Voluntary Poison: A Brainwashed Love Story

OR

An Analytic Look At Drugstore Vitamins 

When I first moved away from my parents' house, my mother was constantly asking about how well I was eating. Although I've always downplayed the extent of my crappy food habits, I would admit that maybe I wasn't eating enough fruit or swallowing enough combined bean-and-rice protein for a vegetarian, and, with a frown, Mom would adamantly take me to the drugstore for a box of one-a-day vitamins. It was insurance, we figured, to make sure I was at least getting all my necessary vitamins and minerals. While there are only a few amino acids (proteins) that can be bottled, and science has yet to come up with a way to synthesize phytochemicals, vitamin supplements have been in circulation since the forties. They're a healthy way to buffer our standard American diets. If it were up to the opinion of mothers and dietitians everywhere, we'd all be popping a pill with our breakfasts every single morning.

As of the last few days, and much to the chagrin of the guy who usually does the shelf-stocking in the drugstore where I work, I've been going through the racks of supplements and checking expiry dates, stacking them neatly in rows, and trying to match the bottle with their haphazardly placed labels on the shelves. Being as the career I'm working towards can involve a lot of vitamin recommending, I took a moment or two when I came across something a little more vague than your basic "niacin" or "B complex" and read the labels on the bottles with fancy "Centrum Pronutrients Bone Health"-type names, wondering, okay, what's in this that makes it "great for bone health"? While certain supplements gave me obvious answers (calcium, vitamin D, etc.), others had me balking and wanting to hide the container behind one of its less dangerous brethren in hopes that nobody would ever buy and ingest the contents of its cheerfully sky-blue packaging. I'd had the same enlightened moment at home shortly before seeing a naturopath last week, and had trashed my tea cupboard in an inspection frenzy, wondering, "What on earth have I been ingesting?" 

We'd had a conversation early in the school year about multivitamins, and my classmates had been delighted to inform each other of the fancy brands they bought, rated five out of five stars and costing slightly less than their firstborn for thirty capsules. I kept quiet about my drugstore-brand pills, because as full as they were of good intentions, I knew they weren't the greatest, and could predict the judgmental, pitying looks and suggestions that would follow should I mention them. In their mostly-colourless bottle, my Compliments Century Complete tablets were a once-a-day dose of thirteen vitamins, six minerals, and one of the few capsule-able phytonutrients, lutein. As an overview, it sounds like a decent mix, but as my eyes traveled to the "non-medicinal ingredients" list, I became more and more horrified and promptly dumped what was left of the bottle in the compost. As a simple introduction, the "we're not food!" list included:

- Croscarmellose Sodium, an emulsifier that expands up to twenty times its size when exposed to water. It not only steals fluid from your body to do so, but can cause the vitamins contained within to be released in your stomach instead of your small intestine (which actually does 99% of the digesting in your body; elementary school lied to you), can create blockages in your digestive tract in large amounts, and can promote yeast overgrowth in your bowels.

- FD&C Yellow #6, a dye derived from coal tar that causes hyperactivity in children and can toxify the crap out of your liver and gastrointestinal tract. The EU has made it mandatory for this additive to have a warning label.

- Hypromellose, another emulsifier that's most commonly found in eye lubrication drops like Genteal. 

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- Microcrystalline Sucralose, which, if my dissection of words is up to par, is basically "really small crystals of Splenda", and anyone who's been keeping on top of the world of sugar alternatives is aware that this little chemical can basically freak up every part of your body, from your thyroid gland to ovaries to liver, kidneys, and eyes.

- Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, which involves not only GM soy (which I try to avoid, because it can act as a crazy estrogen in the body) but partial hydrogenation, the act of forcing hydrogen into fat to make it more stable (think margarine), thereby creating trans fats, which our bodies have no idea how to deal with. Leads to cancer and screwed up sex hormones, among other things.

