FLOG: The Foodiness Blog

There’s no such thing as Whole Grain Cap’n Crunch. But there is Whole-Grain Lucky Charms, there are Whole Grain Pringles, and Vitamin enhanced water that makes you sexy and toned and brainy. And it seems like there’s Omega-3’s in EVERYTHING now. In places where it’s never, ever, meant to be. Like in cookies. Although there aren’t omega-3 Oreos out there…yet, there are a million different products that have omega-3 added to them now. Added to products where they don’t belong.

The explosion of Foodiness nutrition, taking the place of real nutrition, is dramatically changing the way we eat. The same way we now eat “strawberry” fruit bars instead of strawberries, we’re eating “Omega-3’s” in our cookies instead of getting real Omega 3 in the real foods that supply them naturally, like oily fish.

So why is there omega-3 added to yogurt? Or snack bars, cereal, drinks, bread, crackers, mayonnaise, pizza, orange juice, pasta, milk, eggs, popcorn, and infant formula?

Well, Omega-enriched foods and beverages have entered an explosive growth phase in the global retail market since 2004, after the FDA began allowing nutrition claims on packaging about their benefits. Once those floodgates were opened, the foodiness machine stormed their way in and started Omega3-ing everything.

The problem is that, with foodiness “nutrition” everywhere we turn, we are forgetting what actual nutrition is and where it comes from. And a whole generation of children are being led to believe that Omega 3s come from cookies, not from oily fish.

Which begs the question: why does my orange juice need omega 3? Does my fish need vitamin C? Does my yogurt really need added fiber or my cereal need added calcium? If you’re eating real food, it doesn’t.

How do you get out of this foodiness nutrition labyrinth? Eat real food when you want actual nutrition, and junk food when you don’t care. …and you never have to worry about whether your Oreos have Omega-3s or not.

Does milk do a body good? Maybe if you’re Mongolian.

When Mongolian milk was tested against American conventionally produced milk, the American milk had 33 times more estrogen and 10 times more progesterone in it than the Mongolian milk. The Mongolian cows are only milked for human consumption 5 months a year, following their natural fertility cycles.

Here in the Foodiness-filled US, we’ve GOT MILK coming from those cows 300 days/year, thanks to them being kept preggers and producing all year round. A pregnant cow produces way more hormones than a non-preggers one. And she’s milked all throughout her delicate condition. That means a lotta hormones in the milk, and in you. And, she’s producing way more milk. So it makes financial sense for dairy farmers to keep them knocked up all year round, fat and pregnant, eating their corn and soy-based feed products, standing around, not moving…kind of like some other creatures we know well…

And the more hormonal milk we consume in our hay-lined stalls, the more those hormones are doing bad, bad things to us, like ovarian and breast cancer, feminized testes, and male breasts! What to do? drink ORGANIC, of course!

Got milk? I hope its organic.. Studies have linked consumption of non-organic milk to higher rates of all the down-below ills, ovarian and breast cancer, In particular. Countries with the highest consumption of dairy products have the highest rates of those cancers, plus prostate and testicular cancer too. Those same countries also have the highest rates of osteoporosis. Doesn’t make sense. Why do they keep telling me to eat all that milk to keep my bones strong? But there’s thought now that osteo diseases are caused by too little potassium and no exercise and a foodiness filled diet, not from too little calcium. Which makes perfect sense, since typically asian diets contain no dairy, but a lot of potassium and calcium from other sources.

Got milk? If you don’t want to eat sh*t, why would you ever drink it?

In this week’s show I mentioned the Egg Report Card from Cornucopia.org, then I left for Portland and never posted it. Our flight home was a 3 airport, 10 hour trip, during which I had to eat SOMETHING. So I had 2 egg sandwiches in 2 airports. That’s a lotta Foodiness eggs…but better than some random processed turkey sandwich or super-sugared so-called “yogurt”. Then I promptly fell into an air-travel and and airport-Foodiness-induced brain fog, so I never put up the link. And so,  here it is. http://www.cornucopia.org/2010/09/organic-egg-report-and-scorecard/