A new lease of life.. re-dating products..

So who didn't think that this didn't happen? Honestly? It's as old a practice as sticking 'best before' dates on products.

The CBC news article names 'Loblaws', but any large grocery chain name could be used. You would be surprised if they didn't do it, wouldn't you. It's such an easy scam.

A former partner of mine in the UK was a 'Food Safety' officer for a large Supermarket company. When she wasn't present, they used to watch out for me and send a whisper around the store to do things right, just in case I was telling her what the mice did when the cat was away. How sad is that.. :-(

There is no way to eliminate practices like the above because there are not enough people to police the system. Relying on integrity is like relying on sand as a good 'footings' medium..

Processed foods.. Do we have a choice?

Some will say yes, of course, we always have a choice.

But do we? Is there a choice when one is obliged to buy 'cheap stuff' from the major grocery stores? I know that some say it is cheaper to buy 'fresh', but it is cheaper or any safer? I have an acquaintance who always buys from 'Farmer's Markets'. I might do the same if I could afford the prices and if they had the range of foodstuffs that I like, but neither condition is reached.

Why is ostensibly unprocessed meat a target for the doom and gloom brigade? Maybe it's because whatever is sprayed in one part of the world is going to blow into adjacent parts even if you can't see it happening.

Also, while it could be said that the small farmer is there to do good and honest service, there is still the need to make enough money to continue being a farmer.

I don't trust anything that I am told because the people telling me stuff are JUST human, and a long way off any kind of perfection. I question and research everything from as many sources as I can. If I see plagiarised stuff, and there is a lot of it about, I ignore pretty much all of it.

The organic food now can never be the same as food was fifty years ago because every condition has changed. We didn't call it organic food years ago. It was just food, where cows and pigs and sheep and goats and chickens all spent most of their days OUTSIDE, eating whatever the individual animal ate.

Even vegetables are not safe from a variety of bacteria, some of which can kill an oldie or a baby within hours.

I am not going to walk away and hide in a corner until things get better because that is not going to happen any time soon, or ever. So where does it leave me? I have recently had a huge operation to remove Oesophageal cancer, and I don't want a repeat or some other type of cancer.

I have to make serious choices but who do I believe? Where do I go? Worst still, who cares what happens to me apart from me? And who will listen to me? I have no outlet for my thoughts apart from stuff like this blog. :-(

Red meat, processed meat

 

It's anything but good news.. from my local news channel today..

 

Eating processed meat can lead to bowel cancer in humans while red meat is a likely cause of the disease, World Health Organization (WHO) experts said on Monday in findings that could sharpen debate over the merits of a meat-based diet.

 

The France-based International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the WHO, put processed meat such as hot dogs and ham in its group 1 list, which already includes tobacco, asbestos and diesel fumes, for which there is “sufficient evidence” of cancer links.

 

“For an individual, the risk of developing colorectal (bowel) cancer because of their consumption of processed meat remains small, but this risk increases with the amount of meat consumed,” Dr. Kurt Straif of the IARC said in a statement.

 

Red meat, under which the IARC includes beef, lamb and pork, was classified as a “probable” carcinogen in its group 2A list that also contains glyphosate, the active ingredient in many weed killers.

 

The lower classification for red meat reflected “limited evidence” that it causes cancer. The IARC found links mainly with bowel cancer, as was the case for processed meat, but it also observed associations with pancreatic and prostate cancer.

 

The agency, whose findings on meat followed a meeting of health experts in France earlier this month, estimated each 50 gram portion of processed meat eaten daily increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 18 percent.

 

The IARC, which was assessing meat for the first time and reviewed some 800 studies, does not compare the level of cancer risk associated with products in a given category, so does not suggest eating meat is as dangerous as smoking, for example.

 

Health policy in some countries already calls for consumers to limit intake of red and processed meat, but the IARC said such advice to consumers was in certain cases focused on heart disease and obesity.

 

The preparation of the IARC’s report has already prompted vigorous reactions from meat industry groups, which argue meat forms part of a balanced diet and that cancer risk assessments need to be set in a broader context of environmental and lifestyle factors.

