What's In Our Food?

I'd like to begin tonight by sharing a recipe on Tyler Florence's website:


Broccoli, Parmesan and Lemon

Preheat the oven to 400˚F.
Trim about 1 inch off the ends of the broccoli stalks and peel the stalks with a vegetable peeler. Then cut the broccoli lengthwise into spears. Arrange the broccoli on a non-stick cookie sheet, drizzle with some olive oil and season with a little bit of salt and a generous amount of freshly ground black pepper. Toss to coat evenly. Transfer to the oven and roast for 10 minutes.
Remove the broccoli from the oven and sprinkle the cheese evenly over the top and bake until the cheese melt and forms a crisp shell over the broccoli, about 10 minutes. Lift the broccoli out onto a platter with a spatula and hit it with a squeeze of fresh lemon.


Mmm, I'm having such a taste for broccoli. Gosh, I thought I would never hear myself say that! My mother makes the best broccoli and I'm sure Tyler Florence's comes in second to hers. Tyler roasts his broccoli rather than boils or steams it because the flavor and vitamins are lost in the water.

For dinner tonight we had light hot dogs on whole grain buns, topped with reduced fat cheese, green onions (also known as scallions and as spring onions), yellow mustard and Hormel fat free turkey chili with beans. A light but filling meal that we crafted in our early Weight Watchers days. We are following the Weight Watchers Points plan even though I am concentrating on Mediterranean foods and cooking and watching my sugar intake. (Weight Watchers Points are directly related to calories, total fat and grams of fibre. You can learn more about this at www.WeightWatchers.com. )

Which leads me to a subject we all need to talk about - artificial sweeteners. I am horrified by the articles I am reading about most artificial sweeteners but especially Aspartame. Aaron says before I ban it from our home forever I need to do a little more research and then inform all of you too. So please note that I will be delving into whatever I can find on Aspartame and other others to make an educated decision. After looking in all of our cabinets and refrigerator tonight I'm finding it in many things including our fat free yogurt, our diet pop (obviously) and even our diet tonic water. In my preliminary reading on this subject last evening, I found that agave nectar as a natural sweetener has been discovered to actually be beneficial and stevia is from a plant and is regarded positively. In thinking about this I realized that we've always had sugar as a sweetener until our society advanced to the point where we could determine that it was causing us problems. So we came up with an alternative, saccharin, and that was found to have caused cancer in some lab mice. So we kept looking and developed some others and now that we've advanced a little further, we're finding that our current artificial sweeteners are causing us more problems than sugar was. We need to keep searching and researching and testing so that we can all have some healthy alternatives. I pray the drug companies and the FDA seriously consider what they are doing to the health of the population in order to make their millions. People need to eat, we'll buy the food, make it healthy!!!

In the meantime, I welcome you all to take a look at some articles on the controversy of Aspartame and other artificial sweeteners. See what you come up with, let me know and I'll make a reference to the information in some of my upcoming posts.

Food For Thought:

Haven't you often wondered why Americans are overweight and it's (unfortunately) a socially acceptable norm? When I see movies that were made prior to 1980 most people were in shape and healthy. What were we eating in the 1970's? Many people that I've asked this of have answered along the lines of "Oh, we never had fast food restaurants that we visited or all these restaurants in general. We ate a home cooked meal every night and only went out on special occasions." That's true for the most part. But how have our grocery stores changed over the past 30 years? Why are many people paying thousands of dollars annually to be on a diet? I want to know what is in our food that is making us fat? Why is diabetes taking over so many of our bodies? People today are consuming more and more diet sodas, the diet version of many different packaged foods, low fat or fat free foods, and SUGAR SUBSTITUTES! If many people are constantly "on a diet," then why are all of these people so fat? Myself included.

I want to know, don't you?

(9:50pm)