Dye-Free in a Brightly Colored World

A few weeks ago Cordy came home from summer camp with bright blue streaks down her legs and blue around her mouth. I could already smell the artificial raspberry flavor, but still asked her about how she ended up covered in blue. “We had popsicles at camp!” she happily explained.

“But sweetie, you know brightly colored foods aren’t good for you.”

“Yeah, I know,” she replied, “but it was a special treat!”

And that special treat left her distracted and less in control for days. Sigh.

When summer camp started, I asked about bringing in dye-free foods for snack time. They said we could but that it probably wasn’t necessary, as they were making efforts at healthy snacks this year and couldn’t think of any that would have dyes in them. Fruit, water, all-natural lemonade, graham crackers, cheese sticks, etc – all safe for Cordy to eat. With that knowledge, and a reminder to everyone about Cordy needing to avoid food dyes, I assumed we were in the clear when it came to snacks.

I guess I didn’t factor in “special” treats. Her class takes several field trips, and as a result they sometimes get a treat for the kids when they’re out and about. Cordy is aware that artificial food dyes make her feel bad and that she shouldn’t eat them, but she’s also a seven year old who, at that age, would have to show the impulse control of a zen master to say no to a treat when everyone else was getting one.

We consider her reaction to artificial food dyes an “allergy” even though it technically isn’t. It’s listed on all of her medical forms under allergy simply because it’s too complicated to provide the full explanation. Allergy produces a better response from others than “sensitivity” so that’s what we call it to get their attention. Only it still gets overlooked by teachers and caregivers far too often. It’s not life-threatening so therefore it isn’t given the same consideration as a peanut or shellfish allergy.

But we know it’s there. We’ve seen the difference between Cordy exposed to food dyes and Cordy without them. When she’s dye-free (and by that I mean hasn’t had any in over a week), she’s calmer, better able to focus, and seems more present in our world. Her repetitive behaviors (pacing back and forth, flapping, etc) are decreased, too. She’s more in control of herself and seems happier as a result.

When she was younger, people tried to tell me it wasn’t the dyes – we were just giving her too much sugar. So I set up my own test. I kept her dye free for over a week, then gave her a sucker (rock candy) that had no dye in it – pure sugar only. No reaction.

Days later, I gave her the same thing, only this one was bright blue with artificial coloring. Forty minutes later, the signs were there: she couldn’t sit still, she was irritable, emotionally out-of-control, and she wasn’t as interactive with us. She stayed like that for days, just from one little blue sucker. It was a frightening realization.

We’re not perfect with keeping her dye free, but we try to minimize the damage. Still, it’s very hard to find treats free of dyes. Annie’s makes fruit snacks without the artificial coloring. And Welch’s has all natural freeze-and-eat juice popsicles that look very similar to the artificial junk ones.

I also was recently told about Unreal, a line of candy that is free of artificial food dyes, but still looks and tastes like many of the popular candies we see everyday. It’s just rolling out, so it’s still hard to find, but I did manage to track down and buy it at Michael’s craft store. Their version of M&Ms? Really good.

So after the blue popsicle incident, we brought a bag full of Cordy’s treats to her summer camp to hand out to her when others are getting treats she can’t have. She’s usually pretty understanding about it, especially when we can give her some of the more yummy treats. But I know she longs for Starburst or a sucker now and then.

I only wish more food manufacturers would remove the bright food dyes from their foods. There’s no nutritional value to these dyes and there are natural dyes that can be used instead. Don’t believe me? Look at McDonald’s new Cherry Berry Chiller. That drink is about as bright pink-red as it could possibly be without glowing. I thought for sure it was one giant cocktail of dyes and artificial flavors, but it isn’t. It gets all of its color from fruit and vegetable sources, and the flavoring is all natural fruit juice and puree.

Who expected that?  If McDonald’s can do it, there’s no reason other companies can’t do it, too.