 

The IARC, which does not make specific policy recommendations, cited an estimate from the Global Burden of Disease Project – an international consortium of more than 1,000 researchers – that 34,000 cancer deaths per year worldwide are attributable to diets high in processed meat.

 

This compares with about 1 million cancer deaths per year globally due to tobacco smoking, 600,000 a year due to alcohol consumption, and more than 200,000 each year due to air pollution, it said.

If the cancer link with red meat were confirmed, diets rich in red meat could be responsible for 50,000 deaths a year worldwide, according to the Global Burden of Disease Project.

The state of food..

I am recovering from esophageal cancer removal surgery, where I was reconstructed a little internally. There were problems with eating before the surgery, and I have got more problems now.

One of them is the quality of food available. It is next to impossible to reliably work it out from labels because the standard behind some of the terms is so vague and misleading.
Click here for an article written last year.

Ham and cold cuts in general..

Go into any grocery store and see if you can buy real unprocessed ham. You know that the pre-packed has been messed with a lot, but the stuff of the deli counter is just as bad. It is almost all re-constituted to look like the original, but the texture tells another story. The shape does too. Please point me in the direction of sandwich shaped pigs. No, there is no such thing, but there is such a thing as sandwich shaped ham.

Bread.. Getting decent bread is very difficult.

Some multi-grain bread has such a strong flavour that it overpowers anything eaten with it. The sandwich breads which are made the same shape as the sandwich pigs have an unpleasant flavour too, and I used to have problems getting them down way before I ever knew about esophageal cancer. Breads from smaller bakeries are often frozen in transit, losing quality for every kilometre travelled, and are not quite what one might expect from the labelling, eg French, Italian etc..

Frozen vegetables..

I have a suspicion that some are frozen for a lot longer than you might expect, but no manufacturer is ever going to admit that. The size of vegetable also suggests that many are picked way too early, and are probably grown in an environment that is far from natural. My journeys through countryside never reveal much by way of different crop types or animals too. Scary..

Does anybody care?

Yes, many of us do, but the food producers don't care. I have written to some about certain products, and they send me a $10 voucher. Big deal. I don't want a voucher that is only good for the crap that I am complaining about. I want a CEO, to whom I send a challenge to eat what the company produces, and tell me that it is ok and that they would allow their own families to eat the stuff.

The trouble is that the Canadian Federal Gov't can't, won't ensure that we, the great Canadian public, are covered, and as long as the laws are lax, the food producers will be too? Like any other business, they only do the minimum if they can get away with it.

Piller’s SIMPLY FREE..

.. is a range of packaged cooked meats, cold cuts if you prefer.

The packaging is quite nice, soft pastel natural colours, and the words ‘Simply Free’ in a larger text size than any other text on the packaging. Yes, this looks to be a product which you could serve up to your family, basking in the knowledge that you had done them a great favour.

What is Piller’s ‘Simply Free’ free from exactly. I can tell you from the more wording on the packing.. ALLERGENS. It gets better all of the time, doesn’t it.

The product, bearing in mind that it is a meat type is free from:

• Gluten
• Milk
• Peanuts
• Tree nuts
• Mustard
• Sesame
• Egg
• Fish
• Soy
• Sulphites

I don’t know about you, but I would not expect to find ANY of the above list in a slice of ham or Salami. The funniest is ‘FISH’. Imagine that, no FISH in a ham/Salami product.

Piller’s is having us on because the list of ingredients on the back of the Salami pack reads:

• Pork
• Sea Salt
• Cane Sugar
• Spices
• Cultured Celery Extract
• Garlic
• Starter Culture
• Smoke

For those of you who don’t know, the Celery extract is SODIUM. Starter Culture could be anything at all, and Spices is also a little vague.

By weight, the percentage of SODIUM in the Salami product is 17%, and for the ham, it is 18%.

So we now know that Piller’s cooked meats, cold cuts don’t have anything that one would expect NOT to be in there, but it has a nice healthy helping of the big S, SODIUM.

The only saving grace is that they were purchased at around half of the suggested retail price. Will I be buying them again?

