This week, she wrote a great article about the hidden dangers in packaged food that lives out its days on the shelf:
- Bisphenol-A (BPA): not just found in water bottles, but also in canned foods, baby bottles, juice boxes, and plastic food packaging. This chemical is an endocrine disrupter that mimics human hormones and has been known to cause genital defects, early onset puberty, obesity, breast and reproductive cancers, and behavioral problems. Um, yeah, that mason jar's lookin' pretty sexy right about now.
- Acrylimide: found in PB, deep fried foods, cookies, bread, popcorn, soup mixes (including chili), and bread. This industrial chemical has been found to cause nerve disorders, DNA mutations, and female reproductive cancer. Oh, and Alzheimer's. Sweet. Not.
- Monosodium Glutamate (MSG): I'm sure everyone and their sister equates MSG with the local Chinese takeout dive, but it's also heavily added to things like potato chips, crackers, ALL types of fast food (even pizza), soups, and hydrolyzed vegetable protein. Exocytoxin might not sound like such a bad thing, [think "exiting"!?] but when it comes to your nerves, it most definitely is [think "toxin"], triggering cancer growth and metastasis throughout the body.
- High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS):The recent slew of commercials hinting that your body recognizes corn syrup the same as any other sugar are entirely misleading. Perhaps natural and plain corn sugar, (aka- glucose) but HFCS is anything but natural or plain, and note, it is fructose, not glucose. Wait, what? That's right, the carbohydrate naturally found in corn is glucose; it's what makes sweet corn, well, sweet. Chemists take this carbohydrate and bombard it with enzymes that structurally convert it to fructose, which is sweeter. Then they bombard it JUST a little more to make it "high". This tricks our brains to not only prefer it, but to become addicted to it; altering our preference toward ultra-sweet foods instead of natural ones. So, you crave it. And sometimes you give into that craving, and the more you do, the more you crave it, and so long as this cycle continues, you are stressing your liver, your pancreas, and your belt buckle. So instead of frolicking in the fields with your boyfriend, you'll be more likely to veg out on the couch in your fat day pants, alone.
here is a list of foods that DON'T: http://highfructosehigh.com/no-hfcs/
