2. BHA and BHT

Butylated hydroxyanisole and butylated hydrozyttoluene are used to preserve common household foods. They are found in cereals, chewing gum, potato chips, and vegetable oils. They are oxidants, which form potentially cancer-causing reactive compounds in your body.

3. Propyl Gallate

Another preservative, often used in conjunction with BHA and BHT. It is sometimes found in meat products, chicken soup base, and chewing gum. Animals studies have suggested that it could be linked to cancer.

4. Monosodium Glutamate (MSG)

MSG is an amino acid used as a flavor enhancer in soups, salad dressings, chips, frozen entrees, and restaurant food. It can cause headaches and nausea, and animal studies link it to damaged nerve cells in the brains of infant mice.

5. Trans Fats

Trans fats are proven to cause heart disease. Restaurant food, especially fast food chains, often serve foods laden with trans fats.

6. Aspartame

Aspartame, also known by the brand names Nutrasweet and Equal, is a sweetener found in so-called diet foods such as low-calorie desserts, gelatins, drink mixes, and soft drinks. It may cause cancer or neurological problems, such as dizziness or hallucinations.

7. Acesulfame-K

This is a relatively new artificial sweetener found in baked goods, chewing gum, and gelatin desserts. There is a general concern that testing on this product has been scant, and some studies show the additive may cause cancer in rats.

8. Food Colorings: Blue 1, 2; Red 3; Green 3; Yellow 6

Five food colorings still on the market are linked with cancer in animal testing. Blue 1 and 2, found in beverages, candy, baked goods and pet food, have been linked to cancer in mice. Red 3, used to dye cherries, fruit cocktail, candy, and baked goods, has been shown to cause thyroid tumors in rats. Green 3, added to candy and beverages, has been linked to bladder cancer. The widely used yellow 6, added to beverages, sausage, gelatin, baked goods, and candy, has been linked to tumors of the adrenal gland and kidney.

9. Olestra

Olestra, a synthetic fat found in some potato chip brands, can cause severe diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and gas. Olestra also inhibits healthy vitamin absorption from fat-soluble carotenoids that are found in fruits and vegetables.

10. Potassium Bromate

Potassium bromate is used as an additive to increase volume in some white flour, breads, and rolls. It is known to cause cancer in animals, and even small amounts in bread can create a risk for humans.

11. White Sugar

Watch out for foods with added sugars, such as baked goods, cereals, crackers, sauces and many other processed foods. It is unsafe for your health, and promotes bad nutrition.

12. Sodium Chloride

A dash of sodium chloride, more commonly known as salt, can bring flavor to your meal. But too much salt can be dangerous for your health, leading to high blood pressure, heart attack, stroke, and kidney failure.

Courtesy of Healthy Cooking Tips

Chef Tim Johnson

Remember...Grace is upon you so eat to live!

Your Brain

Mind and Spirit

How to Buy
Nutritional Foods

Many chefs feel a responsibility not only to provide such foods, but also to help educate their customers about nutrition. They welcome the challenge to develop menus that offer good health as well as good taste. They may, for example, supplement their regular menus with “spa” menus or “healthy” menus offering special dishes low in fat, calories, and sodium.

Or they may include such dishes on their regular menus and highlight these items with asterisks or other symbols. On the other hand, many operators insist, “I’m running a restaurant, not a hospital.” Not a few restauranteurs have had the experience of investing time and money in developing nutritional menus that people claimed they wanted, only to have the menus fail because no one ordered them.

It is important for cooks to find some kind of balance. Restaurants are businesses and can be successful only if they offer people what they want. Preaching to customers about the dangers of eating the wrong foods is not a formula for success.

On the other hand, a responsible operator will work to prepare healthful, nutritious food that people will order because it is flavorful and enjoyable to eat in addition to being good for them.

Gone are the days when vegetarians were served up a plate of iceberg lettuce and a dull-as-dishwater baked potato. With the growing variety of vegetarian faux-meats like bacon and sausages and an ever-expanding variety of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants, vegetarianism has taken the world by storm.

With World Vegetarian Week here, without further ado, are the Top 10 reasons to give vegetarian eating a try, starting now!

1. Helping Animals Also Helps the Global Poor
While there is ample and justified moral indignation about the diversion of 100 million tons of grain for biofuels, more than seven times as much (760 million tons) is fed to farmed animals so that people can eat meat. Is the diversion of crops to our cars a moral issue? Yes, but it's about one-eighth the issue that meat-eating is. Care about global poverty? Try vegetarianism.