- Polysorbate 80, another emulsifier that some folks have allergies to and people with Crohn's Disease can be really hurt by. Has been proven to eff up the reproduction of and cause cancer in rats, is a skin and eye irritant, and is in most shampoos and toothpastes, as well as ice cream. Yum yum.

- Silicon Dioxide, most commonly known as sand. Seriously. Silicon is wonderful for us in its natural form, but when bonded with those two oxygen molecules it becomes an eye, lung, and skin irritant and can cause inflammation in the body.

- Titanium Dioxide, my personal favourite, because it's the specific reason I switched to a natural deodorant. That's right, folks, my multivitamin contained the same heavy metal your antiperspirant uses to plug up your pores and stop you from sweating. There's a lot of debate on the safety of this one, because it is naturally occurring, but there're a lot of suggestions that maybe ultrafine particles of razor-sharp titanium could be a little hard on our squishy insides and it's probably a carcinogen. 

Unluckily for me, this was only the first level of unending horror I found in the friendly-looking bottle of Century Complete. Conveniently, somewhere between my naturopath visit and my stocking shelves, I picked up Pandora's Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over The American Meal by Melanie Warner and puked my way through the chapter entitled "Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again", which explained how things like Froot Loops and Wonderbread are made completely devoid of anything healthy and then fortified with synthetic vitamins created in China out of things like petroleum. The likelihood of any of those lovely vitamin supplements you're taking being sucked out of an actual head of broccoli or an orange are nil to nothing, my duckies. The vitamin D in your milk comes from lanolin, the grease made in Australian sheep wool. The calcium quantity in milk is likewise half due to the calcium phosphate (gathered from rocks or synthesized by adding calcium hydroxide to phosphoric acid) dumped into it. Vitamin C is made of ten rounds or so of acids, sugars, and fermentation, finished off with a dousing of hydrochloric acid, the same chemical our stomachs use to dissolve food. Vitamin B1 comes from coal tar.

Understandably, the thought of avoiding the vitamins health culture pushes like crazy can sound a little backwards, because what's a malnutritioned old lady to do if her calcium pills are full of carcinogens? She still needs to keep her bones strong, and she just doesn't have the appetite for multiple meals of yogurt every day. If the aforementioned list of additives wasn't a good hint, many supplements are not only not well used by our bodies, but honestly can't be digested. There are many documented instances of seniors excreting "horse pills" completely in tact, because their systems couldn't break them down. This isn't exclusive to the older generation, either; in our first-world societies of obese persons and overindulgence, our digestive systems in general are all beat to crap, and have enough trouble trying to consume Kraft Dinner. We simply can't deal with food that isn't food.

I won't say that every human condition can be fixed by diet, but certainly a large percentage of vitamin or mineral deficiencies can. If you're lacking a nutrient, it's either because A) your body can't absorb it, in which case you should see a doctor to find out why, or B) you're not eating it. When I began losing weight, experiencing brain fog, starving for carbs, and being cold all the time, I realized I was lacking a very crucial macronutrient - protein - and specifically the eight different "essential" amino acids it's made of. Plant foods have varied kinds of amino acids, and animal sources have all eight. I was eating very little of either. Instead of doing the math on which amino acids I lacked and spending a fortune on individual shots of 5-HTP or a sketchy bottle of "branched chain amino acids" from a bodybuilding supplement store, I bought a carton of eggs and ate them like it was going out of style. Three days later I feel like a different person. Food trumps pills.

Checking the ingredient list of every single supplement you're taking can be exhausting and overwhelming, as I realized while stocking shelves. Nobody's diet is perfect, and sometime you have to take a synthetic whatever to live on in relative health (hence my taking Vitamin D pills knowing they come from somewhere weird). But in the interest of not ingesting the same chemicals as are in your antiperspirant, consider keeping an eye out for the following:

1) Avoid ingredients that sound like chemicals. You don't go to the grocery store to buy a cup of Polysorbate 80 for baking, after all. If you don't recognize it, do a quick Google search before you start ingesting it. Despite what we'd all like to think, vitamin companies don't necessarily care how good for us their product is, as long as we buy it.

