Previously: Shevi and Gitty talk about fats and reading food labels. She then spends time with her father.
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I had become a fat warrior. Mommy agreed to take me with her to the supermarket as Mrs. Rich had suggested, and together we became food detectives. At our last session we had learned all about how sneaky food manufactures were; they snuck all sorts of foods and chemicals into their products to trick our brains into wanting more and more, and made it hard to feel full. For example, Mrs. Rich told us about food companies spending huge amounts of money researching the “perfect” amount of sugar, salt and fat to make our brain light up with excitement and crave more. “Perfect” being relative, of course. They might taste just about perfect, but the amounts of harmful things in those foods were wreaking havoc in our bodies. Which brings me back to my being a Fat Warrior. Every item Mommy picked off the shelf quickly became my next target. I would scan the list of ingredients. Mrs. Rich told us to stay away from foods that had many ingredients, especially if they were mostly things I couldn’t pronounce. So anything with long lists or full of words I couldn’t say (which were additives and chemicals) went back on the shelf, and we bought the tomato sauce that had an ingredient list which said simply: 100% tomatoes. Instead of our usual brand of peanut butter, which contained lots of sugar, salt and unhealthy fats, we bought the peanut butter that listed peanuts as the only ingredient. Peanuts are full of healthy fats and very high in protein, which is important for growth and muscle building. But when so much junk is added to them, they can clog up our arteries and cause heart disease, and high levels of salt cause high blood pressure and can cause strokes. Once again I felt so lucky that I was getting to learn about the right way to eat – before it was too late.
Mommy seemed to be thinking the same thing, because she murmured, “It’s so good that you and the other kids are getting such a head start on this healthy eating thing. I wish I had known these things when I was your age.” I grinned back at her as we headed over to the produce section to load our cart up with tons of fresh, colorful fruits and veggies. I piled bright orange carrots into a bag, thinking of the delicious, spicy carrot chips Mommy had made the week before. Mrs. Rich had encouraged Mommy to branch out in the spice aisle and try all sorts of fun, exotic flavors to get our mouths tingling without loads of sugar and salt and MSG. MSG is the name of a harmful chemical called monosodium glutamate, which is added to lots of different foods to make them taste yummier. Spices, on the other hand (if they are really only 100% spice and not mixed with salt and MSG themselves!), could add tons of zing to food, and are healthy at the same time! Now our pantry boasted a wide variety of Indian, Asian and Middle Eastern spices that Mommy was learning to use.
“Now let’s move onto the grains and starches,” Mommy said when she added the last bag of fuzzy peaches to the cart, which was getting heavy. “Remember what we learned about grains?”
I sure did. I had been surprised to discover that the versions of grains we were familiar with were really only part of the grain – in fact, the unhealthy, empty part. Mrs. Rich explained that the other part of the grain – the bran – was the part that was filled with fiber and protein and minerals. But because people suddenly decided that white food was prettier, food companies started stripping the healthy part of the grain away from the other parts and making all the foods – snacks, crackers, breads, and cereals – from the empty part of the grain. By eating these new, “white” foods, we were losing out on all the natural goodness of the grain.
Mrs. Rich encouraged us to get “whole grain” more often than the white variety. At first, she said, we should make the move gradually. Like ¼ whole grain noodles to ¾ white. And then slowly increase the amount of whole grain until we were eating 100% whole grain, filling our bodies with all the nutrients that Hashem had put into the grains. An additional benefit to the whole grain, I discovered, was that I found it is much more filling. As opposed to eating more crackers than I could count, I was discovering that I actually felt full after just a few. In the bread aisle, Mommy discovered bread that was made with light whole-wheat flour, so it didn’t appear dark and off-putting. It looked more or less like the normal bread we’d always bought, but it was so much better for us. Mommy and I smiled at each other as she put it in the cart. We were doing this, together.
To be continued…
