You Are What You Eat

By Larry Teren

The other night I attended an event celebrating a life-cycle event. The food was served buffet style. Anyone could walk up to a long table as often as they desired and grab as many helpings of the food that their stomach would handle. One hot pan had potato puffs and egg rolls side by side. There was another pan with rice and very small cut up vegetables. Another had little chicken strips while another had beef. I’m assuming it was a Chinese cuisine motif. Continue reading “You Are What You Eat”

Fat Free or Low Sodium

By Larry Teren

 

I’m that “sucker born every minute”. You know- the one who looks for food products with the “fat free” label prominently displayed. I convince myself that by eating such-labeled foods, it won’t be long before I begin again to look like an Adonis.

Yet, it can be quite confusing trying to evaluate what is healthy to eat and what is not. There’s salt-free, sodium free, low sodium, low salt and unsalted. Huh? How about sugar free and low sugar? Or my favorite- caffeine-free and decaffeinated. I once did research on this last one. Apparently, decaffeinated means that the thing you are about to put into your mouth once had caffeine in it, but was heroically removed. Caffeine-free means that it never had it and never will (apologies to that soft drink). That’s why the label on pop bottles read ‘caffeine-free’. By nature, pop does not have caffeine, or if at all, just a mere trace. The pop bottlers add it in to give it a kick. Pop that is labeled caffeine-free means that on that production run, they did not add in your favorite addiction.

So, is caffeine a bad thing? Who knows? Some people need an artificial kick to get them going in the morning. I gave up coffee about thirty years ago… zzzzzzz.. Huh, what? Oh yeah, and I don’t have a problem with staying alert. My grandfather, well into his 80’s had a glass of shnapps to start the day off with luster. It was supposedly good for the heart, especially since he already had three heart attacks and wanted a cheaper alternative to a pacemaker.
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Soy milk comes from vegetarian cows?

When I was young, not even ten years old, my digestive system as well as my psyche told me that I did not like milk. It’s not easy for a kid to tell his parents that he doesn’t want any dairy products. The process of eliminating that stuff from my diet was a slow wean. I quickly stopped drinking regular white milk, eating butter, cheese and related ichy edibles. I still drank chocolate milk, chocolate shakes and sodas and ate ice cream cones into my early teens. I even gobbled up milk chocolate candy bars until my thirties. And then I stopped cold turkey.

I remember at age six my father trying to force me to eat a cream cheese sandwich and I practically glued my mouth shut until my mother came home from wherever she was to save me.
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