2) Do not ingest heavy metals. Good for the ears, but not good for the gob. Be wary of anything that sits on the Periodic Table. Some minerals are totally harmless, but others can be extremely detrimental to your health. Eat nothing containing lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, titanium, silver, gold, or arsenic, and be cautious of anything with iron, copper, zinc, aluminum, beryllium, manganese, and/or cobalt.

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3) The less ingredients it has, the better. In my mind, a supplement should have only three things: the vitamin/mineral/herb, a container (which may have multiple ingredients, but should be generally composed of either cellulose or gelatin), and maybe something to make it go down smoothly (usually magnesium stearate).

4) Avoid shopping at the drugstore. This isn't to say that organic food shoppes are automatically better; I've gotten excellent-quality omega 3 fish oils at the drugstore where I work. The thing is, drugstores stock cheaper brands of supplements because their clientele is unlikely to want to spend much money on pills that won't relieve their symptoms right away. Always check to see what's in your vitamin and let it play a factor in how much you spend on it. As in the case of the probiotics I bought for GF, I would prefer to spend a little more for fewer tablets that were just germs and capsules than more tablets chocked full of strangely-named and unnecessary milk powders.

5) If it looks or tastes like candy, it's not helping. Almost all of the Vitamin C and multivitamin capsules you'll see marketed to kids will be either gummies or chewables, usually formed into fun shapes (and in some cases include temporary tattoos and stickers). Take one look at the ingredients of these and you'll see a list that goes, "Sugar, sugar, Splenda, sugar, chemical colour, Vitamin A, sugar, weird gummy emulsifiers, preservatives." Not only are these full of things you shouldn't be feeding to an already hyperactive three-year-old, but they're a waste of money. You could spend $15 on a tub of Flintstone vitamins to make sure your child gets her Vitamin C, and unintentionally pump her full of chemicals and mood-altering artificial colours, or you could buy a box of nectarines for $5. There are cases in which a fun-tasting vitamin may be the only option - with a picky or unwell senior, for example - but try to find the best bang for your buck and remember #3.

6) Liquids > everything else. If you can find a liquid fish or flax oil, I guarantee it'll work ten times better than "horse pill"-sized tablets for getting your omega EFAs into you. This one I can attest to personally.

7) You should feel a difference! I take four specific supplements every morning, and I notice when forget to. Instead of feeling awake and well, I'm overly anxious, easily depressed, broody, and unfocused. While vitamins are not stimulants and shouldn't have you feeling wired, they are meant to help - if you don't feel like it's doing anything, it's probably not. Stop wasting your money.

8) Alligators Don't Eat Fat Kids. Vitamin A (alligators), Vitamin D (don't), Vitamin E (eat), Omega Essential Fatty Acids (fat), and Vitamin K (kids) are all fat-soluble substances that our bodies store and therefore need less often than water-soluble vitamins. Taking large quantities of these can actually make you sick. Remember this when shopping for any multivitamin, unless you've been specifically told by a naturopath or other licensed practitioner to take more. The less of these a multivitamin contains, the better.

9) You don't need multivitamins! I still struggle to understand why my class full of health nuts are so insistent on taking these supplements, because if you're eating well, you should have no need to plug yourself full of synthetic food bits. It's interesting to note that professional athletes aren't actually allowed to take multivitamins; they're so unregulated that it's considered doping. If you believe you need to take a supplement because your diet stinks or is lacking something, consider first changing what you eat. It may be a little harder to do, but there's a significantly lesser chance of you poisoning yourself with a rutabaga than there is with a synthetic, chemical-bound pill.

In the end, the most important thing is to listen to your body. You know you better than anyone else!

