M-m-m! What's for Breakfast??
Now, they've REALLY done it!
The food giants, I mean. I saw a billboard on the way to Minneapolis yesterday that proved that these guys are STRICTLY concerned with profits, and the actual nutrition of the consumer can go hang.
Let me ask you a couple of questions: If you knew that what you were eating was toxic and destructive, would you eat it anyway? If you knew it was going to cause long-term and devastating health problems for you and your children, would you still purchase and serve it?
Yet, the food giants continually produce, advertise as "NUTRITIOUS", and market to those very children of yours one product after another that is so toxic and devoid of nutrients that they have to add synthetic vitamins to make them into even a SEMBLANCE of real food. Not only that, but they are forever on the search for even more ways to market that vile poison to you and your loved ones by coming up with one new cereal variety after another. All of these are LOADED with sugar and trans- fats, as well as chemicals, all of them are touted as "100% of your daily requirements!" and yet, every last one of them is a poisonous concotion of chemicals, sugar, bug parts, and rat poop that shouldn't even be allowed inside the doors of a FOOD store.
I know--some of these cereals have been out there for fifty or even a hundred years. When they started out, they really were what they claimed to be. But making a cereal that is ALL food is expensive. So, the food manufacturers of the time began to experiment with fillers and additives. Pretty soon, cereals by the same name as the originals had nothing in common with their "ancestors" but their names. The worst adulterations started in the fifties with Kellogg's "Sugar Corn Pops®" and "Sugar Jets®" and moved up through "Cap'n Crunch®" and "Lucky Charms®" to "Apple Jacks®" and "Sugar Frosted Honey Wheats®". What next?
How about "Reese's Puffs®," which are, presumably, some form of cereal made with or flavored to taste like Reeses® Peanut Butter Cups. Years ago, we had candy bars with cereal in them, like Nestle's Crunch®. Now, it's cereal with CANDY in it. Since when have candy manufacturers like Mars been in the cereal business?
Of course, what passes for "cereal" these days really IS wheat/corn/ oat/rice candy. The second ingredient is almost invariably one form of refined sugar or another, and the third frequently is, too. Sometimes, more sugar shows up further down in the ingredient list, and some even have high-fructose corn syrup, as well as incomprehensible chemicals added for stabilization, flavor enhancement, coloring, and preservation (like our old friends BHT--"butylated hydroxytoluene" and BHA (Butylated hydroxyanisole) added to packaging material. (I have those names MEMORIZED. Just in case...)
So the ingredient panel on a box of Reese's Puffs® probably reads something like this: "Enriched wheat flour (wheat, B-complex vitamins, folic acid, etc.), oat flour, corn syrup solids, maltodextrose, sucrose, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (corn, soy, or cottonseed), natural and artificial flavorings, cocoa, peanut butter (made from peanuts, sugar, salt, and preservatives), natural and artificial colors (FD&C red #3, etc.), potassium sorbate, hydrolyzed vegetable protein. BHA and BHT added to packaging to protect flavor. Uh-huh. Like adding these chemicals to the box will keep it from getting on the cereal? If it can PRESERVE the cereal by its presence in the cardboard, why can't it AFFECT the cereal?? Sounds to me like a "No-Pest Strip" for humans). And, isn't there something toxic somewhere in things with "-butyl" and "-toluene" in them?? Just asking...
Let's just follow the cereal from the mill to your cupboard and see when it stops being food and starts to become pure profit for the food giants who produce it...
First, the grain is removed from huge silos where it has been stored for several months and sprayed, powdered, or fumigated with various pesticides and fungicides to kill the bugs, rats, mice, and molds that are indigenous in silos everywhere. (How many bug parts, rat and mouse hairs and feces, insect legs, wings, and eggs, and other critter detritus are allowed per million in U.S. flour and grain products? Ask the FDA; there ARE guidelines. And, how many are acceptable in YOUR food??)
