Maple Syrup

A while ago I bought my first ever bottle of real maple syrup. It just ran out. So..... I went and bought another bottle. I am officially converted. Real maple syrup is awesome and the stuff I grew up on freaks me out. I can't believe I didn't realize that I was slurping down maple flavored high fructose corn syrup.

Real maple syrup, on the other hand, comes from trees. There are no other ingredients. Pretty cool. I bought 8 oz. for about 5.50. It came in a glass bottle. The same company sells 16 oz. in a cute plastic bottle for around 15.00. Now, I'm not a math genius (actually, I'm pretty good at math, but still...not a genius) but clearly the 8 oz. in glass is a better deal. Tricky evil marketers.

The syrup is grade A. I wondered what that meant, so I looked it up here. Apparently there are no differences in quality of syrup. It is graded accorded to the "robustness" of the maple flavor, as follows:
Grade A light amber: delicate maple flavor
Grade A medium amber: mild maple flavor
Grade A dark ": robust maple flav.
Grade B: strong robust maple flavor
Commercial: very strong maple flavor

Organic maple syrup costs a lot more. Since maple syrup is already pretty pricey for me, I wondered, "what is organic syrup?" Isn't all syrup organic? According to the people at tropical traditions, there IS a difference. There are 3 main points:
Organic maple forests are not sprayed with pesticides.
No formaldehyde is used in tree tapping.
The number of taps per tree is limited, ensuring the health of the forests.

It can take up to 40 years for a tree to get big enough to tap. I wonder if the forests have been organic that whole time....

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.