I hear more and more stories of parents who are discovering their kids are sensitive to food dyes. I know we’re not alone in experiencing some kind of adverse reaction to dyes. Research has linked it to hyperactivity. Some kids get rashes and eczema from red food dye. Others have stomach discomfort. Others – like Cordy – have various behavioral changes. And these dyes are in everything the kids come in contact with, from candy to mac and cheese, to chewable pain relievers and even toothpaste.

Europe has already figured this out, and most foods there are artificial-dye-free or contain warnings about having artificial coloring int them. What’s taking the United States so long to catch up with a public health issues that other first world countries have already known and addressed?

For now, we continue reading every label and try to educate those who care for our daughter about the importance of keeping her dye-free. It’s not that we’re crunchy green parents against all processed foods (because our grocery cart would prove we’re not) – it really is a matter of our daughter’s health.

Photo credit: Photos by *Micky 



When Life Gives Your Zucchini, Make Zucchini Muffins

My mom visits an Amish auction about twice a month, where she can pick up fresh veggies, baking supplies, and sometimes even baked goods for a price far cheaper than any grocery store.

The last time she was there, I asked if she could pick up a couple zucchini for me – just a couple. I had plans to grow some of my own this year, before I discovered Cosmo is part dog and part goat, with a special taste for vegetable plants. Zucchini have been fairly rare at the grocery, and I was thinking a batch of muffins sounded good.

When my mom brought me my zucchini on Sunday, I was a little surprised to find 14 zucchini in the box! Even better, she bought the entire box for $1.50 AND she was disappointed because if she had waited for one of the later boxes she could have paid only $0.75! I reassured her that she still got quite a deal.

So now my fridge is filled with zucchini and I’m in baking mode.

Yes, you only see ten. Four have already been consumed or turned into the muffins behind them.

I’ve posted my zucchini muffin recipe before, but I think it’s worth re-posting. I’m domestically challenged, but even I can put these together and make them taste delicious. And I love that I’m getting my kids to eat vegetables. The first time I made these I didn’t tell the girls what was in them until they already liked the muffins. Now that they’re already hooked, they ask for zucchini muffins all the time. Parenting win!

Should you ever find yourself with a fridge full of zucchini, or even just a couple of them, give this recipe a try!

Zucchini Muffins

Ingredients:

3 cups flour (I prefer whole wheat flour)
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon*
* substitute nutmeg or other spice here if you have a cinnamon allergy (my girls have mostly outgrown their intolerance to it)
3 eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup natural applesauce (no sugar added)
1/2 cup white sugar
1 cup brown sugar *
* you can use all white sugar if you like, but I prefer the addition of brown – go with your preference
3 teaspoons vanilla extract (REAL vanilla ONLY)
3 cups grated zucchini
1 cup chopped walnuts

Directions:

1. Grease two muffin pans. (I use cooking spray.) Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

2. Sift flour, salt, baking powder, soda, and cinnamon together in a bowl. Don’t have a sifter? A whisk works well enough.

3. Beat eggs, oil, applesauce, vanilla, and sugars together in a large bowl. Add sifted dry ingredients to the creamed mixture, and beat well. Stir in zucchini and nuts until well combined. Pour or spoon into greased muffin pans, filling each space only 2/3 to 3/4 full to allow for expansion. (OK, I’ll be honest here. I top them off for bigger muffins.)

4. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean. Cool in pan on racks for 20 minutes. Then remove muffins from pan and completely cool.

Cooling them while still in the pan is important. I found if I take them out of the pan too soon, they become hard on the outside.

If you’re going to keep these muffins around for more than a few days (good luck – they go fast here), store them in the fridge. A quick 5-10 sec. microwave zap will warm them up again.

They can also be frozen if you choose to make several batches due to getting 14 zucchini all at once. Just sayin’.