In health,
- Leah

The Autumn Squash Challenge Round #3

OR

Butternut Squash Vegan Mac and Cheese - The First Success

It's ridiculous how quickly time goes by when you're older. Everyone and their grandmother remarks of this at least once in their lifetime - "Back in my day...!" - but it's true that as you grow up days fly by inexplicably faster than they used to. I'm of the belief that it's because we don't mindlessly play anymore; we're overaware of the hours of the day and days of the week and everything we have to do before certain dates. It doesn't help that a good chunk of North Americans have very few, but very commercialized holidays throughout the year. About once a month there's a date we have to plan and buy gifts and make food for, and the stores we buy the supplies from are always two months ahead of us. You want Easter decorations? Start looking on January 2nd. If you're trying to prepare for Thanksgiving, you'd better have that eighteen pound turkey ordered three months ahead of time. Christmas is its own special cup of tea, shoving grinning pumpkins out of the way well before it's reasonable and putting a disrespectful screen in front of November 11th. GF and I actually went to our first Christmas craft show, because we're old ladies like that, just this past Friday (with poppies pinned to our chests, thank you very much). While I understand the jumping of the gun in some respects - craft shows are fun any time of year - it makes us overall more paranoid of time going by.


It was almost a full month ago I decided to learn how to cook squash, and it was with a bit of a shock that I realized I've only made about five attempts since then. Any time now, our craft show reminded me, we'll start getting snow here on the east coast (Manitoba's already had some), and it's a slow decline of fresh gourd availability after then. I've got to get my shit together! Especially now that I've finally gotten a grasp on how to cook pumpkin seeds. That's right, folks, I've finally figured out the trick. Thanks to the tutorial on Oh She Glows, I now know I need to boil - yes, boil - the seeds for ten minutes, then toast them for twenty at 325F. Perfection. Even my mother liked them!

Pumpkin seeds, by the way, not only have magnesium (muscle relaxation), potassium (nerve health), protein (everything) and healthy plant fats (brain and joint strengtheners), but are rich in tryptophan, that amino acid in turkey everyone says puts you to sleep. It is, consequently, beneficial if you suffer insomnia or high levels of stress, and is a precursor of serotonin, the brain's mood-regulating chemical. Folks who have depression often don't make enough serotonin, which is why SSRIs (meds that convince your brain you have more than you do) are so popular for treating it. The added bonus of cooking your own pumpkin seeds is that their hard shell is built of an insoluble fibre, which helps build and move feces along your large intestine. Hear that, everyone? If you're stressed, depressed, or can't sleep or poop, start downing gourd seeds.

My other success, with the actual flesh of a squash, was a batch of vegan mac n' cheese. I've come to the quick realization that I'm not as talented an inventor in the kitchen as I'd like to be, so I've been latching onto recipes and following them to a T, with fantastic results. You'd be surprised at how actual measurements can help make a concoction taste good. This recipe was also from Oh She Glows, although the first time I whipped up a batch I actually used honey mustard instead of dijon, so it was rather sweet. Can't decide which taste I preferred, though. The roasted squash by itself was fantastic, too.

It's a shame I can't claim to have figured out both these recipes by myself, but such is life. Maybe I'll stick to promoting other blogs' food inventions. Appreciate what talents you have and accept those you don't.

In related news, do you realize how many pumpkin seeds you can get out of two cheap jack o' lanterns? Manna from the heavens, I tell you! The world really does provide for us - you just have to know where to look. Now is prime time to start stocking up on homemade pumpkin paste and toasted seeds. Before you know it, the Christmas snowmen will have taken over!

Shortly put,
- Leah

The Salty Lesser of Two Evils

OR

Why Quality Salt Is Healthier Than Shitty Sugar

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Iodine is - brace yourselves, I consulted my textbook for this - a poisonous gas that we need to ingest. A halogen mineral, it sits comfortably in the 53rd spot of the Periodic Table, and is apparently purple, not that we ever get to see it. It's most commonly found in vegetables and mixed in with table salt, or salt in general, which is why folks who live in places like Halifax don't have problems with goiter; the sea breezes blow enough iodine into our systems that our thyroid gland doesn't have to expand to try to catch more. (For those of you wondering what goiter is, think of the guy in Disney's Tangled with the winged helmet.) While Iodine in its natural gaseous form is terrible for us, iodine in food is a natural substance that we need to function correctly. This is also true of the salt in which it's found. As much as it's not super great for your blood pressure, without it you would absolutely die. Salt is so necessary that in ancient civilizations it could be traded as currency and people would get arrested for boiling saltwater at home instead of buying it. It's a big deal.

