphasis is mine. Misspelling of “NATURAL” is theirs.)

In my opinion, Kraft is being deceptive in their packaging of this product. In two places on the front of the box you’ll find the phrase, “No Artificial Colors or Flavors.” Did you catch the missing word? Hint: It’s “Sweeteners.” The above phrase attempts to trick us into thinking, “Oh, this is good — nothing artificial.” How sly.

You may remember the post I did some time ago about the effects sucralose had on me. It’s nasty stuff. I’m very upset that Kraft feels it can be put into kids’ drinks, especially after the bad press sucralose (a.k.a. Splenda) has gotten over the last few years. I realize some kids can’t have drinks flavored with sugar, so their parents buy drinks that are flavored artificially. But this drink already has sugar in it. There is NO reason to add the Splenda!

Please join me in voicing your concerns about this product to Kraft (the maker of Capri Sun juice pouches). Remind them of the detrimental effects sucralose can have on our children. Tell them you won’t buy that particular variety until sucralose is removed from the product.

Get active and get involved for the sake of your children’s health. None of us is too busy for that. Thank you!

©2010 Sally Dinius
=================================================

Sally Dinius is writer-in-chief here at CrazyBusyMama.com, a blog created to inspire and motivate busy mamas everywhere to feel healthy, fit, and in control of their lives. Follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/sdinius, and become a member of the CrazyBusy Mama Facebook fan page by clicking here.

Some time back, my husband picked up a box of hot chocolate packets at the store. Nothing unusual there — we almost always have hot chocolate in the house. This box, however, was a sugar-free, 25-calorie variety by Swiss Miss. What made it sugar-free? It was sweetened with sucralose instead of sugar.

I’d gotten in the habit in recent months of relaxing with an almost-daily cup of hot chocolate: it is — as the name implies — chocolatey…it’s creamy, and it’s soothing. But I began to realize that the extra daily dose of around 200 calories (I make it with milk) was probably not doing me a whole lot of good regarding my continued weight-loss/weight-maintenance goals, so I decided to try a 25-calorie packet just for the heck of it.

Well, it tasted like regular hot chocolate to me. I could taste a very slight difference, but it certainly didn’t have that tinny diet flavor. I quickly polished off the box, and my husband bought more. Of course, being made with nonfat milk makes it more like 115 calories instead of 25, but I figured that was still better than 200 or more.

But some things are too good to be true.

First, let me say that in our family we’ve had some heavy-duty situations and experiences that have been causing our stress level to soar, along with anxiety and depression that both my husband and I have been feeling. (Into each life, right?) But when I began feeling additional symptoms of depression over this last week or two that would just whomp me out of nowhere, I wondered if something else could be causing it.

Knowing that what we eat or drink can have a huge impact on how we feel, the first thing I looked at was my diet…and what came to my mind before anything else was the hot chocolate. Even more specifically…the sucralose.

At first, the hot chocolate hadn’t affected me at all because I’d been drinking it at night just before bed. But then I began having it in the afternoon, and that’s when I noticed the mood changes.

So, just what is sucralose, and what’s so bad about it? Maybe more succinctly, is there anything bad about it?

Sucralose (a common name brand you may recognize is Splenda), is a non-nutritive sweetener that is 600 times sweeter than sugar. Because of its extreme sweetness, much less is needed, resulting in a lower calorie count per use. That’s good, but what’s the bad?

Derived chemically from sucrose, a.k.a. table sugar, sucralose was found rather by accident, as the process used to discover it was originally intended to produce a new insecticide, not a new sweetener for your coffee.

An article about sucralose on MedicineNet.com paints the sweetener’s alarming family tree:

According to the book Sweet Deception, sucralose is made when sugar is treated with trityl chloride, acetic anhydride, hydrogen chlorine, thionyl chloride, and methanol in the presence of dimethylformamide, 4-methylmorpholine, toluene, methyl isobutyl ketone, acetic acid, benzyltriethlyammonium chloride, and sodium methoxide, making it unlike anything found in nature. The Splenda Web site even states that “although sucralose has a structure like sugar and a sugar-like taste, it is not natural.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m not so calorie-phobic that I’m going to eat something created with chemicals just to avoid gaining weight. And what about those side effects — like mood swings — that I’d mentioned earlier? Here’s a longer list:

• diarrhea, intestinal cramping, and other gastrointestinal symptoms
• skin irritations, including swelling, rashes, flushing, and hives
• mood changes like depression and feelings of panic
• muscle aches and headaches
• heart palpitations
• runny nose and cough

Additional reading:
Sugar Substitutes and the Potential Danger of Splenda
Sucralose: What is the Positive Side?/What is the Negative Side?
Sucralose Side Effects on Buzzle.com
Sucralose Side Effects on iloveindia.com

Stay tuned…I’ll be introducing you soon to a couple of natural sweeteners that will do the sweetening job just fine.

©2010 Sally Dinius
=================================================

Sally Dinius is writer-in-chief here at CrazyBusyMama.com,
a blog created to inspire and motivate busy mamas everywhere to feel healthy, fit, and in control of their lives. Follow her on Twitter at
http://twitter.com/sdinius, and become a member of the CrazyBusy Mama Facebook fan page by
clicking here.