Sorry, Mr. Piller’s Fine Foods of Waterloo, Ontario, but the answer is a resounding NO. My decision is not based upon the product itself as I have tasted worse, but because you are trying to mislead the consumer into believing that it is a better product than others, and I very much doubt that this could be substantiated in any lab or consumer tests..

Recycling – kiddie car seats..

They are marked as recyclable but recycling centers will not take them. In Canada, There is a center in Alberta, which is really useful for people living in Eastern Canada.

So why isn’t there a recycling center which will take them in Ontario? This is why..

Shown here is a baler machine. Unlike plastic bottles, kiddie car seats are an awkward shape and do not respond well to being compressed. This is where the problem starts. Your local recycling depot may bale stuff up, but car seats require a substantial shredder which is very expensive to buy and maintain and that has to be under cover.

The present answer is to smash them to pieces and place them in the regular garbage. It clearly isn’t a good solution, but is the only one.

There must be thousands of car seats dumped yearly, and even if there were facilities to dispose of them, how many owners would do it right and take them to a depot. Unfortunately, there are many people who don’t care enough t put themselves out, so the situation will continue ad infinitum.

I am going to call a local auto-breaker and ask what they do with plastics from recycled cars. It is just possible that they might accept the seat for putting though their shredders.. we shall see..

Canada bans Marmite

Unbelievable..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25867613

There is talk of meat products in the article but that can’t apply to Marmite because Marmite is entirely vegetarian.

Personally, I think that Canada is just jealous, and to be honest, only Brits know what to do with it. Here in Canada, you find Marmite in the BAKING section in grocery stores because the jar has mention of yeast on the label..

Too funny.. bordering on idiocy, actually..

McDonalds fast food..

I paid a visit to one of the outlets yesterday, and ordered a Big Mac and a Signature wrap Combo.

Fast it wasn’t. Five minutes to produce a Signature Wrap that included the equivalent of ONE ‘Janes’ chicken finger and a tiny amount of salad.

The burger patties in the Big Mac were smaller than the average cardboard drinks coaster found in bars, and were the driest looking things I have ever seen.

Were it not for the fact that my grand-daughter likes the play areas, I would NEVER revisit a McDonalds again.

The standards are low, the value questionable. Way to go, Ronald, scamming millions of people every day while aggressively defending your business MO.

It sucks and you know it..

Kool-aid..

Not being born and bred in North America, there are some expressions that go by me like they were never said. One is ‘been at the Kool-aid’.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew that it was a drink, but it is only in the last two days that I have been at close quarters with a sachet (packet) of the drink mix.

So, you get a pitcher and add one cup of cold water, the contents of the sachet and one cup of sugar!!! One whole cup? Are they kidding or what? Maybe less? How about I add a couple of teaspoons or maybe none at all.

Why is this product being marketed with the instruction to use a whole cup of sugar?

If it is designed to taste ok with a whole cup of sugar added, presumably it will taste like dirt with less sugar. I added very little sugar, and my grand-daughter didn’t drink the whole cup of Kool-aid. After she left to go home with her mom, I tipped the rest of it away. Says it all, doesn’t it.

I don’t care if Kool-aid has been around since 1927. There is NO WAY that I will ever let my grand-daughter pick up another packet of this stuff. I would sooner she forgot about the brand name altogether.

Apparently, there is a sugar free version of Kool-aid. Great stuff, well done. So now the makers don’t have to sell sachets like the one on the picture, do they..

North Americans, I call on you to boycott this product if you value your child’s health..

It’s the toy..

This is what the kids want when they go to McDonalds, and the worst of it is that the toy has almost zero play value after about five minutes.

Studies in Canada have shown that if the toy was to be included in more healthy meals on the menu, the kids would go for the healthy menu.

Yeah right. My experience with my granddaughter is that she only wants the toy and to play on the McDonalds climbing frames. Eating is down to taking tiny bites of food, and I have to do a deal with her on the number of bites that she has to take.

McDonalds say that they are not responsible for obesity in Canada, but there is no doubt in my mind that they are partly responsible.