My Daddy recently read and recommended a book called Wheat Belly by William Davis, and has been following the author's guidelines for getting rid of his persistent "beer belly", which I'm very proud of him for. Mr Davis believes that because wheat grown today is so far removed from the wheat that folks in the fifties and earlier had that our bodies have no idea what to do with it. Genetically engineered and cross-bred to be uniform heights, grow at specific times, and taste a specific way, as well as survive frost and pests, the wheat plants we eat in pretty much everything are not only a threat to those with gluten intolerance and Celiac Disease, but everyone else, too. I've been mostly following in my father's footsteps as of the last week or so after finishing a school project and realizing maybe wheat wasn't the best for me, either - albeit for a different reason.

This past Thursday I'd asked my teacher which was worse: salt or sugar. We'd been talking about atherosclerosis, the hardening and thickening of arteries in the body, and how the amount of salt someone eats can alter how bad their situation is. The class before, we'd talked about how sugar in high amounts, especially high fructose corn syrup, was causing ridiculous quantities of children in the United States to develop or be born with type two diabetes. Obviously neither salt nor sugar are great for you in large amounts, but it seemed, to me, that sugar was the baddest baddie of the two. It makes us fat, attention-deficit and hyper, lethargic, blocks absorption of vitamins we need to live (like vitamin C; those with compromised immune systems should really avoid it), inflames the body, is addictive, severely screws with our insulin levels, and tastes so damn good we can't stop eating it. Salt, on the other hand, keeps us balanced in more ways than one. It helps our bodies build hydrochloric acid in our stomachs to break down food, aids in blood sugar controls, and supports our thyroid gland. This being said, the thousands of grams of cheap, white, refined salt that live in prepackaged meals and your cute bottle of table salt aren't helping you at all. On the contrary, they're making you sick.

Anytime I've ever heard the term "food diary" I've gotten annoyed. Those two words ring out at me from every television show, healthily living book, and style magazine available, all aimed at women trying to lose weight - keep a food diary, they say, and you'll eat better! Or less! Or you'll just feel ridiculously guilty and
ashamed and stressed out, says I. Tedious and over-analyzed, the whole concept seemed pointless to me. But despite my loathing for the practice, I was assigned a project for school that told me to do just what I'd never wanted to: keep a food log. For five days I had to plug in exactly what I was eating and at what time (although thankfully without note of calories), how much water I drank, how I felt, and how many times the toilet and I made conversation. Afterwards, it was my responsibility to look over the information from an outsider's point of view and make recommendations to the "client" on how to eat healthier.

One of the most frustrating questions vegetarians of any kind get asked is, "Where do you get your protein?" Although this macro-nutrient comprises 20% of our body and is needed for everything from muscle building to brain power, it's considered the most important thing we ingest beyond calories by most people. Never mind that your body needs good carbohydrates and fats to function well too, no, the question is always, "How much protein are you eating? Are you pregnant? Are you trying to build muscle? Are you old? More protein! Eat your lean chicken!" Becoming a vegetarian at age fourteen opened me up to years of this question and insists that I eat more beans. Confirmations that yes, a person can get plenty of protein from plant foods were always met with hesitant, "Okay..."s and disbelieving looks. If you know a vegetarian or vegan, please refrain from asking this question, as well as the, "But if you were trapped on a desert island with only a cow to eat...?" one. Just stop.

It was, therefore, the most grueling self-acceptance of mine that I realized, upon finishing my food diary report, that I was severely lacking in protein. In the span of a week I'd eaten nothing but sunflower seeds that were specifically, predominantly protein. Suddenly the suspicious muscle loss and slower cognitive function I'd been experiencing made perfect sense, especially when paired up with the realization that I live almost entirely off of sugar and simple carbohydrates, and had been following this pattern for years. No wonder I'm hungry all the time.

