Around our house, just about everything edible is eaten. We love meat and cheese, fresh bread, fresh vegetables, and salads. We love desert, including vanilla Ice cream with chocolate sauce. We don’t diet, but just try to eat sensibly – and for us that means there are a few things we try to avoid.
What we don’t eat (when possible)
There are only a couple things that we try very hard to avoid. It’s a pretty simple list: diet sweeteners, high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated oils. This is not always easy, and we’re not perfectly complete in our avoidance of these ingredients. For one thing, it’s nearly impossible to avoid them. But we try.
High Fructose Corn Syrup
This stuff is in just about everything. It’s almost impossible to avoid completely. It’s even in most of the bread, including “healthy” brands. But we do try. This means we buy Bays English Muffins, not Thomas’s. When we get a coke to go with our burrito, we pay a little extra for the imported mexican Coca-Cola with real cane sugar.
Hydrogenated Oils
This stuff was sold to our parents and grandparents as a healthy alternative to butter and lard. it’s easier to avoid this than the high fructose corn syrup, but you do have to read ingredients to be sure because this, too, turns up in the oddest places.
Diet Sweeteners
We joke that if it tastes like food, but has 0 calories, it ain’t. I have no idea whether these sweeteners have any serious risks, but why bother? If you’re worried about calories, stop drinking the soda! Of course, calorie-counting is a whole other subject…
I’ll write more about these additives in future posts. Often it’ll just creep in as we’re talking about recipes o ingredients, but I’ve also got a Philosophy category just for those what we eat and why topics.
In the mean time, is there something else you avoid?