An Avalanche Begins To Form

I had no idea what was in food. Before I made my little revelation, the only time I would look at a label was to check if something was loaded in saturated fat or carbohydrates. That was the type of label checking I was involved in, largely because I tried to eat "healthy" and by healthy I mean foods that weren't going to send me to fat camp. I think this is true for a lot of people, and have since had this discussion with several people about the meaning of "healthy" food. Everything is low-carb, low-fat, etc. with the intent to keep couch potatoes less round than they'd be otherwise, or give gym-types the ability to scarf down ice cream without feeling intense guilt or turning bulimic - and this is "healthy" food nowadays - diet coke, crazy fake sweeteners. Essentially everything is fragmented food, processed to hell, and full of things you'd feel bad about spraying bees with, but it is all done in the name of "health". Well, I've had a redefinition of healthy. And lately, it has been an eye opener. Everything changed for me since I have begun shopping in my new world, a universe where I no longer eat processed food, things filled with sugar, preservatives, artificial this - things that end in - ose, ax, anything with a Z in it, and so on. And let me suggest you try to go to the store and find products without preservatives, refined sugar, weird ingredients you cannot spell or pronounce. Good Luck. Seriously, you will need it. There is one section which is quite easy to accomplish this end - I call it the "produce" section. Fresh fruits and vegetables - their ingredient list is only one item long and you can always pronounce it. This, however, is where the ease ends. For instance, I made some homemade hummus and had been eating it on sandwiches, but thought for a nice snack that some crackers would be a good choice to eat it with. Well, I reached into our cupboard and pulled out a box of Triscuit's, which before I had liked. I casually look at the ingredient list, which is really long for something pretty simple, and it's full of preservatives and then I see "mono sodium glutamate". Wait....MSG? Seriously, in Triscuits? Yeah, MSG in Triscuits - and I found it in a jar of dry roasted peanuts later that afternoon. Peanuts. That should be a one ingredient food. "Hey friend, what is in your jar of peanuts?" - and they reply "Peanuts" - that is in an ideal world, however, if you asked them for real, they'd have to spout of a list of odd ingredients better suited for a college laboratory. So, to continue - I head to the store, the health food store mind you, not the mainstream supermarket but the independent health food shop - and tried to buy something as simple as crackers, but to no avail. Sugar, preservatives, and odd ingredients were cooked into them instead of whole ingredients. I searched forever until I found a type of cracker, which was from Norway, (thank you Norway!) which had only whole wheat flour, a little salt, and water. And they are just as good as any other cracker. And that was just crackers, so think how the rest of my shopping trip went. Not very inspiring. However, from everything that appears to set us back, we can usually find a way to redirect it into a positive.

I continued on in my shopping trip to my next item: bread. When I got to the bread aisle there was nothing there that seemed very good to me. Part of my anticancer diet is to eat whole grain breads instead of white. I searched for whole grain breads, and on the surface they had them, and I could have picked up one and left the store feeling accomplished. However, on a label check these pseudo-healthy breads were nothing but fakers. They all had words like: organic, whole grain, etc on the front to reel people in, but were full of refined sugar, preservatives, and some even had high-fructose corn syrup in them. For a cancer patient, these are all big negative signs flashing over and over. I picked up loaf after loaf, only to find the same result each time. I put the last loaf down and slid out of the store, feeling like I had a mountain to climb here, since there was no option at the grocery store. Well, I got home and began looking through bread recipes online. It was a bit of a challenge at first to find one without sugar and that was whole-grain, but after a bit of a search I found a lot of them. So, today I embarked on my first bread-making adventure. Surprisingly, it wasn't that tough - although I do have a breadmaker at my disposal which helps with the whole mixing/kneading part. Here is the recipe I used:

And, I can say, it turned out fantastic. It was on par with one of those $6 organic loaves of fresh baked bread that you buy at a fancy bakery. It wasn't too difficult - you add the ingredients, let the machine mix & knead it (I only used the machine for the mixing part, however, I wouldn't have been upset to do it by hand) - then took the dough out, let it rise a bit, popped it into the oven, and 40 minutes later had a nice loaf of bread. Not that difficult. And look at the ingredients - flour, water, seeds, butter, salt, yeast, and honey. End of story. This, I may say is the end of the story for me as well as far as buying bread from the store. For pennies on the dollar I can bake fresh bread which fills the house with a wonderful smell, is free of weird additives/preservatives, and is in line with my new anticancer foods menu. It's not really a tough decision, is it? So that was my small victory for today. I made myself a sandwich with it later (fresh vegetables and homemade hummus) and felt pretty good about the ordeal (it didn't hurt that the bread was fantastic). I've accomplished two small goals - making things from scratch/not eating foods with preservatives and abiding by the anticancer diet. It may seem like a small step, but if you combine some of the steps so far - having a pot of green tea per day, a glass of pomegranate juice in the morning, making vegetable soup/stock from scratch with lots of cancer-fighting foods - and then you add homemade bread to it - a picture begins to slowly come together. A lifestyle change, a migration from a world of cheap, quick meals that come from factories, packed in cellophane to a diet consisting largely of food you made yourself from scratch, all of which contain cancer fighting properties. Not a bad turnaround for two weeks and running.