Reading Labels: What you Don’t Know Does Hurt

Reading Labels

What you Don’t Know Does Hurt

in·gre·di·ent

A part or element of something.

The dictionary also list words like piece and unit.

 Scientifically, we have to eat to live, and biblically we have been given a guide to follow on what to eat.  Reading labels is a great starting point to make BIG changes in your overall health. 

  If someone you know has a PEANUT ALLERGY you research and read all the ingredients because of fatal reactions. If you have Celiacs Disease, avoiding wheat is vital for your body to function.  We all need a little Sherlock Holmes in us.  We all need to know what we are putting in our bodies. Our food has been altered and contaminated on such a high level, humans are experiencing avoidable illness, disease, and stress on a daily basis.

 What you DON’T know does hurt you.  Start today at minimum avoiding the following list of ingredients, therefore, changing your families future. Processed food means that it has been altered from its “raw” state (i.e. packaged foods).  The John Hopkins Center states that there were $33 Billion spent on advertising and marketing for these types of food in 1999.  Today, $40 Billion!  Dr. Mercola lists on his website the 7 Worst Ingredients in Food.

The 7 Avoidable’s:

1.     Artificial Sweetners: Artificial Sweetners are synthetic and much sweeter than sugar alone.  Aspartame (Equal, Nutra Sweet), Acesulfame Potassium (Sunnet and Sweet One), Sucralose(Splenda) and Saccharin(Sweet N’ Low).     

  

a.     These chemicals confuse your body and actually store fat, aspartame attacks your brain cells.  Real sugar although having its own warnings would be better to consume than the artificial counter part.  If food is altered in an unhealthy way then it is NOT life giving, it is life taking.  Remember, it pays to read the labels.  Look on anything that says DIET or Light for example and anything that is SWEET (i.e. soda and candy).  Also, double check products like GUM and Energy Drinks.  You are your own advocate!  There is a long list of diseases connected to the use and over use of artificial sweeteners.  This is real life, you can’t make this stuff up.

2.     Synthetic Trans Fats:  The act of adding hydrogen to oils called hydrogenation, changes the make up of the oil in its original state. 

a.     Trans Fats are easily found in fried foods, doughnuts, cookies, pastries, crackers and many baked goods to name a few.  It’s a chemically processed oil, NOT God made.  These fats make your body go crazy and reek havoc on your immune system and reproductive system.

3.     Artificial Flavors:  This is an obvious NO GO, but we seem to pass go All the time.  It says artificial in the label, artificial means not real. How can your real body know how to decode something FAKE… your right, it can’t.  You can find this in your buttery microwave popcorn, Candy, tons of drinks and SO much more.  Artificial is an umbrella term and does not list ALL the different artificial flavors that are actually in the said product, sometimes as many as 50. WHAT?!??!

This is Nutella Spread, I bought it on a whim for an oatmeal bar and after writing the blog reread and reevaluated a few labels in my own home!  It now lives in the trash.

4.     Monosodium Glutamate (MSG): It is sneaky chemical additive that over excites your brain.  You will find it in numerous processed food products such as frozen foods, snacks, chips, meats, and salad dressing (Look at your bottle of ranch my TX friends).  MSG has many other names it can hide under, be advised.

I am usually the MSG spotting queen BUT really who whould think to look in their salsa.  Full jar down the drain and does anyone notice the advertising at the bottom of the picture, so fresh.

5.     Artificial Colors: Artificial color is listed in a variety of packaged foods.  The more you read about it, the more you will be reminded that color dyes like Red #40, Blue #2 and Yellow #5 really do present chemical reactions in our bodies.  Most studies were on children but I would imagine that if our children are affected, we are too. 

M&M's and many cherished candies we grew up with and serve our kids today are covered in artificial coloring and artificial flavors

6.     High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS):  I think I need a scientific college degree to explain this substance.  It is pretty much like sugar BUT so much worse.  The liver filters it in a similar way it filters alcohol and since the western diet is drenched in this chemical our livers are being over worked and under paid on a daily basis.  Obesity is a major link to HFCS. To put it into perspective a soda has 40 grams of sugar and half of that is fructose, a daily allotment on a generous day is 25 grams of fructose.

Many foods that are sweet contain HFCS because it is a very cheap to make.  There are usually other choices at the grocery store, sometimes sitting right next to what you are used to buying, easy switch. 

7.     Preservatives:  To infinity and beyond…expiration dates to 2019…YIKES!  When reading the ingredients label these are the main but not limited to chemical preservatives you are looking for, Butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydrozyttoluene (BHT) andTertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ).

  Other countries have banned the use of many additives that the US still allows in our foods today.  I started with a list very similar to this one a few years ago and have experienced greater overall health in my family’s lives. I have attached a free 4x6 printable:  The Avoidables-7 Worst Ingredients

Be a great detective in the grocery store this week!

