Where are you in your journey to eat REAL FOOD? It can be overwhelming to make changes in what you eat, and that’s especially true on holidays like Thanksgiving when you’re entertaining friends and family. So if you’re new to eating less processed foods, what are some simple ways to improve your Thanksgiving meal? Here’s my list of six easy steps you can take to walk away from processed food and towards REAL FOOD that’s better for you and our planet:

1. Let’s talk turkey:  The turkey is the centerpiece of most Thanksgiving meals, yet it’s also very symbolic of what’s wrong with the industrialized food world. Raised inhumanely in confinement on factory farms, the modern day turkey dines on GMO corn, supplements, and antibiotics vs. the grasses, grubs, and insects they thrive on in the wild. To make matters worse, turkeys like your classic Butterball are injected with saline solutions, sodium phosphates, and other “natural flavorings” (if you’ve read my series called “All Natural … Really?”, you’ll know better than to feel good about these natural flavorings). In fact, today’s industrialized turkeys are so bastardized that they can’t even reproduce. Is something wrong with this picture? Yes!  This year, find a local farmer and look for a heritage, organic, or sustainable turkey. To learn more about  choosing the right turkey for you, check out this article, “Organic, Heritage, Sustainable—When Talking Turkey, Does It Matter?” And please remember—be prepared to change how you cook your turkey—heritage birds are smaller, leaner, and just different (thank goodness) from the turkey you used to get. So here are some heritage turkey cooking tips from LocalHarvest as well as a Rosemary Maple Butter Turkey recipe.

2. Can the cans: Emptying your recycling bin after Thanksgiving often sounds like the bride and groom’s car driving off after their wedding. Yes, lots of canned food goes into most Thanksgiving meals. But recent research conducted by the Breast Cancer Fund found that nearly half of the Thanksgiving canned staples tested had comparable BPA levels as those in past studies where BPA levels have been “linked to adverse health effects.” [Grist: Your Canned Thanksgiving staples are full of BPA] So kick the cans to the curb. Believe it or not, substituting fresh, unprocessed ingredients isn’t that hard.

Cranberry Relish: I ditched the jellied stuff in a can years ago, but I’m looking forward to trying something new. I just found this recipe on Homemade Mommy for a fermented spicy cranberry relish that sounds wonderful.

Sweet Potatoes: Honestly, you don’t need the cans nor the marshmallows to make delicious sweet potato side dish. I made this Balsamic-Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Butternut Squash recipe a couple years ago, and I’m definitely making it again.

Pumpkin Pie: Here’s a link for die-hard pumpkin pie fans on how to make your own pumpkin puree. I use organic pumpkins from my CSA to make the puree. And if you’re looking for a great, Pumpkin Pie recipe, check this one out from Carrie Vitt at Deliciously Organic.

3. Mashed Potatoes: With claims that they “taste as good as homemade,” boxed potatoes have been a modern-day timesaver. But is this processed food tradeoff really worth it? Filled with GMO ingredients like maltodextrin, soybean oils, BHT, and other ingredients that read more like a lab experiment, I’ll stick with my homemade mashed potatoes.

If you’re ready to give homemade a try and don’t have a recipe, here’s a simple one that will make your entire family happy: Boil water and add 1/2 teaspoon of salt and if you like garlic (1-2 cloves, minced). Add 3 lbs. of gold, organic potatoes, quartered (I prefer unpeeled, but my son still like peeled better). Cook about 15-20 minutes until tender. Drain, cool for 5-10 minutes, then rice the potatoes into a large saucepan and add 10 T. organic half and half, 4 T. organic butter and mix over low heat. Add  more milk or half and half until you get the consistency you prefer. Salt & pepper to taste. Enjoy!

4. Stuffing: Pepperidge Farms stuffing has been a Thanksgiving staple in my family’s house as long as I can remember. But did you know it contains High Fructose Corn Syrup, LOTS of sodium, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, and other GMO ingredients? I know better these days. Making your own homemade bread for stuffing may be out of reach for many cooks, but there are organic options like Whole Foods 365 Stuffing Mix. And if you’re looking to do something really special, then check out this Chestnut and Prosciutto Bread Stuffing recipe by Lisa Leake at 100 Days of Real Food.

