Why You Should Pack Your Own Lunch

Yesterday, I was in the lunchroom microwaving my homemade chili and people watching when it dawned on me that making my own lunch had a benefit I'd never thought of before. I mean everyone knows a homemade lunch is significantly healthier and less-expensive than any pre-packaged meal in a box could ever hope to be, but until yesterday I'd never stopped to consider the other downside to those pre-packaged meals: How much trash they create.

I mean, you've got the box they come in, the microwavable dish covered with plastic wrap and some meals have even more garbage in the form of heating aids, plastic utensils and such. Even if any of that material is recyclable, the chances that the workplace will actually recycle it is slim to none, so all of this trash goes into our landfills. That is a lot of trash!

So today when you're eating lunch, I'd like you to consider the real price of eating a pre-packaged, microwave ready meal.

• The Supermarket Price--As I mentioned, these meals are much more expensive than something you can create in the kitchen. You could make your lunches and then save the money you'd have spent on pre-packaged lunches and go on a pretty awesome vacation at the end of the year.
  
• The Environmental Price--These meals create a huge amount of waste.
• The Health Price--These meals aren't good for you (no matter what the box says), so you wind up spending more at the doctor's office to treat illnesses and diseases that are perpetuated by an unhealthy diet. Processed foods take a toll on your health. Look at the ingredient list, it's longer than War and Peace and full of ingredients with scary names that you can't even pronounce. Look at the amount of sodium and sugar in these meals. Can you say diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, mood disorders, and cancer?
  
• The Caloric Price-- These meals are high in calories and fat. I call them fat attracters because they love to encourage your body's fat cells to expand, expand, expand.
  
• The Hunger Toll-- Pre-packaged meals are often full of empty calories that will make your insulin levels spike. An hour after consumption, you'll crash and will feel like crap. Because your insulin levels are so low, you will feel hungry and will now have to consume more food, more calories to solve the problem! This gets expensive!
  
• The Emotional Price--By not preparing your own food, you miss out on the sense of accomplishment that a homemade meal gives you. Also, you know these meals aren't good for you, so somewhere deep down inside you feel a tiny bit guilt about eating them.
  
• The Taste Price--No prepackaged meal is going to taste as good as what you make at home.
  

The moral of the story is to consider making your own lunch. It really doesn't take more than 5 minutes. If you're short on time in the morning, then make your lunch the night before. If you're short of time the night before, get up a couple minutes early and make your lunch in the morning.

Quick, easy, nutritious and filling lunches are as simple as taking two seconds to scoop some of the leftovers from dinner in a container.

Quick, Nutritious Lunch Suggestions:

• On the weekends, throw something together in the crockpot. When it's done, put it into individual serving size containers. Freeze all but two containers (one for Monday and one for Tuesday). This way you and your family can grab and go for a week or two.
• Make a sandwich.
• Toss some salad into a bowl with some garbanzo beans.
• Pour the low-sodium broth of your choice into a bowl with some frozen mixed veggies. Voila, soup.
  
• Beans and rice. It can't get much easier than this.
  

Happy lunching!

Stay Young, Take Care of Your Teeth

I was driving to work the other day when NPR did a fascinating report on what happens to our faces as we get older. You know the signs, bags under the eyes, sagging cheeks, disappearing chins...

Plastic surgeons have been addressing these issues for years. They used to believe the sagginess was a result of the loss of soft tissue, the loss of the baby fat gives the face it's round and cherubic look. But apparently there was an entire new dimension to aging that's been missed for years.

Apparently, plastic surgeons were wrong. David Hunt, a physical anthropologist from the Smithsonian Institute's National History Museum discovered that sagging skin wasn't the only cause of facial aging. He discovered our skulls actually lose bone as we age.

Our eye sockets get larger and we lose bone in our cheekbones and our jaws. This is why the traditional pull the skin tight type of plastic surgery doesn't work on everybody. It's also why a lot of plastic surgeons tend to use cheek and chin implants. Fascinating.

What's really cool is that people who have all of their teeth, lose jaw bone mass slower than people who've lost their teeth. The reason is that when you lose your teeth, the body absorbs the unused sockets, which is why so many toothless old people look slack-jawed.

If you're interested, read the original article by Deborah Franklin, As Our Skin Sags with Age, so do Our Bones.

And when you've finished, be sure to check out my Suite101.com articles.

Food, Inc. and the Genetic Manipulation of Our Food

Friday night, Justin and I watched the documentary film, Food, Inc. It is an interesting, eye-opening and frightening documentary about the world of modern farming and the corporatization of our food supply. The film explores:

• Industrial chicken, beef and pork farming and how current practices are increasing the risk of exposure to e-coli and salmonella.
• Why genetically modified foods are not required to carry a GMO label.
  
• How seeds are being genetically modified, then patented.
• How and why farmers who prefer traditional methods of farming are losing their farms.
• The future of our food supply.
• How it's a very realistic possibility that in the future, all seeds used for crops will be controlled by corporations and genetically modified in some way.
  

Perhaps what was so scary about the film is that it's a few decades too late. GMO crops are making a lot of people a lot of money and once that happens, there's no going back. There's a saying that goes something like this.

"When they came for the Jews, I did nothing. When they came for the blacks, I did nothing. When they came for the Hispanics, I did nothing. When they came for the Asians, I did nothing. Then when they came for me, nobody was left."

I fear that this is going to be the case with our food supply. It's possible and probable that in our lifetimes, no naturally produced foods will exist. Our only choices will be to eat GMO foods because there will be no alternatives, no non GMO seeds or animals left. Then what? Do we have a new branch of science that focuses on genetically modifying humans so they are resistant to the diseases and illnesses GMO foods create? Sounds like science fiction, but how many sci-fi novels and TV shows have accurately predicted our future?

After the film, we looked at our container of Silk soymilk. It used to advertise "no GMO ingredients." That label is now gone, perhaps since 80% or 90%, I can't remember the exact number, of all U.S. soybeans have been genetically modified. Scary.

Then at the grocery store, we found a container of soymilk that advertised being made from GMO free soybeans. Cool or maybe not. I trust labels about as much as I trust salespeople, so I thought about this one for a moment and wondered.

Since advertising is what it is and the FDA doesn't require GMO labeling, then wouldn't it be legal for a company to genetically modify seeds and then claim that the actual finished product, the soybeans, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, etc. was not genetically modified?

And worse, GMO foods haven't been on the market for that long so there have been no long-term studies on their safety. There have been some short-term studies which have had some pretty freaky results.

All of it makes me wonder if this is why so many kids are getting sick so often, why so many more people are getting cancer, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, inflammatory conditions and are having issues with food allergies and intolerance. I mean seriously, before the mid 1990s who'd heard of gluten intolerance? Now the grocery stores have a special gluten-free section. Could this be from pesticides, herbicides or the genetic manipulation of our food? Could it be that our bodies can't recognize what we're eating anymore because it's not natural? Just a little food for thought.