Sunday, February 8, 2009

Putting the contents of my fridge where my mouth is.

So Julie's posts and my own reaction to it made me take a good hard look at what we're feeding M (and ourselves). This weekend I started to go through my fridge and remove things that had HFCS, transfats, or higher cholesterol (recently updated physicals resulted in that being a slight concern for someone in the house).

I admit that while I may have written about making my own meatballs, I haven't been very good about sticking to my guns on the whole food thing lately. We are eating out less, but some of that eating out has been replaced by convenience foods. Especially since I'm not home for dinner much these days because of work.

The first thing I found that had to go was barbecue sauce. The first ingredient in nearly every brand (including local brand Famous Dave's) is HFCS. That part sort of shocked me. Since M is your average toddler, we've used "sauce" to help encourage her to eat her meat more than once (less of an issue with veggies). "Sauce" includes dressing, mustard, the sauce from some other food, and barbecue sauce. Yeah, not any more. I couldn't find anything acceptable at the store. So I went looking a ketchup. A tangy tomato option as well. You'll be happy to know that this Regan "vegetable" is full of the stuff too. The exception being Heinz organic and a couple of other organic/natural brands. I got the organic stuff for now.

Also on the list (and now in the garbage), light salad dressing. I bought it for a recipe and haven't used it since, so I have no problem tossing it. Not so easy to get rid of, the yogurt that A takes to work every day. I'm leaving that one up to him to deal with, since just getting him to find an option for breakfast was hard enough. M doesn't get near the stuff, she gets the low sugar kids stuff when she does have yogurt. However, I know that a number of other "kids" yogurts are well known for their content of lots of bad things, including HFCS.

So, that is my start. I should have done this ages ago. It will help with my quest to lose weight and hopefully about Type 2 diabetes. Now I just need to start on M's school....

3 comments:

Marketing Mama said...

I'm impressed! I'm a bit inspired... although I haven't read the angry blogger posts you mentioned the other day.

Anonymous said...

The biggest one for me was bread- even "good" whole grain bread that had HFCS. Why and mess it up? When you make bread you don't use sugar - Why would it need HFCS? Grrr!

Amelia Sprout said...

I am afraid of tackling bread, but I suspect that will be next on my list. The good news (I guess) is that M doesn't go for bread as much as she does veggies, and if we're having any kind of battle about food, bread is the first thing to be given up.