Next, the flour and chemicals, oils and additives are mixed into a slurry or paste. This paste is then extruded through dies or nozzles at high speed and pressure; flaked, puffed, popped, and molded, then quick-baked to dry them, sprayed with more sugar to stiffen them, sprinkled with still MORE sugar to make them crunchy and give them sparkle, then mixed with the candy parts of the cereal and fluffed around, then put into the BHT- and BHA-loaded cardboard boxes. (And date-stamped, to make sure you receive only the FRESHEST poisons.)
Hydrogenated vegetable oils ("cottonseed, corn, or soybean," it will usually say on the label) are a major component of all prepared cereals. Hydrogenating a vegetable oil makes it stiffen up at room temps, and stabilizes it at high temperatures which are used in processing other foods containing hydrogenated oils; but it also makes copious amounts of trans- fats, which are TOXIC beyond belief. They are so poisonous that they shouldn't even be fed to animals (except that they ARE). Trans- fats kill animals. So why are HUMANS eating trans- fats in virtually everything that comes off a store shelf? And, who PUT them there, in the FIRST PLACE?? Just asking here, too...But, back to our processed cereal.
Many prepared foods contain cottonseed oil. Since cotton is not a food crop, it is permissible to spray the bolls at any point with whatever pesticides are necessary to insure a crop. The seeds that are then removed can even be sold as food/oil seed to grain mills for a little added profit on the cotton crop.)
"Natural" flavoring can mean a miniscule amount of almond oil or peach essence, or something similar, or it can mean a tincture of a flavor. Or it can simply mean that the flavoring is made from sugar, salt, and caramel (which is more sugar), or just plain sugar. Well? That's "natural," isn't it?
The "vitamin" supplements are supposed to make this glop "nutritious" for your children. These "vitamins" are usually nothing more than chemicals in more- or less-recognizable atomic configurations that food manufacturers add to their noxious crud to give it a semblance of legitimacy. Many synthetic vitamins are not recognized by the body as nutrients, and are excreted or stored in the fatty tissues.
Mmmm! What's For Breakfast?
So here you are, with that brand new box of cold cereal in your cupboard: You stagger down the stairs in the morning, stiff and aching in the joints and with your mind as clogged and stuffy as your head from all the sugars and toxins in yesterday's meals. You get your latest box of "SugarWhiz Gutbombs" out and fill a bowl, then float them in blue skim milk because you don't want to get any fat or cholesterol in your breakfast, by golly. Then you sprinkle not just one, but three spoons full of granulated White Death on top of this sogging mishmosh and get ready to dive in. You toast a couple of slices of Wonder Bread®, slather them with Shedd's Spread® (the soybean's best friend), add about half an inch of Welch's® Grape Jelly, and pour yourself a tall, refreshing glass of MinuteMaid® (..."from concentrate," it says on the carton...), add a cup of Starbucks® high-test Espresso with milk and three teaspoons of sugar, and dive in.
No wonder you always feel so sleepy by noon. Also why you can't stay awake in the afternoon past 2 pm. And why your boss has been watching you lately--your work has been suffering. Let's see: You had about 1 cup of cereal (about 60 gm. carbs), skim milk (17 gm.), sugar (30 gm.), two slices of bread (40 gm.), margarine (1gm.), jelly (40gm), and 8 oz. orange juice (36gm./4 oz makes an 8-oz. glass worth about 70gm.) More sugar in your coffee (30 gm.). You got about 8 grams of protein. The fat you got was hydrogenated (no cholesterol, etc.), so we'll say very little fat, no cholesterol.
Doesn't this menu look a little lopsided to you?? Yet, this is your usual menu for the morning, nearly 300 grams of sugar in one form or another in ONE MEAL. Some days you vary it by having pancakes or waffles. Depending on their size, they run about 60 gm. each in carbs. For a tall stack, you can count 240 gm. carbs. Add your syrup (1/2 cup) and give yourself another 180 gm. 420 grams of carbohydrates before LUNCH??? Oh. I forgot to add the orange juice and the sugar in your coffee. (Incidentally, if you drink regular coffee, you need to know that caffeine stimulates insulin production just like sugar and starches do. Just thought I'd let you know...) This starts out a day that should have no more than 60 grams of carbohydrate food in it. All day. 24 hours. Have I got your attention yet?
