The Consequences of Convenience Foods
“Based on what I am seeing via atomic spectroscopy analysis of all the dietary substances people are consuming on a daily basis, I must now announce that the battle for humanity is nearly lost. The food supply appears to be intentionally designed to end human life rather than nourish it.” - Mike Adams
One of my greatest joys of being a mom is often my most challenging task; "what do I make for my family to eat?"
Most of us desire health and we get the basics...don't feed your kids skittles three meals a day. But after that, it can be hard to know how to navigate grocery stores and what foods are "really" healthy options for our families to eat.
A Mom's Dilemma: Hungry Mouths with Demanding Tastes, Limited Time & Money
Convenience Foods
“What is right is often forgotten by what is convenient.”
Most days moms are looking for quick solutions, so drive-throughs, restaurants, pizza delivery, microwavable box foods are often the most attractive solutions, and usually requested by everyone in the family. The problem with quick solutions is that convenience almost always comes with a consequence.
Here are the 3 Main Traps that Attract Us to Convenience Foods:
- Longer shelf life
- Often more economical
- Offer a consistent taste & texture making them more stimulating and “pleasurable.”
Longer Shelf Life
The birth of the packaged food industry started around WWI. The intention was never for people to eat this food every day, but it was created to send overseas to men in the war so that they could have food without concerns of spoilage. Once the food industry caught on to this, they decided to use these same methods of food processing in the general markets to help reduce profit losses that occurred due to food spoilage. This sounds great in theory, but what is often not truly understood is the process in which these foods are made. To increase the shelf-life of food, they must remove all viable nutrients, stripping it of all active nutritional value, dehydrate any water content and often fill it with preservatives to make the food "shelf stable" so it can keep in boxes and bags for an extended period of time. This can be valuable in times of war and famine but was never intended for sustenance. Soon after this began, the FDA realized the detriment of the consumption of this kind of food and started to require companies to fortify foods with whatever nutrients that were originally removed in the processing. Problem solved, right? WRONG! Fortification means synthetic vitamins.
The Dangers of Synthetic Vitamins
When fortified (synthetic) vitamins are used to replace the natural ones, the body has difficulty recognizing and using them and therefore they become a burden to the body instead of a help. Fortified foods are missing many trace minerals and enzymes that would normally be present in a whole food source that would help the body utilize the vitamins. Without all of the viable nutrients present the body often has to use its own resources of enzymes, vitamins and minerals to process the fortified food. This only further complicates the mineral and health deficiencies our society is plagued with today. Mineral deficiencies cause low energy, poor bone health, hormone imbalance, sleep problems, etc. The other danger is that synthetic vitamins are often delivered in higher amounts than whole food natural forms, and if the synthetic vitamin is fat soluble, then they become toxic to the body by accumulating in fatty tissues and vital organs instead of being excreted (example: synthetic vitamin A).
Cheap Boxed Foods
You get what you pay for is very true when it come to food. Most cheap boxed foods are made with cheap ingredients that are often by-products of industry. This means that they are not whole foods, but chemically derived isolated parts of foods that act as fillers in almost every box or bag of packaged "food".
Example: Soy protein is also known as textured vegetable protein which is a by-product of the soybean oil industry. Both by-products, the oil and protein become non-foods. Creating isolates require heavy processing using solvents, chemicals, deodorizers, and high pressures that demolish what was once a whole food. Enzymes and nutrients are destroyed, proteins are denatured, and this ultimately makes the end result hardly recognizable to the body, bringing with it the chemical residues from the process.
Consistency of Taste & Texture
How do companies create "foods" that have the same exact taste and texture every time?
The high degree of processing requires food additives, colorings, chemical flavors, and synthetic emulsifiers to make the "food" more palatable, visually appealing and marketable. The danger is that many of these food additives are toxic, they create a burden on the body, and include neurotoxins that are over-stimulating to the nervous system and extremely addictive. These things were never designed to go into the human body and our grocery store aisles are full of them.
Examples: MSG (autolyzed yeast), artificial sweeteners (aspartame), high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils, sodium nitrates (meats), sulfur dioxides (dried fruit), BHA/BHT, potassium bromate, Red/Yellow/Blue food colorings...and the list goes on.
Unfortunately, the US has poor labeling laws so you may not find these ingredients on the labels but this doesn't mean that they don't exist. For example, potassium bromate is in many flours across the US (illegal in Europe and China), but usually, the flour is simply listed as the ingredient and we are left to guess whether or not the flour itself contains potassium bromate.
Can You Guess What "Food" Contains These Ingredients?
MADE WITH SMILES AND UNBLEACHED ENRICHED WHEAT FLOUR (FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMINE MONONITRATE [VITAMIN B1], RIBOFLAVIN [VITAMIN B2], FOLIC ACID), CHEDDAR CHEESE ([CULTURED MILK, SALT, ENZYMES], ANNATTO), VEGETABLE OILS (CANOLA, SUNFLOWER AND/OR SOYBEAN), CONTAINS 2 PERCENT OR LESS OF: SALT, YEAST, SUGAR, AUTOLYZED YEAST (MSG), LEAVENING (BAKING SODA, MONOCALCIUM PHOSPHATE, AMMONIUM BICARBONATE), PAPRIKA, SPICES (CONTAINS CELERY) AND DEHYDRATED ONIONS.
It's the happy snack food that almost every kid eats, GOLDFISH! Notice the list of synthetic vitamins, MSG, and rancid vegetable oil (most likely genetically modified), all delivered to you with "smiles".
A Whole Food Diet
“The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.” – Ann Wigmore
We believe God created us to eat whole living foods that He created, not man. God put man into a garden and said Genesis 1:29, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food." and in Leviticus 11 He talks about what meats are healthy for our bodies to eat (clean and unclean). We know it isn't easy to navigate the processing of our food supply in our world today, but it's critical for our health and the health of future generations. What we eat every day determines the fuel and building blocks the body uses to perform everyday functions such as thinking, sleeping, moving, fighting infection, inflammation, building new cells and especially building a new life.
We have developed a diet program with meal plans, recipes, and tips to help you go from a diet of convenient processed boxed foods to natural whole foods. The Eating by Design 29-Day Challenge outlines steps to help you ease into a whole foods diet that is free of processed foods, grains, dairy, and sugar.