5. Green Bean Casserole: Okay, for many families this may seem like heresy, but why not skip this Thanksgiving classic and replace it with a REAL vegetable like green beans or brussels sprouts? I’ll give you two good reasons to reconsider. One 3/4 cup serving of this casserole concoction has 9g of fat and 530mg of sodium. And when’s the last time you ate just 3/4 of a cup or green bean casserole? So try this simple green bean recipe: Boil water in a large saucepan. Drop in 2 pint of green beans that have been trimmed. Cook for about 5 minutes or until beans are tender (but still bright green—don’t overcook). Remove, drain, squeeze juice from half a lemon (or to your taste), grind some fresh pepper over the top, and add butter and salt to taste. If you’re out of lemon, use some balsamic vinegar. And, if you want to make it look fancier, brown some sliced almonds and put them on top.

6. Butter: Ahh… sweet creamy butter. It’s another Thanksgiving staple that’s used as an ingredient in almost everything you cook. But did you know your supposedly real, “all natural” butter is most likely made with rBGH cream? Don’t know about rBGH yet? You can learn more about it here. Basically it’s a hormone used by the dairy industry to increase milk production. The US is now the only developed nation that allows its citizens to consume milk made with artificial growth hormones. Land O’Lakes and most store brand butters contain rBGH. So make a simple switch and choose organic butter instead—and if you can find grass-fed organic butter, that’s even better!

Take one of these steps or take all six…the important thing is to keep making progress on your journey to eating REAL FOOD. I know I’m still learning on my REAL FOOD journey, so I’d love to hear your ideas for making Thanksgiving just a little better.

As always, if you’ve enjoyed this post, please share it by pasting a link on your Facebook wall, liking it, or emailing it to a friend. And for more inside scoop on the world of food, please subscribe to my blog.

This Thanksgiving post was originally published on November 16, 2011. I’ve updated it a bit with some new recipes and links. Hope it helps you out!

8 comments

Part II of the series Baby’s First Encounter with Big Food

Snacking has become a national pastime. The NPD Group, a leading research organization hired by most Big Food companies, recently reported that “one out of every five eating occasions is a snack.” Now that statistic might not be so alarming if the snacks were healthy. Unfortunately, more often than not these snacks aren’t real food. Instead they’re fat-dripping, salt-filled, GMO-laced fake food that has been highly processed. But after researching Part I of my series, Baby’s First Encounter with Big Food, I got curious. When does junk food snacking start? As I ventured back into the infant and toddler aisle of my local grocery story, I discovered it starts far too young.

“Pincer” Grasp

It all begins innocently enough. Around 6 to 12 months, children start developing “pincer” grasp—the ability to pick up things with their thumbs and index fingers. For millennium, children used this emerging skill to start “feeding themselves” real foods like small morsels of fruits or vegetables. But over the past 50 years, processed foods have been slowly squeezing out simple, real foods from baby’s high chair.

One of the first Big Food brands to market baby “finger foods” to Moms was General Mills’ Cheerios. With 1g of sugar and 2g of dietary fiber (in a 3/4 cup serving) it’s arguably one of the healthier choices among processed cereals. But with added salt and some genetically modified ingredients, these oat-based “Os” aren’t as simple as they claim to be. For decades, however, Cheerios remained a relatively unchallenged favorite in this first finger food world. However during the past 10 years one global food behemoth has decided to cash in on baby snacking, and in turn has set up millions of children for a lifelong snack addiction.

Yes, that company is none other than Nestlé, the world’s largest food company and owner of the Gerber brand. Nestlé’s self-ascribed approach for food items aimed at young children is “Start Healthy Stay Healthy.” While this sentiment sounds wonderful, I’d argue actions speak louder than words. So in today’s post I’ll take a closer look at Nestlé’s products targeted at a segment they call “crawlers.” Then in Part III of Baby’s First Encounter with Big Food, I’ll examine Nestlé’s line-up for toddlers and pre-schoolers.