If kids really did like the food, one might see them in Harveys or Burger King, but that is not the case because those two companies do NOT offer toys or have play areas at any of their sites.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the food at McDonalds looked interesting, but it doesn’t. The kids burger is limp and tiny, both meat content and the bun. It isn’t even particularly cheap either.

Personally, I would like to see the removal of the toys and the play areas, but parents eager to take the easy way out like them.

The other gripe that I have is with the cleanliness of the play area equipment. Is it cleaned down regularly? I doubt it very much, and here are kids crawling around the floor and the equipment, and then picking up food in dirty hands to eat it. Maybe it’s as well that many of the kids don’t eat anything while in the area.

It would be better if food was NOT allowed in the play areas. At least parents could then control the eating part better by not letting the kids play until a reasonable amount of food has been consumed.

McDonalds pay lip service by including apple slices and a yoghurt in each happy meal, but that is about all that it is. If we had any sense, we would not take our kids to McDonalds at all.  

Eight glasses of water..

The myth states that the average fairly active person needs to drink eight glasses of water per day. http://www.snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp

The current thinking is that maybe eight is over the top in view of the fact that we get water from sources other than drinks. http://www.cbc.ca/news/health/story/2012/06/08/water-eight-glasses-myth.html?cmp=rss

This assumes that we are eating food which already has a high water content and that we are preparing the food in a way that preserves the water content.

Raw vegetables or those cooked in water (boiled) will retain their water content. This does NOT include microwaved vegetables where the recommended amount of water to add does not ever cover all of the vegetables. In fact, the added water invariably ends up as condensation on the inner sides of the microwave. There will still be some, but wrinkled vegetables are a sign of dehydration, and dehydrated vegetables are hardly going to hydrate the person consuming them.

Fruit is an excellent source of water too UNLESS it is used to make preserves and only eaten in processed ‘preserve’ form or where alcohol, a known dehydrator, is added.

Modern day living is all about ‘fast’, and while raw fruit is fast, it tends not to feature too high in the diet of many people and is expensive in countries or regions where it does not grow on local trees.

Vegetables are traditionally disliked by many children, and the dislike can continue throughout a lifetime. In the old days when I was a kid, vegetables were boiled, and baked potatoes were wrapped in foil which preserved some of the moisture. Grilled and microwaved vegetables are not the same and do not deliver the moisture of their boiled counterparts.

So, should we drink eight glasses of water per day? Is the myth really the truth?

My advice… Always try to have a glass of water handy when you eat. Drinks with caffeine are ok but caffeine dehydrates to some degree, so back it up with water at some point. Alcohol dehydrates for sure, especially if you drink enough to the point of being sick, and you will definitely have to back it up with water.

Drink when you are thirsty and if your preferred drink is not cutting it, get some water because that always will. There is no good alternative to a glass of clean, plain water.

Oh, and one last thing, only drink eight glasses of water if there is no food available, and try to get something to eat as soon as you can because water alone will flush out the sodium in you, and despite claims that salt is bad, we all need some in our diet..

Enjoy..

Tobacco companies face $25 billion lawsuit

“A groundbreaking trial gets under way in Montreal on Monday against three tobacco companies which face a $25 billion (R189bn) lawsuit for allegedly failing to adequately warn smokers of the dangers of cigarettes.

Plaintiffs have filed two separate class actions against Imperial Tobacco, JTI-Macdonald and Rothmans Benson & Hedges in the Superior Court of Quebec.

The plaintiffs accuse the Canadian tobacco companies of hiding research which has established a link between smoking and serious health problems like cancer.”

Players please.. You’re never alone with a Strand.. I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel.

Of course the tobacco manufacturers advertised their products as good to use. Tell me of a manufacturer that doesn’t.

My paternal grandfather had lung cancer back in the 50’s. He had smoked Woodbines (an un-tipped British brand) for years but was told to give them up in 1944. He did that, but the cancer still got him in 1957. He was one of many.

We don’t smoke because it does us any good in real terms. We smoke because, in our heads, we believe that they calm us down. That is exactly what they do by numbing the nervous system to some degree. And yes, they are addictive.

