Our Feeders Are Killing Us

    I recently was in the bustling Charlotte Airport terminal with only an hour between connecting flights. I was hungry but the lines at the fast-foot places were far too long, so I ducked into a shop and grabbed a three-dollar bottle of water, a small bag of baked chips, and a PB and J sandwich on wheat bread in a neat wedge-shaped clear plastic container labeled “City Point Market ‘Fresh Food To Go’”, believing I was making reasonably healthy choices. I ate half the chips and half the sandwich before walking quickly to my departure gate.

    When I got home, I still had half the sandwich left. Naomi read the ingredients. She had to use a magnifying glass because the type was that tiny. You’d expect a short list, right? Peanut butter, jelly, and wheat bread. Wrong.

    She read out 45 mostly chemical ingredients to me, some of them difficult to pronounce and including well-known unhealthy stuff like high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oil, and witchy potions to retard spoilage. Forty-five ingredients.

    She then compared the numbers of my expensive grab-and-go concoction with a typical PB and J sandwich we’d make at home using Nature’s Own Wheat Bread, Polaner All-Fruit Jelly with no additives, and “Simply Peanuts” butter with no additives.

Here were the results:

            My Grab-and-Go Concoction                           Our Homemade sandwich

Calories             760 (almost half a day’s load of 2,000 c)            380                                                     

Total Fat            32 g (almost half a day’s load)                            17 g

Saturated Fat     7 g                                                                           2.5 g

Total Sugars      31 g                                                                         14 g

Sodium               860 mg (a whopping third of a day’s load)        355 mg 

    I concluded that the York Street Caterers Company of Englewood, New Jersey, must have been trying to kill me.

    From my years working as a volunteer pilot for the environmental Neuse River Foundation, I’d learned that the American diet is knowingly polluted with harmful chemistry. Hogs, for example, are fed antibiotics to prevent rampant disease in the packed corporate barns, and the meat retains those antibiotics. Eat enough pork and you’ll develop a resistance to antibiotics. Crops of all kinds are drenched in harmful pesticides. Soft drinks are loaded with way too much sugar. And we’ve long known that sodium levels in soups and meats and nearly everything else are far too high. But I never thought an innocent looking PB and J sandwich would be almost lethally laced with chemistry.

    Check out the YouTube documentary “Eating You Alive.” It’s frightening what the typical American diet of fast food and processed food (in other words, the vast majority of food in the typical neighborhood supermarket) is doing to us over time.

    Then read any healthy eating book by Dr. Joel Fuhrman or his like.

    We don’t have to let our feeders kill us. We only have to read their legally mandated labels, even if we have to use a magnifying glass.

    And change our diet habits accordingly.

Phil

www.philbowie.com

Check out my guaranteed non-poisonous suspense series of novels available--each for less than the cost of a probably poisonous fast-food lunch--in print or Kindle on Amazon. Easy buy links through my website. People seem to like them.