Most anybody can recognize plain white sugar. Hand someone a chocolate bar and they'll easily confirm that it's loaded with the stuff. Fruit, most people can tell, has its own natural sweeteners. But when handed a box of pasta, nobody looks beyond the nutrition facts on the side that say how many carbohydrates are inside and wonders what that pasta will become once they ingest it. When we eat the three main macro-nutrients, carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, our body takes them apart like Lego and then build them into things our
bodies need to function. Fats... well, they stay as fat, and lubricate our cells, move fat-soluble vitamins around, and pad up our internal organs so we don't die of cold or shock. Protein is deconstructed into amino acids when we eat it, little building blocks that construct everything from stretchy muscles to serotonin. Anything solid besides bones in these meat sacks we call bodies is made of protein. Carbs, on the other hand, are our main source of energy. Our bodies run on glucose, a form of sugar. Carbohydrates, both complex like buckwheat and simple like pasta, turn into glucose. Carbohydrates are sugar.

These are all sugar. Simple sugar.

The reason low-carb diets "work" is because our bodies, when they can't find sugars in our diet, will pull stored sugar, sitting in fatty deposits (your favourite love handles) out of our bodies to burn for fuel. Once those are gone, your brain instructs your digestive tract to start eating protein, our emergency rations. This is called ketosis, and although Mr Atkins thinks it's a great idea, it's dangerous and ensures that when you do reintroduce carbohydrates, your body's going to hold on to those sugars, in the form of fat, like a starving man would a banquet. The fact is, we all need carbohydrates to function right. It's the cheap firewood that keeps us running. Cutting out carbs is like throwing electronics in the fire to avoid burning up wood. Electronics don't burn well, aren't good to be breathing in, and cost a lot more than a chunk of dead tree. Plus the fire'll be pretty weak by the time you decide maybe it's okay to use firewood again. Let's just do ourselves all a big favour and not avoid carbs, alright?

Carbs come in a couple forms. Simple sugars are pasta, white rice, bread, basically anything that makes you feel good eating when you're stressed out. Complex carbs are buckwheat, quinoa, brown rice, beans, things that make it too hard for you to have dessert because you're so full. At the risk of getting too technical, simple sugars are little chains, and complex are long chains. If you had a couple jelly beans in one hand and a foot-long Fruit Roll-up in the other, which would take longer to eat? These long-chain "Fruit Roll-up" complex carbs are a slow form of sugar that your body can still use well but that don't cause blood sugar spikes or contain so many simple "jelly beans" that they get out of hand and your stomach has to time-out them in fatty deposit corners. Basically, if you've got problems - like me - with eating too much sugar, opting out of the Halloween candy isn't good enough. You've got to get rid of the simple carbohydrates and replace them - to avoid ketosis - with complex. The bonus of complex carbs, especially for those of you worried about their vegan family members, is that they contain protein. I've been opting out of eating wheat - which is generally a simple carbohydrate, unless you're eating wheat berries - and these "jelly beans" in general both to stabilize my blood sugar, increase my protein intake, and help satisfy my unending hunger.

Here we arrive at the point of this post. Salt. Once you cut that delicious sugar out of your diet, and being as everyone and their mom's telling you you need to stop eating salt, food's probably going to look pretty bland. I have bad news for you: you should probably cut down on the salt intake, and you have to stop buying regular old table salt. The good news is, you don't have to get rid of salt completely.

Dextrose is a chemical term for glucose. Sugar.

Consider where salt comes from. The sea, the earth, the human body. The table salt we're all used to eating comes from one of these sources (hopefully not the last one, haha), gets sent to a factory, and then is bleached, depleted, de-ionized, sprayed with chemicals, sprinkled with iodine, rolled in sugar, and packaged in pretty white bags. You read that right. Go grab the salt from your baking cupboard right now - there's sugar in it.