So what’s with this crap about ‘nobody told us’?

We knew from the first few inhalations that they were doing us no good but we still persisted. Those first puffs wouldn’t have got us addicted, but the PERSONAL choice to continue the practise ensure that we all succumbed.

Recently, there has been a study which suggests that patches and counselling don’t help in the quest to quit. So make the same kind of personal choice as you made as you choked your way through your first cigarette.

Hey, I didn’t say ‘we’ for a reason. You’re on your own with this one. I wasn’t with you when you started and don’t expect me to be there when you quit.. 

Sodium = 24%

Can any foodstuff where almost a quarter of its weight is Sodium be any good for anybody. I am not talking about a bag of potato chips, by the way. This is on the back of a pack of Presidents Choice Mediterranean Chicken.

Apart from having salt added, it has these too..

• Sodium lactate has a mild saline taste. It may be used in shampoo products and other similar items such as liquid soaps as it is an effective moisturiser.
• Sodium diacetate, usually in combination with lactates, is widely used by the meat packing industry as an excellent anti-microbial preservative. Vinegar taste on potato chips or tacos can be achieved by adding 0.1% sodium diacetate.

As an added treat for Type 2 Diabetics, it also has Dextrose added.

• Dextrose, commonly called glucose, d-glucose, or blood sugar, occurs naturally in food, and is moderately sweet. It is a monosaccharide (basic unit of carbohydrates, C₆H₁₂0₆) and has a high glycemic index (digested carbohydrates ability to raise blood glucose levels, also called Gl) ranking at 100.

On the front of the pack, it states that there are no added nitrites. Is this because two other Sodium compounds have been found which do the same job. The two compounds above have been passed as safe, but then so have nitrites.

Loblaws will think that I have it in for them, but I don’t. All processed foodstuff is the same, and all manufacturers will be looking for a way to re-word the labelling such that it appears to be better for us.

I can never see a time when North America or the UK will ever stop charging a premium for healthy food. If I won the lottery, I would scarper back to Spain where people still eat decent stuff and one has to pay a premium to buy the crap that kills us..

Informative but deceitful..

This is the state of food labelling in Canada.

I watched CBC’s Marketplace last night. It was all about lousy labelling. You know the type, full of health claims, little logos which suggest a healthy option. They had 10 products tested, and the #1 culprit was a meat product.

Maple Leaf’s ‘Natural Selections’ came under fire over wording on the front of the packaging. There is an ingredient on the front which seems innocuous enough called ‘cultured celery extract’ which is………….. NITRITES.

It urns out that there is as much nitrite in Natural Selections as there is in the cheaper Maple Leaf cold cuts, so how can it be healthier?

Maple Leaf and most other food producers know that the average shopper will be caught out by false or deceitful claims if the right kind of wording and logos are applied to the front of the packaging. Even the colour of the packaging can make a difference.

But wait.. Is it entirely the fault of the food producers? Well, the deceit is for sure, but not the food stuff or what is added to make it last in packaging.

If you give families the choice of a grocery store which always has a good choice of food stuffs always available regardless of the time of day, or run the gauntlet of having to shop in maybe five different small specialized stores but not always get what is required, they will choose the large grocery store almost every time.

The ONLY way to package processed food stuffs or any foodstuffs such that they last is to add PRESERVATIVES.

Foodstuff manufacturers try to ensure that their products will still look like foodstuffs when the package is opened. The manufacturers do their best to keep it properly before shipping, the shipping people do their best to keep it properly before delivery to stores, stores do their bets to store and display properly before it is sold, but after it is sold, there is no telling what will happen to it.

There are so many shoppers who are ill-informed about how to store foodstuffs. It is amazing that more people aren’t poisoned daily.

Food is bought at the beginning of a shopping trip and then left in a vehicle for an unspecified amount of time while other store types are visited, but if these people are challenged, 99% will say that it should be ok. When the foodstuff finally makes it back home, it may sit around for a while, and when it is finally put away, stuff that shouldn’t be put in a refrigerator often will be, and stuff not suitable for freezing will be put in the freezer. All of the people will expect the foodstuff to still look and taste like it would if it was absolutely fresh.

