Just Label It

When is comes to food, I've been a label reader for the last fifteen years.  It started when I decided to make a change for my health and primarily focus on losing weight.  I had always been athletic and active, but was never thin and my weight crept up through high school and college.  So I was learning about eating better and watching fat and calorie intake and reading labels.  When I started buying food for my kids, I would look at ingredients to ensure that I wasn't buying things like bread and apple sauce with high fructose corn syrup.  My thought was that my kids didn't need the extra sugar in the things that they eat every day (the bread) and the things that they like without the extra sugar (since I never add sugar when I make applesauce from scratch). 
Some of my friends have made pretty extreme changes to the foods that their families eat.  One cut out gluten because potential links with their child's ADHD.  Another removed casein and gluten because of the impact on Aspergers.  One went vegan because of possible links between animal proteins and her autoimmune disease, and noticed a positive affect on her husband's Chrone's disease. 
While my family has been lucky enough not to have any health issues that are tied to foods, we are also concerned about all that we have been hearing about high fructose corn syrup and genetically modified foods.  We live in a rich country that has more food than ever, and yet there are more food issues and allergies than ever.  The more Andy and I learned about food processing (thanks to movies like Food Inc and countless websites) the more we are concerned about what we are feeding our families.  Food manufacturing and processing has changed exponentially over the last 20 years and I firmly believe that the methods used are a huge contributor to the rise in obesity and food allergies that we see today.  The food that we ate as kids may have the same name, but it is not made the same way as the food we used to eat. 

Andy and I are still label readers, but now our focus is more on buying food that is natural rather than low fat. If my kids can't pronounce the ingredients then we probably shouldn't be eating them. 

Just Label It