What's for lunch? How about thick-crust pizza at the all-you-can-eat place, regular root beer, and pie for dessert. Supper is a big tuna-noodle casserole thickened with soda crackers, with sweet potatoes and corn bread with honey-butter. For dessert, there's double-chocolate cake.
And, things aren't going too well at work, are they? Let's take a look...
You can't concentrate on any printed page long enough to read more than a line or two before you have to put the page down. And then, to top it off, you don't remember a single word you read. You know the words, you read them, but they have absolutely no relationship to the other words around them. Your short-term memory is suffering lately, too, as you forget last-minute meetings, where you put that report, and the fact that you are having dinner at the boss's house tonight. You find yourself inarticulate and unable to spit out the words when the boss asks you what's holding up that report that was due yesterday.
When you get home in the evening, you are lethargic, irritable, famished, and rather disoriented. You don't even think about sex any more, but you blame that on your wife, because she is such a monster every month, so you are sure it is all her fault. You'd think about a divorce if you could concentrate on it long enough. By bedtime, you are exhausted. You've fallen asleep twice in front of the television since supper, so you go to bed, but know you will be waking up off and on all night. You will lie there in the dark, listening to your heart thunder in your chest, and when you finally doze off, you will awaken an hour or so later, gasping and sweating, with your heart leaping out of your chest from the nightmares. You have an appointment with your doctor, who is going to put you on blood-pressure medication and recommend that you not only not eat any fat or cholesterol, but that you avoid stress (right!) and get some exercise.
WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?
Well, you are just the latest in the endless parade of sugar-poisoned sufferers to come along. You think, "This can't be SUGAR! I hardly eat any at all," thinking of candy and pastries as "sugar." Of course.
That's what the food giants want you to think. They know that you would refuse sugar if it was put in a recognizable form on everything you eat. But they have found a way to get more than 150 pounds of it into you, as well as your wife and kids, every year. They simply hide it in EVERY SINGLE LAST PIECE OF PREPARED FOOD THAT YOU BUY FROM THE SHELF. The idea is to create a market for their products. Sugar is addictive. It makes foods taste so GOOD, you have to have MORE! Built-in product enhancement. People today will eat anything if it is sweetened.
To top it all off, the refined sugar is just the obvious half of it. The other half is hidden in potatoes and starches, bread, pasta, cereal, sauces and gravies, and even in ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard. The human metabolism converts starches to sugar in the stomach. By the time your body recovers from the load of sugar from your last meal, you are sending it another, and another, until you are toxic. Your pancreas is in deep overdrive, secreting insulin by the quart to handle all the sugar that makes its way into your diet every day. First, you become hypoglycemic because your cells shut down their insulin receptors and no glucose gets into your cells. Then you become Type II diabetic when your pancreas fails from overwork. Then you go into heart and kidney failure because of a lack of circulation. (Dialysis, anyone?) Next, you go blind, lose limbs, and die long before you should have. Are you SURE you want THIS in your future??
Have you ever had a day when you woke up late and simply didn't have time to eat breakfast, or to stop for a snack before lunch? Didn't you notice how productive, alert, and clear-thinking you were? Didn't you notice that after that big lunch of fettuccini Alfredo washed down by two large glasses of Coca-Cola at noon that you were back to your rumdum, confused, lethargic and drowsy self? Couldn't make the tie-in, huh?
You were active, productive, and alert because your body was finally able to work without being drowned in a continual bath of insulin from your usual carbohydrate-laden diet. Read elsewhere on this Nutrition page to learn how carbohydrates steal your life and health. And, in the meantime, stay away from those Double-Whammy Gutbombs, and especially stay away from the Reese's Puffs®.