Nestlé defines crawlers as children who crawl with their stomach on the floor and are beginning to self-feed with their fingers. For most babies these developmental milestones are happening around 6-8 months old. Remarkably, Nestlé also claims that as a crawler “grows into toddlerhood, about 25% of his calories will come from snacks.” After looking at Nestlé’s snack line-up, I’m seriously frightened.

Although Gerber Graduate Puffs are fairly similar to Cheerios (both contain GMOs and have 1g added sugar), Gerber’s version is definitely more processed by virtue of using some refined grains, having no fiber, and adding “natural” flavors. If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you’ll know that natural flavors are hardly what you imagine them to be. Instead, they are usually made up of complex compounds that are designed by “flavor house” companies that literally create flavorings as a way to get you “addicted” to food [If you want to learn more about this, visit my post entitled, Confessions of a Former Coke "Addict"].

So where do I net out on Gerber Graduates Puffs? All-in-all, I wouldn’t choose to feed my “crawler” this food.

Nestlé steps up their infant snacking game with Gerber Graduates “yogurt melts.” Although the package states “nutrition specially made for your child,” I’m very puzzled how they can defend this claim since each 7g serving packs 4g of sugar. Hmmm… I’m no math major but this stuff is more than 50% sugars. To top things off, the so-called yogurt is sourced from cows treated with growth hormones (rBGH), and Nestlé has decided to add some “natural” flavors for good measure. Let’s face it, Nestlé, this is nothing more than baby candy.

If the fact that Nestlé is serving up candy to crawlers isn’t appalling enough, take a look at Gerber’s lil’ crunchers. OMG, I can’t believe this—Nestlé is selling cheese puffs to infants with a front label claim “supports HEALTHY GROWTH & development.” Hello? This is a cheese puff made with with highly processed ingredients, 2g of fat (almost 30% by weight), GMOs, preservatives, dairy sourced from cows treated with rBGH, lots of salt, and “natural” flavors. Of course, if salty isn’t your baby’s thing, you can go the pre-sweetened snack route with Maple or Apple flavored Wagon Wheels.

How does this make me feel? I’m sorry, but in my 15+ years of food marketing experience, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more inappropriate lineup. When you pair “snacks” like these with research that suggests “junk food is as addictive as heroin,” you’re literally putting six month old crawlers on a course towards a lifelong struggle with food. Shame on you Nestlé. The sad thing is, Nestlé’s junk food approach to children’s nutrition doesn’t end there. So stay-tuned for Part III of Baby’s First Encounter with Big Food.

As always, thanks for visiting my blog. If you haven’t had a chance to check out my book, Fat Profits, you can download your FREE chapter here. With the holidays just around the corner, Fat Profits may be the perfect gift idea—an entertaining thriller that also gets people asking the question, “do I really know what’s in my food.”

Finally, if you’re new to my blog and you’d like to learn more about the tricks, traps, and tools Big Food uses to get people eating more processed food, please subscribe for the latest updates.

11 comments

There hasn’t been a newborn baby in my home for a while. My son, Ben, turned 15 last May. While feeding a teenager healthy, unprocessed food has its own host of issues, I’ve been thinking a lot about babies again. No, I’m not expecting. You see, in less than a month, I will be an uncle. My brother and his wife are due right around Thanksgiving, and our whole family is excited. But it has me thinking—what exactly is in some of this stuff we feed our babies?

Ideally most newborns and infants are breast fed. Sometimes, however, things just don’t work out. I remember the challenges “we” had breastfeeding our son. If it wasn’t for the sheer determination of Ben’s mom, it just wouldn’t have happened. But if you have to use formula, what’s really in it? So I decided to check in with two of the leading formula manufacturers—Nestlé who owns Gerber, and Mead Johnson who owns Enfamil.

Nestlé, the world’s largest food company, has a quite a long and notorious history with manufacturing and selling baby formula. In the 1970′s its formulas (and the entire company) met a widespread boycott after it was revealed that Nestlé’s aggressive promotion of formulas was endangering infants in less economically developed countries. After weathering that storm, years later Nestlé bought Gerber to increase its global share of infant and baby feeding products.