Enjoy,

Kirsi Ingram

John Hopkins

Articles written by Dr. Mercola

Rex Russell, M.D., What the Bible says about Healthy Living

Dictionary
Images from google and Kirsi Ingram Photography

My Story… An Untold Version

My Story… An Untold Version

Now that I am posting on an “actual” blog I feel as though I need to have a story, something about a story makes things seem more official.  My heart is beating a bit faster and my arm-pits begin to sweat as I start to write this post, this always happens when I know I am sharing something the Lord has put on my heart or prompted. I have never liked starting my story at this place in my life because I am admitting to something I like to pretend never took place.   My story has depth from birth to age 14 BUT this story and part of me starts at age 15.  I was bulimic and anorexic in the middle of my 9^th grade year, although since 7^th grade I had accepted Christ I was very confused, I was lost inside.  I say I was anorexic because I would try so hard not to eat and when I did I would make myself throw-up usually in the shower where no one could hear me.  I felt control, it made me feel better.  I would run for miles and miles escaping something, a loneliness I didn’t know how to explain, which is where I first experienced “runners high.”  During this season of my life I moved out of my mom’s house and into my dad’s, stepmom’s and youngest brothers house, leaving behind my sister and other brother.  Too many emotions to filter for a 15 year old, so the disease spiraled further, the skinnier I got the better I felt and if anyone were to address it, I would easily dismiss it because no one would push.   I also, looked on the outside happy and put together, which was not the case.  I cried myself to sleep often, feeling so alone.  I did have family around but I had isolated myself and mostly pretended it wasn’t a problem and that I was okay so why would I need them and what would I be confessing.  I didn’t know what really needed to be fixed; how do you fix something that you feel is not broken.  The summer was filled with travel because my stepmom was a flight attendant and it made it easy to continue the crazy cycle because we were constantly on the move. 

            As 10^th grade approached and things were more consistent it got harder and more tricky to hide what I was doing to myself; when I felt trapped and unable to throw-up I would take diuretics.  The sensation I felt through this time was very real, as if I were accomplishing something important in me and for me.  Well, the only accomplishment I got was a super skinny body, a throat that was always sore, thinning hair and eye lashes and a heart that felt heavier than my own body weight for my first day of High School.  Still the effects were not enough for a bunch of new kids or teacher’s notice.  Needless to say I “fit” the part, I was skinny, had very long blonde hair kissed from the sun of the many beaches I visited that summer and dressed in new clothes all the time.  The Lord is good though  because that year at a new school he put me smack dab in the middle of bunch of girls that new Jesus or at least came from homes where rules were followed and grades were of the utmost importance.  Although home life was always unsettled those high school years and the opportunity to hangout often with these ladies was lacking, they came from good homes and made wise decisions.  I was lucky to not be swayed further into my dark world.  Pieces and parts of them started to heal my heart.  The last straw was when my step-mom caught me in the bathroom making myself throw-up.  An awakening moment for someone to see me in that place, but so thankful because that day I began to change on the inside.

            Unfortunately, it still took years to develop a healthy relationship with food.  It was however the beginning of a passion and at times an obsession I have with food.  From the time my heart changed I weighed in at about 105lbs, made my way up to 140lbs with bad acne and leveled out around 130ishlbs by graduation.  Here is the place where I saw how stress can completely effect how you eat and how your body can not digest the food properly when you have too much emotional things attached to it.  Heading out of state for college and finding a health nut as a best friend was what the doctor ordered and God ordained.  Although our research was lacking the understanding of quality of foods; my college roommate and I would grocery shop together and make home cooked meals, rarely did we eat out.  I did not experience the freshmen 15, my acne started to get better as time went on that first semester, and my body began to find a balance.  I joined Crew that year and was able to feel that “runners high” feeling once again and really started a relationship with working out and the health benefits mentally and physically that came with it.  I was healing from the inside out.  The roomie and I giggle often as she is starting a new career in nutrition at our “well” balanced meals in college.  It was a starting point and a reminder we all start somewhere.  As all good things come to an end so did college; following my 2003 graduation I filled a backpack and boarded a plane alone to meet some family friends in Germany.  “The Girls” we called them, three of them, all beautiful and all so different in my eyes.  We grew up neighbors at our summer lake houses.  We literally watched each other grow and change year after year.  The one thing that was consistent was that they were vegetarians and they used natural methods for healing and seemed to always be so healthy.  I was curious and I was hooked. 