It is the way that people want to shop and sheer ignorance and unwillingness to learn how to store food properly that forces food manufacturers to add ingredients which will give us all cancer long term.

In North America, there is no way to turn back the clock. The entire food process is so entrenched, and all of the small food retailers who did have the knowledge and skills are gone.

To anybody reading this from outside of North America, take note. If you don’t want to subject your family to medical conditions which may terminate lives early, don’t buy processed food. Stay loyal to the small corner store which still sells preservative free food.

Avoid processed meats, mass produced bread in polythene bags, anything with health claims all over it. Instead of buying ready prepared meals, make them up yourself. It can be fun, and is much better for you. 

Is it real?

I don’t know about you, but I really detest polythene packed sliced white bread. It may be a miracle of mass production, and it may contain all of the ingredients which go to making bread, but bread it most definitely isn’t.

I recently ate a couple of slices of Dempster’s Smart16, and like almost all other white sliced loaves, it had a distinctive taste which I did not recognize as being bread. I sometimes think that eating the wrapper would be more beneficial.

The manufacturing process includes ‘bleaching’ which is what accounts for the aftertaste for many people. See here..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flour_bleaching_agent

This is an interesting website too.. http://www.womenfitness.net/ugly_truths.htm

Should anybody be eating this stuff? I don’t think so. When I was a kid, we didn’t have bread like the above. It was all baked locally and for the most part was a pleasure to eat. Modern white sliced bread is just a convenience, and in my opinion an unpleasant convenience at that.

Wholemeal bread is not much better either when produced in the same way. If you are going to eat bread, try to buy locally baked. Many major grocery stores in Canada make their own, and the difference in taste and texture is night and day.

Do your kids a favour and stop giving them the crappy stuff. It is only marginally cheaper and will save your kids developing health problems later in life which will cost them more than just money.

Note that while I have mentioned the Dempster name, ALL mass produced bread is made to the same standards, and should be avoided at all costs. As long as people buy this stuff, the manufacturers will have no problem supplying it. They don’t care as long as they make money.

Bad news on the health front..

The preponderance with pre-packaged, reconstituted products in North America is alarming, and it is no wonder that so many have health issues.

I have recently been diagnosed as being a diabetic type 2, and I blame it on the food that I have been eating for the last eight years. Before coming to Canada, I ate a southern European diet, almost all fresh and no crap like pizza, burgers and other reconstituted junk.

In all of my travels, apart from the UK where many have adopted the North American fast food way, I have never come across so many people with so many health issues.

Everything in North America has to be fast, not just at pizza and burger joints, but also in preparation at the food processing plants.

If you want a healthy life, make a stand and stop buying anything which has been reconstituted from mechanically recovered processes.

I watched a bit of Jamie Oliver’s program on TV and watched as US school boards took legal action to prevent the guy even being allowed in school cafeterias, let alone the kitchens. Absolutely deplorable on all counts..

I know that the word ‘conspiracy’ is a dirty word in the US, but I really do think that there is a conspiracy between the food producers and health providers. Nobody seems to be willing to change, and resistance is put up because nobody wants to lose out financially.

Get your heads out the sand, people. Your governments do NOT care. Food producers do NOT care. Health providers thrive on your illnesses and diseases.

Health is entirely in your hands, and never forget it.

More on ‘Cold cuts’..

As discussed in another post, cold cuts sold in packages have an excessive amount of preservatives in them. Look on the packs.

OK, so maybe you think that getting cold cuts from the deli counter of your favoured grocery store will be better. Think again, because it is a false assumption.

Metro deli counters sell cold cuts which do not have the harsh taste of the packaged stuff. I assume that there is some preservative in them, but just not as much.

This is NOT true of Loblaws deli counter. They have TWO variants for sale. The cheaper shaved cold cuts are every bit as bad as the packaged hams, chicken, turkey etc. If you want nitrate free cold cuts, you have to pay between 80c to a dollar more for the more brightly labelled meats.