Also, while I may call it “my” recipe, it’s actually a slightly modified version of a zucchini bread recipe on AllRecipes.com. Changes to the original recipe included cutting the oil in half and substituting applesauce for the other half, using whole wheat flour, cutting back on the amount of sugar and using brown sugar. I’ve tried several variations on the recipe, including substituting 1/2 cup of ground flax seed for 1/2 cup of flour, and nearly every variation has still turned out well. It’s a great recipe to play with and make your own.

Added bonus: after baking these, your entire house smells delicious for the next 12 hours!



Walk With The Animals and HOOFit for Health

One perk of blogging is that I occasionally get advance notice of cool, local family programs and activities. Compared to all of the emails I receive for events in New York and California, I’m thrilled when local organizations find me.

Earlier this week I was invited to come out to the zoo for the kickoff of the HOOFit program, sponsored by OhioHealth and the Columbus Zoo. The idea is simple: we’re all looking for ways to keep our families healthy and fit, so why not incorporate fitness into activities we already do? The HOOFit program is a series of guided walks through the zoo this summer, where you’ll be joined by an OhioHealth doctor who will discuss common health issues and answer questions as you stroll and visit the animals.

The kickoff event was a lot of fun. Several local bloggers were invited to attend, along with the media and representatives of the zoo and OhioHealth. (And I was briefly interviewed for TV – yikes!!)

@cbusmom, social-media-maven Mikaela Hunt from NBC4, and me

And we got to see Jungle Jack Hanna up close and personal. While he’s a local celebrity, you may also know him from appearances on late night TV with his animal friends. (Or from his old Saturday morning TV show, long before most animal conservationists were on the media scene.)

Also? He just had double knee replacement! Understandably, he didn’t walk much with us.

There were a few animal guests in attendance, too, happy to pose for photos with their fans.

 Baby kangaroo! All together now: awwww.

I didn’t need anyone to tell me that going to the zoo is a workout. We have an annual pass, so we like to go to the zoo frequently. Anyone who has been to the Columbus Zoo will tell you it’s huge and involves a lot of walking. We rarely see all areas of the zoo in one trip, because it’s just too much to take in, and because Mira will eventually slow down and remind us, “Guys! I’m tired because I have LITTLE legs!”

She’s right – to start the walk we were all given a card showing the minimum number of steps you’d take going through each area of the zoo.

The guide breaks it down for small, medium, and large strides, proving the Mira’s little legs really do mean she meets her daily step requirement long before we do.

HOOFit was a great reminder that some of the everyday activities we do can actually be great for promoting family fitness, too. Ask my kids to go exercise, and they’ll probably groan and refuse to do it or lose interest in a few minutes. At the zoo, however, they’re taking thousands of steps as they laugh and play and learn about the animals. (And it’s a good excuse for me to get some activity in, too.) It’s like a health activity cloaked in fun. Sneaky, eh?

This guy preferred swimming to walking.

All participants in the guided walks are given a bracelet pedometer to track your steps through the zoo. (Children will receive shoelaces instead of a pedometer.) You can sign up on Facebook to attend one of the guided walks, or if you can’t make it on those dates, you can pick up a map/step chart at the zoo for your own solo walk. Strollers and people of all ages are welcome on the walks.

I’m already signed up for the next HOOFit walk on June 21 – it’ll be my birthday, but starting with a great walk with the zoo animals in the morning is pretty good way to celebrate, I think.

Anyone else want to join me?

Full disclosure: I was invited to this event by OhioHealth and the Columbus Zoo. I received a t-shirt and wrist pedometer while there, and a healthy snack bag at the end of the walk. All adult participants who come for the walks can receive a wrist pedometer as well.



The Real Nutrition Problem For Our Kids

Occasionally when the kids are very helpful, we treat them to a meal out. The other day it was Steak N Shake, a favorite for both Cordy and Mira thanks to the paper hats and 50’s cardboard cars they can build. A favorite for me, too, for their amazing Frisco burger.

