I haven't read the whole thread because this is a train wreck waiting to happen, lol... but here is my take on things. I am like one of the mothers the OP wrote about. We do not eat out, I take food everywhere, and we do not ingest dairy or gluten. i am currently working on removing the last of soy and I strongly avoid corn (since it is all now GMO or GMO compromised, same with soy). Once you begin to view a substance as a toxin, everything changes. As background, I drank soda constantly, ate fast food daily, worked in a pizza place... so I have not always been this 'weird' (according to most of the posts I did read) person. Did anyone see Jamie Oliver's food show where he showed the kids what is in a nugget? Why would a person want to eat that or give it to a child? Also, the meat in the burgers is not 100% meat even. It is skin, bone pieces, entrails, all the bits not sold as use for meat (just like the chicken bits in jamie's experiment). After they chop it all up, they soak it in ammonia. That is that familiar taste and smell I could never put my finger on when I worked in a McD. (also, what goes on behind the scenes at fast food and sit down restaurants, is appalling) Here is a link to the NY Times article that exposed this truth to the world. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/31/us...2&pagewanted=1 Now about why we choose to eat GFCFSFCF.... I do it for mostly (for lack of a better word) moral reasons. Dairy is an easy one for me. They take cows, get them pregnant, then take their babies away, screaming for their mother as their mother screams for them, usually on the day of birth. I think it is a horrible practice and I refuse to be any part of it. Even organic milk is produced this way. Back in the old days, it used to be someone near you had a cow and after it calved, they would milk it after the calf had its fill. Now the calves are taken away immediately, and either left to die or slaughtered for the veal trade. Very few are allowed to live, and the ones that do are to replace the adults that are already in the system. The adults are killed when only through half their life cycle, because production goes down after that. Since we are all attachment parents, looking at cow's milk in this way should be a life changing thought. I do not want to be any part of creating such a horrible aching and unhappiness for any living creature. If you have your own cow and respect it, or get milk from a family that does, and it is grass fed and the milk is raw, letting the baby feed first, then that is completely different. On to the next subject. Why should the animals be fed grass? Because in the US and other countries ALL of the animal feed is GMO. GMO is beginning to debilitate the food cycle already. When we vote with our dollars buy not buying less than healthy foods, we change the system. Chickens fed GMO corn knew it, they would not eat it- http://current.com/news/90598094_afr...ified-corn.htm GMO has been shown to cause organ failure in many studies, a few very recently. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0...95.html?fbwall These GMO crops are in all the candies on the shelves in America and some in other countries also. All the HFCS is GMO, all cereals contain GMO grains, unless they are organic. Hershey's contains GMO ingredients now. When I was a kid, junk food was still just bad because of the sugar, but now it is so much more. Now we get to food colorings. The food colorings which are being used so widespread today are so dangerous, there is a group of medical professionals trying for years to get them banned. There are safer alternatives that can be gotten just as cheaply. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/109838.php People go around saying children act the way they do because they are children... and most of the time it is something they ingested... we are what we eat. I am sure I could write more, but I read the OP and I could have said the same things 5 years ago. Then I learned more. There is a reason not to give GMO foods and dyes and cow's milk (and gluten and soy, but that is another post I am sure). It is not optimal for humans to consume these things. They are toxins (in my and many others opinion and much is documented as such in medical and scientific studies). My children still eat sweets, I have not quit using sugar (yet). I use organic, fair trade cane sugar in my baked goods which I make weekly and freeze some. dd1 still enjoys candy, just not with toxic ingredients ( http://www.naturalcandystore.com ) I don't shop from there personally, but those are the brands I buy at the natural store when I go. I have a way of being blunt, and sure hope this post is taken the way I mean it, to shed light on why those of us that do as the OP said, do what we do, not to pass judgment an anyone else, just to explain why we are zealous. I do it because the food in mainstream America is the same as poison *to me*. I ate it for most of my life too though.
post #121 of 132
4/11/10 at 10:36am
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I'm totally with you. We eat healthier than most Americans, but we also like treats and the occasional junk. 