None of the items on a deli counter have labels showing what is in them, and NEVER assume that they are better for you. Ask to taste a piece first before committing to buying.

Fish.. Is it safe to eat?

I bought a pack of frozen Basa fish recently. To be honest, I had no idea what type of fish Basa was, but I knew that it was not part of the Cod family. While I was bread crumbing, the consistency was slightly rubbery, so I looked it up on the Internet.

Yikes. Malachite Green, human excreta, industrial waste, was their nothing to which these fish were not subjected? Naughty Asians for making those poor old Basa eat nasty stuff. You almost put me off eating any of the pack at all, and I am not sure that I will ever buy more.

The above made me read up on fish generally, and this is part of what I found.

http://ottawa.ca/residents/health/living/nutrition/healthy_eating/fish_facts_en.html

http://www.intraspec.ca/fish.php

http://www.fas.usda.gov/ffpd/Newsroom/Articles/Catfish__Basa_5-07.pdf

http://www.epi.state.nc.us/epi/fish/safefish.html

http://www.iaglr.org/scipolicy/issues/contamseds.php

Yikes. Canada and the USA are no better. Both countries seem more interested in how it affects the economy more than how it affects health, but why wouldn’t they?

With all of the testing that can be done, we can learn what is good and bad, but don’t kid yourself that  pollution of environments is anything new. The industrial Victorians didn’t give a hoot what they let out into water tables, rivers  and oceans. I doubt that  fish has been safe for the last two hundred years and more.

So, does fish pass my ‘safe’ test?  The jury is out presently. Land based farm animal diets puts them in the ‘suspicious’ category too.

What is a foodie like me to do? Ignore all of the warnings, or go hungry for days at a time? Maybe if I over cook everything, that will help. If it doesn’t, I will end up in an obituary list in the local newspaper.

Yikes..   

CPAP sucks..

Well, actually blows, but you know what I mean. For those who don’t know, CPAP = Continuous Positive Airway Pressure, is the gold standard for the treatment of Sleep Apnea, and it is administered via a machine which pumps air through a humidifier into a mask which has to be strapped to one’s face.

Sounds like torture? You betcha.

Modern CPAP machines are very quiet, so noise is not the issue, but the mask and tube? There are two types of mask, nose only nose or ‘nose and mouth’.

The nose only mask pressurises when you turn on the main box, and you can feel the pressure too. Although breathing out is slightly harder than without, it is not as bad as one might imagine. However, open your mouth and you feel a sudden gush of air from your nose into your mouth, and if you close your mouth quickly, your cheeks puff up like a hamster.

Coughing produces similar results, and can wake you up, which is totally the opposite of what the machine should be achieving.

Anybody who suffers with claustrophobia should not use the nose and mouth mask. It is horrid, but only slightly worse than the other one.

I sleep with one hand under my face, and always have done. The tube gets caught up sometimes, and the mask moves. Air rushes into my eyes generally which, surprise surprise, wakes me up.

If you suffer with a blocked nose, CPAP is useless. If you suffer with claustrophobia as I do, it is distressing. I used to look forward to getting to sleep. Now I wait and wait until I am really tired.

It is easy to see why most give up on these infernal torture machines. They are not nice.

There are other ways to get over sleep apnea and, at the next meeting, I will discuss the problem with the sleep study doctor. I will never ever get used to CPAP. 

An update to the previous post..

I looked at all of the packs of cold cuts in my local Loblaws store here in London Ontario. Apart from two, Maple Leafs Natural Selections and a Presidents Choice Prosciutto, all of the other packs of ham, salami and similar products produced by:

• Ziggy’s
• Piller’s
• Mastro
• President’s Choice
• Schneider’s

contained the following preservatives:

• Sodium Phospate
• Salt
• Carageenan
• Sodium Ascorbate
• Sodium Nitrate

You might think that the contents of the packages came off the same productions lines and were just packaged according to which retailer was going to sell them. There may well be some truth in this, but I do not know for sure.

What I do know is this. We are eating all kinds of crap.

Now for a question.

If Sodium Phosphate is a substitute for Sodium Nitrate, why do both sodium types appear in the SAME foodstuffs?