I know eating out is often not a healthy option – it’s an occasional treat. But even when they order macaroni and cheese or a grilled cheese sandwich, they often choose a side dish of a fruit or veggie. Cordy is obsessed with salads, so she’ll always choose a salad for her side. And Mira often asks for applesauce.

But this time, the restaurant was very busy and they brought Mira’s applesauce out still sealed in it’s cup. I happened to look at the label before she ate it and couldn’t help but stare at what I saw.

Apples, followed by super-sweet high fructose corn syrup and then even more sugar in the form of corn syrup. What the hell? Has this country forgotten that apples are naturally sweet? They don’t need to be laced with added sweeteners to convince kids to eat them.

If you want to fix the problem with nutrition for our kids, start by returning to real food. Meat that you can recognize as meat – without meat byproducts as filler. Fruit without added sugar. Foods without artificial dyes added to brighten them up. Real whole grains. Real cheese without added fillers. Ketchup made from tomatoes, spices and vinegar with almost nothing else. Fruit snacks that are actually made from fruit and not “fruit-flavored” snacks.

I’m a child of the 80’s. (Well, born in the 70’s but most of what I remember was from the 80’s.) I grew up with some of the most artificial food out there. Popsicles that were nothing more than sugar water and a whole lot of artificial coloring. Doritos with bright orange cheese powder that stained everything. Snack cakes filled with enough saturated fat for an adult’s daily intake. Sugar-filled drinks that matched the bright neon clothing we wore.

Sure, I survived it all, but I can guarantee you it didn’t make me any healthier. If anything, it was a big contributor to my later obesity. I also can’t be sure my diet of artificially created food didn’t shave years off the end of my life, or plant the seeds for later cancers. I guess we’ll have to wait and see the outcome.

We, as a society, know better now. Nutritional science has shown that natural is almost always better than man-made and we’re thankfully seeing the pendulum swing towards a return to real foods.

However, the one area that is lagging behind is food geared towards our youngest and most vulnerable population, especially in the markets of restaurant foods and school lunches. Food marketed towards and produced for kids still contains higher amounts of added sugar (especially in the form of high fructose corn syrup), added fat, processed and artificial ingredients, and gallons of artificial food dyes.

Back to my original question: why does applesauce need added sugar? The answer is it doesn’t, and food manufacturers should be ashamed of themselves for continuing to pump additional calories and ingredients into foods that don’t need it. It’s no wonder some kids would refuse to eat an apple – when your taste buds have been taught to seek out unnaturally sweeter, brighter colored foods, a naturally sweet apple probably doesn’t have as much appeal.

We’re letting our kids down. They deserve better than this. And not just the kids who have parents that can afford the “better” stuff – this needs to change from the top brands all the way down to the bulk products sold to schools and institutions. Walking down the aisles of your grocery store, you shouldn’t have to look hard for the “natural, no added sugar” applesauce – that should be the norm.

Change is already happening. Schools are being allowed to opt out of pink slime for their government lunch programs and many parents, now being made aware of the issue, are putting pressure on their local districts to no longer use this processed meat filler. McDonald’s recently changed their Happy Meals to reduce the portion of fries and automatically include apple slices. (And yes, fast food nutrition still has a long way to go, but that’s a great stride forward.)

Companies aren’t going to alter the way they do things without a demand for change, though, and that’s where we come in. It’s our responsibility not to settle for what is being served to our kids. We need to send the message to food manufacturers that we expect better and if they can’t deliver we will take our money to a competitor who will put the health of our children above cheap materials. We need to keep pressuring the government to demand the highest standards for school lunches, which for many poor children are the only chance they have at a complete meal each day.

Our children are a barometer of the health of the nation. What are we seeing? An increase in allergies, obesity, asthma, ADHD, autism, behavioral issues, etc. Of course it’s not all because of food, but I’d guarantee that if kids were raised on a healthier, more natural diet that the severity and incidence of these issues would be far less. My best example of this is Cordy – when kept away from artificial food coloring, she has fewer outbursts and meltdowns and is more “present” in her daily tasks. Add the dyes back in, and it’s like I have a different child.