Needless to say, I continued my backpacking trip alone in Europe and proclaimed I was a vegetarian for the remainder of the trip.  Those mozzarella and tomato sandwiches never got old! As I got home, it was hard to be consistent until I started reading literature on vegetarianism.  My mom and I both decided one weekend while at the lake we would become full blown vegetarians. As stated earlier, I was still on a journey with food, I continued to be a vegetarian for 5 years and in between that obsessed at times in veganism and raw food.  In each category of life I walked away with something.  In Alicia Silverstone’s  book, The Kind Diet I really learned the concept of thinking it out before you eat it.  She writes about the benefits of really giving thought to how that particular food will make you feel after you eat it and is it really worth it.  After a few years, time went on during all of this experimenting, and throughout my first pregnancy.  All the while, in my last year of teaching I was sick all the time, not enough to have to stay home from school but enough not to feel well often.  It was at this time, looking back, you can once again see how stress plays a HUGE toll on your body.  I had the weirdest ailments, like pin needles at the ends of my fingers, horrible sinus infections, a spot on the top of my head that itched all the time, constant sore throats.   I experienced all of this, all the way to Minnesota (husband’s job-yes I got married in between all that too) and back to Texas with our first child.  At this point I am a sickly human being but don’t realize it because the symptoms were not as noticeable since the stress level had gone down a few notches, only a few! During this time I continued researching veganism, and realized that I feel better when I lay off the dairy, my body functions better.  I eat it now but I know my body better and also know when its time to take a break.  As for Raw food(organic)…eat more of it I am reminded, it is made from the Earth, unchanged and exactly how God created it.  I learned about juicing and the benefits it has for our bodies and our children’s bodies.

At this point in my life I am gaining knowledge about food year after year, but not seeking God’s direction in it all.  We had trouble getting pregnant with baby number two and this was the beginning of really seeking out all things natural and healing.  I was still a vegetarian at this point(not eating a well balanced protein filled plate), which is an important factor to why the Naturopathic Doctor found Candida throughout my entire body.  Candida is an over growth of sugar inside you, it’s a beast.  She helped me cure it naturally through herbs and diet. The ailments listed above were red flags for years trying to get my attention.  It took 6 months to cleanse my body “just enough” to get pregnant.  Please note the just enough to get pregnant part, because I wasn’t completely strong and healed, physically, mentally or spiritually.  My body needed another 6 months to heal and strengthen.  I was too focused on getting pregnant that moment that I lost site of health and Jesus.  This pregnancy was the hardest of the 3, I was weak, I was not whole.  Number 2, has since day one had skin ailments and I know there is a connection, I feel it in my gut as a mother. She screamed for 8 months, her legs would flare up and look like fiery patches.  Now she is 3 and a half and we are still battling skin stuff.  Baby Number two also is the road map to my changing diet and seeking alternative methods to heal and growing closer to Christ.

I learned to hit the floor and pray, to call on the Holy Spirit, I learned that going to the health food store would give me better options for fighting ailments my family faced, and I also learned that we had to add meat to our diet.  We were trying so many different things to clear her skin, NAET, home remedies, diets, etc that I came across Sally Fallon’s book, Nourishing Traditions from reading Lindsay Bentley’s Blog (http://lindsayleighbentley.com) and Yankee Homestead Blog(http://www.yankeehomestead.com).  Since reading this book, implementing bone broths into our lives, organic meats, fermented foods and yes essential oils too our lives are forever changed.  I am thankful for the journey that has led me to this place.  In each birth the Lord teaches you something and with baby number 3 he has taught me peace and more contentment.  I am reminded often my plate “in Life” does not need to be full right now.  I am reminded to seek him more and that my purpose is not my own.

He has given me the gift of encouragement and I need not to sit on it anymore.

 “6 We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; 7 if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; 8 if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead,[b] do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.” Romans 12: 6-8

I have felt the push to start writing again and not just about the benefits of essential oils.  There is much healing needed in people’s lives today through real food,

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” - Hippocrates

through exercise, “Those who think they have no time for exercise, will sooner or later have to find time for illness.” Edward Stanley and most importantly a relationship with the Lord in whom will give you wisdom and show you the way and the path He has set for YOU, we have all been given a different path and HUGE purpose and he needs us to be healthy to fulfill His purpose to the fullest.  “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us…” Hebrews 12:1

            The passion I have for food started in a very lonely place and has developed into something much deeper, something very real. I am fascinated in the Science of food once it enters your body, it has to do something and be used somewhere.  And I am constantly reminded our bodies are not our own, scripture gives us a perfect road map on how to eat and stay healthy. My hope is to help and encourage others in this confusing and sometimes overwhelming subject of health.  I make no promises of becoming Miss Blogger 2015, but do promise to post on topics that weigh heavy on my heart.

Enjoy,

Kirsi Ingram

We Love Oatmeal...

I scream you scream we all scream for OATMEAL!

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