High (Fructose) at the Supermarket

I rarely do anything all the way. And being healthy is not something I'm about to start doing all the way.

I hit the gym 3 times a week - at the most - and I eat my fair share of fast food - Burger King, Checkers and Five Guys Burgers and Fries - and Mint Arctic Mochas and Iced Soy White Mochas ... the list goes on. I can not forget about the Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, White Cheddar Cheez-its and Buttermilk Ranch Pretzel Bits.

But when I am trying to be healthy in between all of this nonsense, which honestly is more often than not, I'd like to not be tricked.

For instance, my ham and cheese or turkey and cheese or roast beef and cheese sandwiches with lettuce and mustard are a good start for my lunch. But I recently discovered that for whatever reason, my bread, 9 times out of 10, has had high fructose corn syrup.

So, you may be saying if you've been living in a cave!?!

Studies, and the expanding waistline of Americans and other countries switching to ever more pre-prepared foods, point toward links in childhood obesity and all the health risks associated with that through life.

It's the same thing that makes soda and thousands, maybe millions, of other foods such an unhealthy part of a well-balanced diet.

This high fructose corn syrup is even in most applesauces.

So my trips to the supermarket now include a look at the labels over price. All-natural applesauce and 100% natural whole grain breads, just to name a few.

Today as I was sitting and eating my lunch, I glanced at the label of my Breyers yogurt to find it contains aspartame. So no more Breyer's for me.

Now, aspartame has been linked to increased headaches and other brain problems, both in studies and just from conversation I've had with people who once drank diet sodas regularly. I have enough problems with headaches to not need my yogurt causing more.

It's yogurt. It's supposed to be a health food. It's all over the label: Probiotic blah blah blah; lose weight with this product as a part of a well-balanced eating regiment, blah blah blah. Healthy doesn't seem to be the case with its side effects on the thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of eating people in the U.S. alone.

As I've said before on this blog, my switch to soy milk over cow's milk is largely to blame on hormones pumped into the cows that gets into the milk I used to drink before it regularly tore through my intestinal track.

It might be more expensive to go all natural and 100% route, but not having to tack on more toilet paper, headache medicine and the like means I may be getting it all for a reasonable amount in the end.