No crap food in my house!!

Real food. Its easy. Keep it simple.

Roast up a pan of chicken legs. Micro wave frozen peas. Nuke a potato. Cut up an apple.

I had to do easy to feed my children. And then they learned about crap food at school.

My kids were taught how to cook. How to help with meal prep. At 20 and 21 BOTH my boys can cook.

Or cut off a chunk of cheese from a 2# block of cheddar!

Mcnugget style meat is not meat. Its breading and fats with a trace of meat. Once I figured that out.....gone. A pan of chicken legs cooks in under an hour, and the extras are for another meal.

The cheap crap " foods" are lethal to a thinking brain, to good mood, to our mental health.

Salt and sugar is the tip of the iceburg. Just feed realfood. Thank you dr Atkins.

Make meat loaf.


This was regular fare.

One McNugget has 2.3g net carbs, 2.5g fat and 2.4g protein…hits that magic carb + fat combo for Optimum Fattening.

And you can dip them in ketchup for more carbs.

Oh, they have a variety of sugary sauces to choose from. And BBQ is often ridiculously sweet. I see bottled sauces where the sweetener is the second ingredient.

We now KNOW these processed combinations re-shape the brain's appetite center. It gets larger the more a person eats these artificial foods.

The thing is, some of it is not their fault. These have been crafted to be addictive substances. Dr. Atkins got me off the carbs, and that IS the answer. While it might take the longest to kill you, compared to alcohol or opiates, carb addiction makes our lives tortuous and expensive.

And finally there is research about how it affects your brain. I can tell. I was dumber and less mood stable on carbs. I know I'm not alone.

It is unrecognised how this might be a public health issue for others who are eating real food. Our chubby/angry friends or family members can't help but inflict their issues on us. The seeming futility only makes sufferers more angry. We've all been there, doing what we're told, and failing miserably, and being miserable.

Here in the US, I have come to believe certain regions of the country are suffering extra from the double whammy of crushing work which doesn't pay enough, and subtle undermining of even the ability to acquire and cook real food. If someone is in an economically depressed state (and our states make up a lot of their own rules) such places also become known for their love of junk food AND a lack of health care infrastructure.

So people are suffering the most in places where it's even more difficult to eat real food. I was watching a Youtube when the creator had recently moved several states. She and her family were stunned at how difficult it was to get to a grocery store (Wal-Mart is known to drive out competition and then site megacenters) so people in rural areas have to drive up to fifty miles to get groceries.

And she said, "And every foot of the highway that we have to drive is a place to turn around, get fast food, and go home. I don't blame all those people who do that. It's hard not to do that!"

And I agree. I can get to a grocery store within five minutes in either direction. The other day I picked up groceries for a sick neighbor, because it's easy to do favors like that. I have an actual kitchen but a lot of shared living situations creates issues around kitchen cleaning and maintenance.

The time shift between the two in terms of effort has an incredible pull.

All these factors drive people from their homes and their reasons to be there.

about this claim of dramatically reducing "sugar"…that was easy to deal with…substitute non nutritive sweeteners!

How fake sugars sneak into foods and disrupt metabolic health

Artificial sweeteners and other sugar substitutes sweeten foods without extra calories. But studies show the ingredients can affect gut and heart health.

Info on artificial sweeteners and the "natural ones", e.g. Monkfruit and stevia, hiding in our processed foods.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/well...M6Rdg&itid=gfta

Maybe it's just me, but I don't consider those sweeteners to be hiding at all. Then again, I've been reading ingredient labels since I was in my 20's.

I started reading them in the 70's when I was on LC.

Even thought I ended up going off and on LC for a few years in the 70's, I still read ingredient labels.

When I was off LC for a couple of decades, I still read ingredient labels, because one thing that being on LC for a couple of years had taught me was that certain sweeteners (primarily sugar alcohols) did not play nicely with my digestive tract. Even when I didn't care if what I was buying had a pile of sugar in it, I still checked to make sure there were no sugar alcohols in it.


