Top 7 Genetically Modified Crops

www.huffingtonpost.com - April 26th, 2013

Check your pantry. Do you have any cereals, crackers, cookies, snack bars, soy milk or baby formula in there? How about anything with corn syrup or processed food made from corn on your shelves? If so, you are probably eating food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

GMOs are plant or meat products that have had their DNA altered in a laboratory by genes from other plants, animals, viruses or bacteria.  For example, genetically modified corn contain a pesticide that cannot be washed off. Most GE food grown in the U.S. is "Roundup Ready," meaning it can withstand spraying of Monsanto's Roundup pesticide and live, while weeds around it die. (Well, that's how it works initially; now resistant "superweeds" have increased the amount of pesticides farmers must spray on their GE crops.)

Research links GMOs to allergies, organ toxicity, and other health issues, though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not require safety testing for GMOs.

Market watchers estimate that upwards of 70 percent of processed foods in your local supermarket contain genetically modified ingredients. However, there's no way to be sure of the percentage because no labels are required to inform consumers about the presence of GMOs in food.

The top three GMO crops grown in the U.S. are soy, corn and cotton, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). During the past 12 years, the percentage of acreage planted with GMO crops soared to over 80 percent for each of the top three.

Read More

Think Outside the Box, Especially When it Comes to Cake

www.huffingtonpost.com - September 27th, 2011

Cake mixes, which were first introduced in the 1930s, didn't really catch on until after World War II. And even then, despite stereotypes of the apron-clad '50s housewife juggling taking care of kiddos and cleaning the house with just enough time to whip together instant baking creations, cake mixes actually weren't popular at first.

Simply adding water to a dry mix wasn't enough to make consumers feel proud of their baking handiwork. So, those crafty manufacturers reformulated their mixes so that consumers had to add fresh eggs themselves. Sneaky.

Today, the same appeal exists. Just add a few ingredients and baking a masterpiece of a cake (that's all your own) becomes a piece of cake. Whether a mix or a homemade cake rates better on the tasty-scale, will probably be a debate that goes on, well, forever. But from a health standpoint, there's no debate. Homemade cakes are healthier, even if it is dessert.

Why? Because you're in control. You can choose what ingredients go into your cake. Using whole, fresh and organic flours, sugars and butter, will blow any conventional cake mixes' ingredients out of the oven.

Need proof? Take a look:

Ingredients in Duncan Hines Classic Yellow Cake Mix:

(I'm going to pick on Duncan Hines, although other popular cake mix brands including Betty Crocker and Pillsbury have similar ingredients.)

Sugar, Enriched Bleached Wheat Flour (Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Vegetable Oil Shortening (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Propylene Glycol Mono- and Diesters Of Fats, Mono and Diglycerides), Leavening (Sodium Bicarbonate, Dicalcium Phosphate, Sodium Aluminum Phosphate, Monocalcium Phosphate). Contains 2% Or Less Of: Wheat Starch, Salt, Dextrose, Polyglycerol Esters Of Fatty Acids, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Cellulose Gum, Artificial Flavors, Xanthan Gum, Maltodextrin, Modified Cornstarch, Colored with (Yellow 5 Lake, Red 40 Lake).

Read More

Corn Syrup in Unexpected Foods

www.huffingtonpost.com - September 5th, 2012

High-fructose corn syrup, the cheap, prevalent and much maligned sweetener, is famously in foods like soda, candy and cake. If you look out for it, you may know that it's also in many sauces and dressings. But what about macaroni and cheese? Or frozen pizza?

After the Healthy Living team found corn syrup solids printed high on the ingredients list of some nuts we were snacking on here at the office, we decided to investigate. Just how often did we find corn-based sweeteners in surprising places?

The jury is still out on whether or not high-fructose corn syrup (a subtype of corn syrup) is more, or differently, damaging than any other amount of sugar. One Princeton rat study found that HFCS, as it is known, causes more weight gain than sucrose in the same amount. But criticism of the study design left the finding in doubt.

What we do know is that, given its cheap price it is easy for companies to pack more sugar into a food using HFCS and other corn-based sugars. And thanks to myriad names and formulations, those looking for sugar may gloss right over many of the sweeteners on ingredient lists. Overall, we eat too much sugar -- much of it hidden by different names. Part of that overconsumption has to do with disregard of the recommendations, but some of it can be attributed to the prevalence of sugar in unlikely foods. Here are some surprising, insidious sources of corn-based sugars that we found at our local grocery store. What unlikely place have you found sweeteners?

Read More

Food Processing – Why Do We Need It?

www.blog.fooducate.com - August 20th, 2012

The term “processed food” has gotten a bad rap in the last few years. We are told to buy unprocessed foods because they contain less chemicals, because they are natural and healthy for us. At worst a food product should be minimally processed.

But what exactly is processed food? And is a processed food bad for you by default?

What you need to know:

Food processing is a set of methods and techniques used to transform raw food ingredients into consumable food. Food processing can be as simple as cutting up some vegetables to prepare a salad, or as complex as manufacturing a Twinkie in multiple processing facility.

From the early days of food processing, the primary goal was to extend the life of a foodstuff, by acting as a preservative. This helped balance humans’ need to eat daily with nature’s trend to provide crops only during certain times of the year. To this day, extending shelf life is one of the most important reasons food manufacturers add so many weird sounding ingredients to products.

One of the first forms of food processing, dating back to BC, was the salting of meats as a means of preservation. Sugar was introduced much later as a preservative for fruit, and thus the jam was born. Keeping food cold, either underground, or by using ice, was an effective, if primitive method of preservation until the ascent of ice boxes and recently electrical refrigeration.

In the early 19th century, a new technology was introduced to vacuum bottles of food for French troops. It would lead to the use of tin cans a decade later and thus the canning industry was born.

Pasteurization, another French invention from the mid 19th century, greatly improved the safety of milk and milk products, as well as increasing their shelf life. (We won’t get into the raw milk debate in this post).

Read More