2. Eating Meat Supports Cruelty to Animals
The green pastures and idyllic barnyard scenes of years past are now distant memories. On today's factory farms, animals are crammed by the thousands into filthy windowless sheds, wire cages, gestation crates, and other confinement systems. These animals will never raise families, root in the soil, build nests, or do anything else that is natural and important to them. They won't even get to feel the warmth of the sun on their backs or breathe fresh air until the day they are loaded onto trucks bound for slaughter.

3. Eating Meat Is Bad for the Environment
A recent United Nations report entitled Livestock's Long Shadow concludes that eating meat is "one of the ... most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global." In just one example, eating meat causes almost 40 percent more greenhouse-gas emissions than all the cars, trucks, and planes in the world combined. The report concludes that the meat industry "should be a major policy focus when dealing with problems of land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity."

4. Avoid Bird Flu
The World Health Organization says that if the avian flu virus mutates, it could be caught simply by eating undercooked chicken flesh or eggs, eating food prepared on the same cutting board as infected meat or eggs, or even touching eggshells contaminated with the disease. Other problems with factory farming -- from foot-and-mouth to SARS -- can be avoided with a general shift to a vegetarian diet.

5. If You Wouldn't Eat a Dog, You Shouldn't Eat a Chicken
Several recent studies have shown that chickens are bright animals who are able to solve complex problems, demonstrate self-control, and worry about the future. Chickens are smarter than cats and dogs and even do some things that have not yet been seen in mammals other than primates. Dr. Chris Evans, who studies animal behavior and communication at Macquarie University in Australia, says, "As a trick at conferences, I sometimes list these attributes, without mentioning chickens and people think I'm talking about monkeys."

6. Heart Disease: Our Number One Killer
Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases, including the United States' three biggest killers: heart disease, cancer, and strokes. Drs. Dean Ornish and Caldwell Esselstyn -- two doctors with 100 percent success in preventing and reversing heart disease -- have used a vegan diet to accomplish it, as chronicled most recently in Dr. Esselstyn's Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, which documents his 100 percent success rate for unclogging people's arteries and reversing heart disease.

7. Cancer: Our Number Two Killer
Dr. T. Colin Campbell is one of the world's foremost epidemiological scientists and the director of what The New York Times called "the most comprehensive large study ever undertaken of the relationship between diet and the risk of developing disease." Dr. Campbell's best-selling book, The China Study, is a must-read for anyone who is concerned about cancer. To summarize it, Dr. Campbell states, "No chemical carcinogen is nearly so important in causing human cancer as animal protein."

8. Fitting Into That Itty-Bitty Bikini
Vegetarianism is also the ultimate weight-loss diet, since vegetarians are one-third as likely to be obese as meat-eaters are, and vegans are about one-tenth as likely to be obese. Of course, there are overweight vegans, just as there are skinny meat-eaters. But on average, vegans are 10 to 20 percent lighter than meat-eaters. A vegetarian diet is the only diet that has passed peer review and taken weight off and kept it off.

9. Global Peace
Leo Tolstoy claimed that "vegetarianism is the taproot of humanitarianism." His point? For people who wish to sow the seeds of peace, we should be eating as peaceful a diet as possible. Eating meat supports killing animals, for no reason other than humans' acquired taste for animals' flesh. Great humanitarians from Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi to Thich Nhat Hanh have argued that a vegetarian diet is the only diet for people who want to make the world a kinder place.

10. The Joy of Veggies
As the growing range of vegetarian cookbooks and restaurants shows, vegetarian foods rock. People report that when they adopt a vegetarian diet, their range of foods explodes from a center-of-the-plate meat item to a range of grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables that they didn't even know existed.

Sir Paul McCartney sums it all up, "If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That's the single most important thing you could do. It's staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty."

So are you ready to give it a try?

Courtesy of Healthy Cooking Tips

Chef Tim Johnson

Remember...Grace is upon you so eat to live!™

This Spinach Salad may be prepared before the serving, but the dressing for this Spinach Salad with Strawberries may be prepared few hours before serving.

Preparation

Fill medium skillet with salted water; bring to boil. Add chicken breasts, cilantro sprigs, and whole green onion; reduce heat to medium and poach chicken until just cooked through, about 20 minutes. Using tongs, transfer chicken to plate; cool. Add snap peas to same skillet; increase heat to high and cook until crisp-tender, about 1 minute.