Look, I’m not trying to take away ice cream, cookies and candy. My own kids would probably stage a revolt against me if I did. I’m just asking that we consider the quality of the ingredients in our food – even the treats – and demand that our food go back to the basics. Ice cream should be milk, cream, eggs, sugar and natural flavoring. Bread should be made with whole grains and not processed, bleached flour.

I don’t want to completely ban artificial ingredients and added sweeteners, but in an ideal world they would be harder to find on menus and grocery shelves than foods without them. There is a place for them, but that place isn’t in nearly every food product we push towards kids.

Read the ingredient labels on your foods. If there’s something on the label that you don’t believe should be in that food, or even if you aren’t sure why it’s there, take five minutes to contact the company and tell them how you feel. Ask them to take high fructose corn syrup out of their applesauce. Ask Kraft to make their mac and cheese without FD&C Yellow #5 and Yellow #6 when the same product they make in Britain is just as brightly colored with paprika and beta carotene.

As for Mira’s applesauce at Steak N Shake? I explained to her what was in it and offered to let her have a container of her natural applesauce back at home instead. She happily chose to wait until we got home for the natural applesauce.



I Will Not Stress Eat

The last seven days have been a mountain of stress for me. Just when everything was swimming along in my life, it was announced that my shift is being eliminated at work. I’m unsure yet as to what this will mean for my employment overall, but you can imagine how news like this can affect you emotionally. Especially when you just had new living room furniture delivered to your house the weekend before, with a large credit card bill coming due.

The first day I was in shock. When I was given the news that morning, I couldn’t sleep. (I work nights, in case you’re new here.) Once I did get a few hours of troubled sleep, I woke up and couldn’t even face the idea of dinner with my family. It’s hard to think I’d ever be too upset to eat, but that was the case for the rest of the night.

I barely ate the next few days as well. The reality slowly sunk in, and while the shock has worn off, the uncertainty at the moment is still very present. It will likely be a few more days before I’ll know the future of my current job situation.

Suddenly the five stages of grief makes sense to me. I went through denial and anger already, and while bargaining doesn’t really make sense in this situation, I know depression is just around the corner. Here’s where I get worried, because depression rarely shows up at my door without a bag of powdered donuts, a pint of ice cream and an extra large spoon. (And as an adult depression also generally brings a box o’ wine along as well, making sure to get the most alcohol for the value. Depression is thrifty like that.)

Before this news hit last week, I was celebrating a new milestone. I finally broke through the 166 pound curse and had officially made it to 165. Since then I’ve dipped down to 164 and even saw 163.8 on Saturday morning. (But won’t officially count it since I know it was partially due to lack of eating while I lived in my head for a few days.) Breaking that plateau was such an accomplishment for me and gave me hope that by the end of my Slim-Fast challenge I’ll reach that goal I set of 158.

So I now find myself scared that all of this uncertainty will destroy the progress I’ve made and send me to the bottom of a fried-dough-and-sugar binge. No matter how much I’m told this job situation had nothing to do with our performance, I still feel like a failure. (Not helped by the news that most of the other two shifts were made company employees while I’ll remain a contractor if I still have a position.) The negative emotion cycle feeds into itself, with any slip on my part interpreted by my brain as more proof of my inability to succeed at anything, which then leads to more self-destruction.

This week’s challenge for myself is to resist the negative self-talk in my head and not give in to stress eating. No matter the outcome of this situation, I can’t let it affect all that I’ve worked for in my personal goals. I’m trying so hard to love myself and reshape myself into a model of good health, and I’m already 80 pounds from where I started.

Failing myself because of the business decisions of men in expensive suits sitting in fancy offices far removed from what I do would be silly. However, that extra large piece of chocolate cake looks like the perfect medication to soothe your soul when your feelings are hurt and depression is holding a chair for you and offering you a fork.

I can be stronger than this situation.

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