One thing I have a problem with in the WP info (aside from it being presented in such a cutesy manner) is that they list all these horrible effects that any non-sugar sweetener can have on your gut, your brain, and your health - even monkfruit and stevia, which are naturally occurring sweeteners that have been used for hundreds of years, and yet suddenly they're included in this artificial sweetener horror story.

Besides, didn't it come out at some point that the way they came to the conclusion that artificial sweeteners would affect your gut health was by observing how they affected gut cells in a petri dish? And also using the sweeteners at such high concentrations that a human would need to eat several pounds of the pure form of the sweetener daily to make it remotely possible to see any of those effects on their gut. As opposed to observing how it affected the gut health of actual humans who had consumed the sweetener, even in what would be high amounts, such as the individual who drank dozens of sugar free sodas daily, along with using those sweeteners in many of their foods every day.

But that brings up the way that they list how much sweeter all the artificial sweeteners are than sugar - is that really a factor in how they affect you? Just because they're all hundreds of times sweeter than sugar, that doesn't mean you're using hundreds of times as much sucralose or stevia as you used to use of sugar. I use pure stevia - there's nothing in it to extend it. If I used even 1/10 the same amount of stevia in a recipe as the recipe says to use of sugar, it would be too impossibly sweet to eat. The same is true of any purified form of the other sweeteners - sucralose is as much as 700 times sweeter than sugar, hence you use approximately 1/700 as much of the actual sucralose. That would be impossible to measure though, so they extend the sucralose (and other super concentrated sweeteners) by adding enough maltodextrin to it to make it possible to measure it "just like sugar".



Don't get me wrong - I think the amount of sugar being added to most foods on the market is just appalling (especially the foods that don't need any sweetening to begin with), and switching to a different sweetener without making it obvious on the front of the package what they're using instead is bordering on bait and switch/false advertising.

I realize something needs to be done to reduce the amount of sugar in all those foods, and I agree that switching to a concentrated sweetener isn't helping. The general public has become so out of touch with the way real food tastes though, and they're going to stop buying their favorite sweet foods if they're made less sweet... and switch to something else that's as sweet as they like it.

I was thinking about my beef with "Keto" Products. I don’t buy them but cruise the multi-aisle snack section at Costco to check out the latest ingredients. A recent offering are the NOSUGARKeto Bars (that is the actual name in large letters) in fudge brownie, chocolate chip, etc. from the what else, TheNOSugarCompany.

On ingredients list, well before the stevia, is Erythritol, Inulin, various processed fibers and such tasty bits as "IsomaltoOliogosaccharide Fiber". No idea what it is, but it sounds sweet. And these Keto bars keep you in ketosis" and are "plant-based" so all the buzz words on one box! That whole section is filled with sugary snack foods that make the parent purchaser feel good about the junk they are buying for their kids.

They have been reformulating all the foods to contain artificial sweetener because that's cheaper. But it's also further away from real food, which they use all kinds of emulsifiers and artificial flavors and such to make it seem like food.

When I was learning baking I had people eat a slice of MY cake, hand beaten with real butter and cake flour. They would fall over. Now, the standard has fallen so far cake no longer even tastes like cake. It's now a chemical confection which over-promises and under-delivers.

Real food is serious competition to their profits, no?

I recall at some point several months ago, Costco had all the LC/Keto stuff grouped together in one or two aisles in the middle of the store. It was almost mind boggling how much there was. I looked at a couple of the packages just out of curiosity as to how in the world they were making all these typical snack foods Keto. And it was very much like the ingredients you listed there.

Out of curiosity, I googled IsomaltoOliogosaccharide Fiber, and this is just a sampling of the info that came up in the little blurbs below the links, and a few from the section of common questions about it:


So fiber - another buzz word that is no doubt is big and bold on the package.


Lovely, just what everyone wants!


Perfectly natural... nothing to see here!


Oh look, another buzz word!


So... not really good for keeping you in ketosis after all.