Obviously when your salt has sugar, your body's more than a little confused and you're eating something very unnatural. The general goal of someone who wants to be healthy should be to eat as close to a food's traditional form as possible, meaning they'd opt for a steak, which is just a hunk of muscle, instead of a hot dog made of mysterious beef parts mixed with chemicals and wrapped in plastic. Seasonings should be looked at the same way. If you went down to the beach, grabbed a cup of seawater, and waited for the liquid to evaporate, you'd be left with a cup of probably grey and black chunky salt. Believe it or not, this stuff is totally edible (although it's not a great idea, since our oceans have pollution problems). This is natural salt, the way it's been mined for centuries. It's infused, like a good tea, with minerals like magnesium, potassium, and calcium. A good natural salt can have as many as 85 different trace minerals in it. The chemical table salt we're all used to, by contrast, is bleached white, has all the minerals sucked out of it, has to have iodine put back in to protect midwesterners from goiter, and it's so over-purified that it bypasses every toll booth in our bodies and therefore screws us right up.

If you're going to eat salt - and we all should, in small doses - I highly, highly suggest you invest in a lovely sea or rock salt. Be mindful - if it's pure white, it's probably just a variation of the sodium chloride table salt we're all used to, labeled as "sea salt" to get in on the health craze because technically speaking, all salt came from the sea at some point. Aim to find yourself a nice off-colour salt, fine ground or chunky. My cupboard personally has some adorable fine pink Himalayan sea salt (said to be the richest in minerals), a rich grey Celtic sea salt, and oak-smoked rock salt from South Africa, which smells like a campfire in November. The added bonus of natural salts is that they've got stronger, deeper tastes, and you therefore need less, and this is coming from someone who salts the crap out of her food. It's important to point out that if you're eating a lot of sugar, whether with your sodium chloride, in candy, or as simple carbohydrates, you're probably going to crave salt like a boss to counteract all the sweetness. Cutting down on sugar means you'll need less salt, and if you're eating a healthy, un-stripped salt, you'll be getting essential minerals along with your meal instead of heart problems. Win-win-win.

In summery:

1) Simple carbohydrates are sugar. While our bodies do need sugars to function, they run best on complex carbohydrates that digest slower and give us a little boost of protein. If you're like me and eat bread and pasta all the time, consider switching up for more brown rice and buckwheat to balance yourself out. For the record, granola and oatmeal are simple carbs doused in sugar. Avoid them.

2) Your table salt has sugar in it. It's completely devoid of nutrients and you need shit-tons to make anything taste good. Spoil yourself with a colourful, mineral-rich sea or rock salt and experience both amazing new tastes and health benefits that will protect (in reasonable amounts) instead of harm your heart.

3) Although we all hate to hear it, vegetarians and vegans need to be mindful of their protein intake. It's very possible to be totally healthy on a plant-based diet, but us lazy meat-avoiders have to be careful. If you're like me and don't particularly care to eat beans every day, make sure you're eating lots of whole grains and nuts. If you're also like me and can't really afford/keep forgetting to buy nuts, or are getting really deficient in this important macro-nutrient, consider getting a hemp or plant-based protein powder.

4) Mr Atkins' program is dangerous and dumb. Your body needs fat, carbs, and protein. Give it good quality and reasonable amounts of all three, exercise a little, and stress less, and you won't have to worry about your weight.

5) Food journalism isn't a good long-term habit, I personally think, but it's not a bad idea to log your eating habits for a week or so and then critically look them over - do you eat a lot of sugar? Simple carbs? Salt? Are you stressed out? Do you poop? Are you eating late at night? Take responsibility for your own health. I'll be seeing a naturopath later this month who can help me out with the specifics of my protein deficiency and organize some better eating habits, but in the meantime, I know what I basically need to fix. It's no good waiting for someone else to take care of you; you're the best specialist you've got.

In health,
- Leah