Growing up, my family sprinkled MSG on food to make it more tasty, drank Koolaid and ate Jello, full of artificial colors, and flavors, having no idea that we were filling our bodies with chemicals. We liked our foods yummy and pretty. Scientists were working to make that happen. We survived because our parents also believed in feeding us lots of real food. We ate good fruits, vegetables and proteins. My Dad, the food shopper, brought home new and unique fruits and vegetables for us to try. When I became a home economist some 40 plus years ago, people in general were not as concerned about what was in food, as long as we were eating a variety of foods from all the major food groups, and as long as they tasted delicious and didn’t make us fat.
But they did make us fat!
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This is a Kraft Foods photo with Jello brand Cherry Gelatin. A very similar dish could easily be made into real food by using plain gelatin and a bright naturally colored fruit juice like pomegranate. Over the last several decades, as more and more people began to have challenges with obesity, the wisdom of the day was that to lose fat, one must remove fat from the diet. The “low fat” diet was so popular, that manufacturers began to strive to remove fat from processed foods, and touted them as “low fat” or “fat free.”
The challenge came that, in order for the food to still taste good, they had to replace the fat with other ingredients, especially sugars, and the one that tasted best and was the cheapest, was high fructose corn sugar. High fructose turned the body into a super fat storing machine.
Since people gained weight, rather than loosing it with the “low fat diet, high sugar diet” the very next solution was a “sugar free” diet.
They replaced some of those offensive sugars with artificial sweeteners. These artificial sweeteners made the body crave other foods, and threatened our health.
Each time the replacement caused more problems than the perceived culprit. Many of those artificial sweeteners actually caused a great deal more harm than good.
In recent years studies have clearly shown that additives in foods are not only hurting our health, but are slowly killing us. It is hard to find any packaged food that is not full of additives that are potentially harmful to the body. What our bodies really need is real food.
Have you ever gone to the grocery store and come home realizing, after unpacking all the groceries and you got ready to fix a meal, that there was nothing to eat?
I’ve often wondered how many folk have had this happen to them. Sometimes I play a game, with myself, while walking through the supermarket. It is to observe how much real food is actually in other people’s carts.. Real foods include, fruit and vegetables, dairy, and meat. The carts I see in the supermarket, often contain very little real food. They are full of processed foods which lack nutrition, and are filled with empty calories, and additives that make the liver work so extremely hard to process them, that everything else must be simply stored as fat. In my little game, I rejoiced to see even a lonely hand of bananas in a cart 🙂 amid the chips, soda, “hamburger helper” and sugary cereals.
One of the reasons I write this blog is that I love making up recipes that are quick and easy to accomplish and free of the “junk” and additives. . My goal is to put out real tasty food, without resorting to purchased mixes or packaged foods with additives. Each recipe presented on Home Again Jiggety Jig has as much “real food” as possible. You will find on this blog some amazing food that is quick and easy to fix, tastes good, is less expensive, AND good for you.
Edited: July 2015
Check Out Some of My Original Recipes On Pinterest
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FROM MSG AND KOOLAID TO REAL FOOD16 thoughts on “FROM MSG AND KOOLAID TO REAL FOOD”
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While we aren’t strict real food eaters, I’ve found my tastes developing to the point that I prefer to avoid things that come in boxes and bags and spend the extra time it takes to make it fresh.
Thanks, Nicole. I know our overall health has improved with the removal of junk from our food, and that food actually has become more luscious tasting, and surprisingly affordable.
My taste buds now prefer real food. I can actually taste chemicals when I eat processed foods. You speak the truth about the problems of low fat diets and the use of artificial sugars. I actually lost 30 pounds simply by cutting out processed foods. I got rid of low fat and switched to full fat and found that I ate less. I was “finally full.”
I absolutely agree with you Marjie, real food is the way to go!
I can’t believe the difference in our health since we eat real food.
I LOVE this post! Nice job summarizing the processed food history in our country and the consequences to our health. Real food nourishes. We need to eat more of it!
Great info! Real food is God’s food for our body’s health.
So true! Thanks for reading this and the comment, my friend!
I always giggle when I realize that I rarely ever enter “into” an aisle at the grocery store. Even then it’s for something clean like oats. This was a great run down on how scientists keep thinking they can create better food than Mother Nature!
It sure makes going through the grocery store easier and quicker to shop the perimeter and get the things that are good for our bodies.
You are so right on how processed foods have become the norm and causing so many health issue for us! I read labels more than ever now. I wish I would have started to be more vigilant years ago!
Me too Sandra. I hate to think of all the chemicals that my family ingested in the name of food. We sure do feel better now that we eat the real thing!
How true! There is a plethora of foods, yet most of them are junk! You have to spend quite some time to the super market to determine what’s good and what’s bad! I always try to feed the family with nutritional products!
So true, Katerina. There is so much to choose from and it looks so lovely too, that searching through all the bags and boxes takes a lot of work in order to find nutritional products.
This is a great araticle Marjie. Like you, we are about eating real foods too. I grew up not concerned with the additives in foods because “how could anything that tastes good be bad for you?” I was saddened to hear that the Dark Act passed the house. It goes against all the progress that has been made to help food transparency in this country.
Thank you Nicky!! Such Sadness about the dark act! It is such an uphill fight right now. Seems like most of us really want to know what is in our food, but the legislators seem to be under Monsanto’s spell!