A Healthier Life

How many times have you heard that this causes cancer and that causes cancer?  It seems like every time we turn around there is something new in the news that causes cancer and we are subjected to many of these things on a daily basis.  It's always disturbed me and I have felt like I do my best in food choices for our family (lots of fresh and not processed foods) and also products our family is exposed to daily (toothpaste, soap, cleaning products, etc.), but it's not enough.  Lately I've been feeling the need to dig deeper and make some lifestyle changes for our family, primarily in diet.  Today we are going to the funeral of a 43 year old woman, the daughter of a sweet couple in our church, whose life ended due to cancer.  Cancer is such an ugly disease and not something that I want to experience or have anyone in my family experience.

So for starters, we are trying to cut out all foods which contain GMOs (genetically modified organisms).   That's huge because among other things, 88% of the US crop of corn, 94% of the US crop of soy, and 95% of sugar beets are genetically modified.  Do you know how hard it is to find products which do not contain soy (in some form or another) or corn (canola)?  Also, I read that most of our sugar is refined from sugar beets not sugar cane which means that most products with sugar in them contain genetically modified sugar.  How disturbing!

So that has lead me to reading labels much more carefully and choosing more organic options.  Also, I started making our own bread (and have a breadmaker on order, yay!) to reduce the amount of preservatives we eat.  I found a recipe that doesn't even use sugar, it uses honey.  I see a lot more homemade food in our future.  I printed out some recipes for granola bars, fruit pastries (like pop tarts but with real fruit), gelatin fruit snacks, and even homemade chocolate chunks.  I'm looking forward to trying them soon!

I have also been researching natural ways to increase my platelet count since that was such an issue during my last pregnancy and delivery and my count has already started to decline with this pregnancy.  I found that kale is very rich in vitamin K and can be beneficial for raising platelet levels.  They call it a "super-food". So I had kale for the first time last week in a salad and it wasn't too bad.  It's especially good topped with chicken Wiener Schnitzel. :-)  However, if you're trying it for the first time, I suggest mixing it with some iceberg lettuce first so you have some mild taste in there too.  It was a bit strong by itself.

While I won't deny myself some of the wonderful foods in this world, (like the pizza I had delivered last night), I do want to take steps to get rid of most of the processed foods with all their preservatives and GMOs.  I've heard that if you can't pronounce the ingredients on the label, it's probably not good for you.  That is so true.  Today I typed a couple of ingredients that I couldn't pronounce into Google and sure enough, some of the links that came up showed that those ingredients cause cancer.  So prepare yourselves for more pictures of homemade goodness from our household.  And if it turns out good, I'll share the recipe too.