When you look at infant formula labels, you quickly realize why breastfeeding is best. Simple and easy to understand ingredients? I don’t think so. But surely care is taken to prevent infants from exposure to growth hormones and GMOs? So I emailed Gerber to find out.

In my first attempt to answer this question, I received this following response:

Gerber has many products that use ingredients that are not made from GM crops. However, for some ingredients there are no non-GM options available as a result of the way crops are grown and harvested and how our raw material suppliers process their ingredients. All GM crops are reviewed by the FDA to make sure they are safe and nutritionally equivalent. If you have further questions, please don’t hesitate to call us @ 1-800-255-2164. We’re here 24/7.

Did they answer my question? No, not really. And I challenge the accuracy of their line “for some ingredients there are no non-GMO options available.” After several additional emails from me were ignored, I called Gerber’s 1-800#. Finally, after a long round-about conversation, the representative  confirmed that their formula most likely contains GMOs and is made with dairy products from cows treated with rBGH growth hormones. In the image above I’ve highlighted ingredients in Gerber’s Good Start formula that most likely are from GMO crops or cows treated with rBGH (you can click on the image to get a better view).

When investigating Enfamil, I decided to save some time and simply called Mead Johnson vs. emailing them. After putting me on hold briefly, a customer support representative answered with the whole FDA spiel about these products being safe, but then went on to confirm that their formulas contained ingredients from GMO crops and  cows treated with rBGH. Again, I’ve highlighted suspect ingredients on their label.

So what’s a parent to do? Are there non GMO/rBGH options? Undeterred, I decided to look at organic baby formulas. Surely, these have to be better, right? While these formulas are “clean” with regards to GMOs/rBGH, I discovered another issue that’s found in almost all commercially available non-organic AND organic formulas. You see, in a quest to replicate the naturally occurring DHA/ARA fatty acids present in breast milk, manufacturers fortify their formulas. That’s good, right? Well, maybe not. As a January 2008 Cornucopia Institute article entitled “Replacing Mother — Imitating Human Breast Milk in the Laboratory” reports:

…some infant formulas contain DHA- and ARA-containing oils that are novel foods—extracted from laboratory-grown fermented algae and fungus and processed utilizing a toxic chemical, hexane. These algal and fungal oils provide DHA and ARA in forms that are structurally different from those naturally found in human milk…

These oils are produced by Martek Biosciences Corporation and appear to be added to infant formula primarily as a marketing tool designed to convince parents that formula is now ‘as close as ever to breast milk.’ Substantiating this thesis is a Martek investment promotion from 1996, which reads as follows: ‘Even if [the DHA/ARA blend] has no benefit, we think it would be widely incorporated into formulas, as a marketing tool and to allow companies to promote their formula as ‘closest to human milk’.’

Furthermore, the Cornucopia Institute has exposed that many manufacturers further violate the Organic Foods Production Act by adding synthetic preservatives (click here to learn more). So even when choosing organic formulas, you may need to dig even a little deeper. Here’s a handy guide from the Cornucopia Institute that reveals potential DHA issues across all forms of baby foods and formulas. According to this guide, Baby’s Only Organic is the only formula that doesn’t use the Martek’s DHA/ARA blend. Instead it uses fatty acids that are derived from egg yolks. You can learn more about Baby’s Only Organic DHA/ARA blend here.

Stay tuned for Part II of this segment on Baby’s First Encounter with Big Food where I’ll take a look at how the snacking habit starts.

As always, thanks for visiting my blog. If you haven’t had a chance to check out my book, Fat Profits, you can download your FREE chapter here. With the holidays just around the corner, Fat Profits may be the perfect gift idea—an entertaining thriller that also gets people asking the question, “do I really know what’s in my food.”

Finally, if you’re new to my blog and you’d like to learn more about the tricks, traps, and tools Big Food uses to get people eating more processed food, please subscribe for the latest updates.

To read Part II of Baby’s First Encounter with Big Food, click here.

19 comments