Eat Food Update

This is officially day 7 (last day!) of the Eat Food Challenge. I think that overall, it was not a great success. I had 3 main problems:
1. I ate out a lot this week and am not sure how the food was made. I tried to choose the most "real" option, but I can't be sure.
2. Kid food -- total disaster. It turns out that I have very little control over what my kids eat when they are out of the house.
3. Camping -- we went camping this weekend and I packed very quickly on Friday. I had to pack things that would not take too long to cook on our camp stove and that the kids would eat. I also needed lots of snacks for hikes. I brought plenty of fruit, dried fruit, nuts, stuff for sandwiches... no problem so far. I made hot chocolate mix instead of buying it. BUT... I also got hot dogs, marshmallows, peanut butter and jelly crackers and cheerio snack mix. I was in a big hurry at the store. The hot dogs and marshmallows -- I know they're bad. No excuse there. I've actually tried the "natural" marshmallows sold at Whole Foods and they just seem totally weird tasting to me, not to mention exorbitantly expensive.

PB&J crackers -- all I really wanted was a quick trail snack. My kids love these, but they are bad bad bad. They are wrapped in cellophane, and then all the packages are wrapped again. They are full of weird ingredients, and I noticed that they're not actually PB&J but PB&J "flavored". That's strange. How hard can it be to put PB & J in a cracker? Apparently too hard. Here's the worst: Each serving (6 cracker sandwiches) has 3.5 grams of trans fat. I had no idea. That's the last time I'm buying those crackers.

Cheerio Snack Mix -- in my speed I thought this would be a pretty healthy choice. It has cheerios, chex, pretzels, crackers, etc. I did not get the cheddar flavor b/c I thought it would be too overpowering. THEN I looked at the ingredients. There were many strange ingredients that grandma would not have recognized. And they were very salty. Not very good trail food, considering that we were running low on water by the end of our hike.

So, overall, I am a failure at eating real food. I guess. I tried, but maybe I could have tried harder. What kind of nut buys hot dogs in the middle of an Eat Food Challenge? But just constantly thinking about it made me learn some new things:

1. To eat real food, some planning is necessary.
2. It is better to just make simple snacks rather than buy them. It saves packaging, time, and a lot of weird ingredients. Example:

• don't buy stupid PB&J crackers -- make crackers with PB&J (this is really obvious, especially since I brought PB&J with me on the camping trip!)
• don't buy snack mix -- make "Ensalada de Cereal" (Cereal Salad) or GORP. My kids like Cereal Salad (that's what we call it) -- we just mix up all the last bits of different cereals. Instead of the cheerio snack mix, I could have mixed up some cheerios, some dried fruit, some pretzels, whatever.
  

3. "Healthy" grocery stores can have surprising ingredient lists. Every dessert I looked at in Central Market (a la-di-da version of our regular HEB) had partially hydrogenated oil in the ingredients. Gross.

4. I researched High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) to see what was so bad about it. It sounds pretty bad and has been linked to obesity. The body processes fructose differently than glucose, and it can lead to obesity and insulin resistance (according to some peer-reviewed studies, but not all). I also learned that High Fructose just means that it is higher than regular corn syrup -- not necessarily that it's super high. It's actually only 5% higher than regular table sugar. Hmmm.... One theory about the link to obesity is that HFCS is so cheap that it has led to increased portion sizes.

Also, there is such a thing as organic HFCS. AND, that companies are labeling products with HFCS as "natural" because it's made from corn. Even thought it's been chemically altered. That doesn't sound very natural to me. So watch the labels! Organic does not necessarily mean HFCS-free.

I'll continue watching the info about HFCS, because I'm curious to see just how bad it really is. In the meantime, I try to avoid it as much as possible, which can be really difficult because it seems to be in everything. For example, do you know what the second ingredient in my daughter's chocolate milk at school is? That's right...HFCS.