Another hobby we (I) have is to study other peoples shopping carts and speculate about their lives through looking at the groceries they buy. I am amazed over how many families have their carts filled to the brim with only unhealthy things; white bread, sweet soft drinks (in masses), ready-made foods like schnitzel and sausages, sugar-drowned cereals and all those small one-portion sweet "desserts" that so effectively remove any interest in real food in a child. I bet they get all their inspiration from the TV commercials, which they swallow without any discriminative thought going through their minds.
The other day I showed a video clip about good-quality food in relation to fat-burning to Yoram. (It really wants to sell a whole package of DVD's, books and stuff, so don't mind the selling attitude, but the information about physiology and food is totally correct, so if you are normally gifted, the information should be enough.) Yoram has a few kilos left around the waist that he wants to remove, but they are very persistent. He cut away a lot of unhealthy things already last year, but then we stagnated. He kept on eating bread, popping a cookie here and there and besides that, he drinks Coke Zero. He thought that it was a brilliant idea, since it contains zero calories, and my continuous commenting about aspartame being toxic on the body was simply sliding off of him like water on a duck. In the video it was explained how a diet high on synthetic food additives will exhaust the liver. The liver has two important functions (among other things); to break down toxic substances and to take part in the degradation of body fat. If the body is busy breaking down all the chemicals you take in through processed food, then do you think that there are any resources left for burning fat? Hardly, irrespectively of how little you eat. I think that he finally understood this now when he heard it from another source than me, which is typical, but the days after he seemed very aware of the dangers of nasty things like aspartame and Monosodium Glutamate (MSG).
I very rarely touch packed meats, like slices of sausage, "ham" or "pastrami", which mostly is the left-overs scraped off of the floor in the slaughter house, which is assembled with some nice "meat glue" and juicy additives to make it delicious (sic!). Today we looked for sausages for the kids, who as you know have terrible food-preferences, and for the first time Yoram actually looked at the content lists on the packages. It turned out that we did not find even one brand without MSG, which I find outrageous. Clearly Israel is left behind when it comes to building awareness on these things. In Sweden today, products like these are mostly free of MSG. We ended up buying some package anyway, but Yoram said that this has to end sooner or later. At least I don't think that he will touch it himself anymore. Then you can discuss still giving it to the kids, but they are still too complicated with foods, and removing too many things would leave nothing left that they accept to eat. There our opinions differ, and Yoram is too worried about their nutrition (as if they get the nutrients they need now) to put them through a food boot-camp. I say that they will eat whatever when they get hungry enough. Now they are just spoiled. But, one step at a time.
To finish this off, I can mention that Yoram started loosing more weight after cutting Coke Zero and the other "insignificant" bites here and there of less natural foods. Say no more...
No comments:
Post a Comment