Hey!! LOOK At What You Are Consuming!!!

Let's face it: We are now living in the times where what we consume are going to have a lot of stuff added to the foods and drinks that just might make our stomach slightly upset, make our digestion a little out of balance, and have gunk build up in our bodies (arteries, intestines, etc). When we eat a lot of these processed foods on a daily basis, we're slowly becoming even more unbalanced, slowly getting that build up of gunk in our bodies.

Maybe it's time to start paying attention what we're consuming, yeah? For example: Lean Crusine. This brand does offer healthier alternatives to frozen food, fast food, and pizza. However, nutritional information is not the only thing we need to be looking at. We also need to look at the ingredients list. When looking at the ingredients list, you can see there's a bunch of stuff listed in there. An average individual like myself, who is not a registered dietitian or nutritional expert, am not going to recognize a lot of these words such as "gum arabic, autolyzed yeast extract" and so on. However, we can tell they are additives. To keep the food fresh, to add flavor, etc. Oh yeah, and a lot of them are going to have a high sodium content. I've stopped eating Lean Cruisine when I started to realize there are a lot of additives that doesn't sound healthy but is fine to eat on occasion. Our bodies are not made to easily process additives and anything chemically processed just to make the food taste good. It's not natural and I'm willing to bet that long-term use of these foods can eventually catch up to us and we will have problems later in life from the processed foods we eat.

MorningStar Farms frozen food. I've heard some healthy stuff, but the long list of ingredients is a little alarming. Just a little for a reason. A lot of their products got half of the natural ingredients. The other half are ingredients I can't pronounce and the only time I usually see these words are in chemistry class. What's worse is, why does the brand feel the need to add what kind of vitamin a chemical is? If it's naturally added... it wouldn't be on the ingredients list. The vitamin would be in the nutrition information list. This getting you to think?

I'd like to add something about natural flavors. Just why do they feel the need to say "natural flavors", hmm? Maybe they're also added stuff that's just under the federally regulated guidelines for what is artificial flavoring and natural flavoring. Just my opinion here. It could be "natural flavors" because that's the natural flavors of that flavor. One of these days I will be taking classes on nutrition and learn more about the foods we are eating and whether or not I was right to be concerned with these things.

On a lighter note, I got good news for the coffee drinkers. We've all looked at our ingredients list from time to time to see what's in the coffee creamer we consume, right? And we all see just how many stuff is in one tablespoon's worth! I'm happy to announce that I have tried CoffeeMate's Natural Bliss. Instead of the 20-somethings (might be more, might be less) ingredients found in most processed coffee creamers, the two flavors of CoffeeMate's Natural Bliss only have four ingredients. That's right, just four! Nonfat milk, sugar, heavy cream, and natural flavors. Again, not sure why they added that last part but it's still much better than the regularly processed coffee creamers, yeah? Maybe the Sweet Cream Natural Bliss's "natural flavors" would be just that: the natural flavor of Sweet Cream.

Hopefully this post have gotten my readers to start thinking about the foods we eat. My hope is that my readers will start looking at the ingredients list and weigh in whether or not the product is worth the lower calories and fats for all the additives in that food. No more just looking at the nutritional information. Sure, it's nice that the food tastes great. Are they worth the trouble our digestive bodies will have to go through to reject the processed chemicals that we don't need to be consuming? That's the question you all need to ask yourselves. Think about it: They lowered the bad stuff in nutrition, but what did they add to keep the food tasting great?