Drain; rinse snap peas under cold water to cool. Discard whole green onion and cilantro sprigs. Coarsely shred chicken. Toss chicken, chopped cilantro, chopped green onions, snap peas, and next 3 ingredients in large bowl. Whisk ponzu, vinegar, oil, and ginger in small bowl. Add dressing to salad; toss to coat. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Courtesy of Healthy Cooking Tips

Chef Tim Johnson

Remember...Grace is upon you so eat to live!

In December of 1965, while James Schlatter, a chemist for G.D. Searle & Company, was working on an anti-ulcer drug candidate he accidentally discovered aspartame. He was recrystallizing aspartame from ethanol when the mixture spilled onto the outside of the flask he was using. Some of the powder landed on his fingers. Schlatter discovered the sweet taste of aspartame when he absent-mindedly licked his finger later. He realized that the sweet taste must have been the aspartame.

The first report of the discovery of the artificial sweetener was in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. It stated:

"We wish to report another accidental discovery of an organic compound with a profound sucrose (table sugar) like taste... Preliminary tasting showed this compound to have a potency of 100-200 times sucrose depending on concentration and on what other flavors are present and to be devoid of unpleasant aftertaste."

G.D. Searle has spent the last 40 years aggressively and recklessly promoting their accidental discovery with total disregard to the evidence they have gathered that show how dangerous and toxic this chemical is to human beings.

As early as 1984, studies were performed that clearly indicated the toxicity of Nutrasweet (aspartame) to living organisms. In 1984, the State of Arizona completed studies showing that aspartame in carbonated beverages can break down into free methanol (among other things) in 99°F temperatures. Compare this to human beings' average body temperature and we begin to see a problem.

On May 13, 1998, the University of Barcelona produced a study clearly showing that Aspartame was transformed into formaldehyde in the bodies of the living creatures, and that upon later examination the formaldehyde had spread throughout the vital organs of their bodies.

The chemical breakdown of Aspartame in the human body is as follows:

Methanol, from Aspartame, is released in the small intestine when it meets the enzyme chymotrypsin.

The methanol is then converted to formaldehyde. The formaldehyde is next converted to formic acid. Formic acid is toxic and is commonly used as an activator to strip epoxy and urethane coatings. Phenylalanine and aspartic acid (90% of Aspartame) are amino acids normally used in the synthesis of protoplasm when supplied by the foods eaten. When unaccompanied by other amino acids, they become neurotoxic.

The FDA has established at least 92 medical/health problems that have symptoms associated with Aspartame. These include abdominal pain, anxiety attacks, Arthritis, Asthma and asthmatic reactions, bloating, edema , blood sugar control problems, brain cancer, breathing difficulties, burning eyes or throat, burning urination, chest pains, chronic cough, chronic fatigue, confusion, death, depression, diarrhea, dizziness, excessive thirst or hunger, flushing of face, hair loss or thinning of hair, headaches/migraines, dizziness, hearing loss, heart palpitations, hives , hypertension, impotency and sexual problems, insomnia, irritability, joint pains, laryngitis, marked personality changes, memory loss, menstrual problems or changes, migraines and severe headaches, muscle spasms, nausea or vomiting, seizures and convulsions, slurring of speech, swallowing pain, tachycardia, tremors, tinnitus, vertigo, vision loss, and weight gain.

Aspartame disease mimics the symptoms and many times worsens the following diseases:

Fibromyalgia, Arthritis, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson's Disease, Lupus, Diabetes, Epilepsy, Alzheimer's Disease, birth defects, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Lymphoma, Lyme Disease, and Attention Deficit Disorder.

These studies were destroyed and kept from the public and from health investigators.

Courtesy of Healthy Cooking Tips

Chef Tim Johnson

Remember...Grace is upon you so eat to live!

You Thought MSG Was Bad? At least they admit that it's in there... well, mostly. Have you picked up a can of soup lately and noticed that the sodium levels are lower? Seen a label that said, "No MSG"? How about realizing that there is less sugar on the label of your favorite ice cream? Believe it or not, this is cause for concern.

This article has been especially hard to compose. "Why?", you may ask. There is simply not much information to be found on the subject. It has taken weeks of internet research to uncover the smidgeon of information that has been acquired.

A relatively young company, Senomyx, may be responsible for the sodium and sugar levels falling in your favorite grocery store item. How are they doing this without affecting the taste? The truth is, they may be putting chemicals into your food right now without you even realizing it and without telling you.

And guess what? They don't have to.

Senomyx has contracted with Kraft, Nestle, Coca Cola, Campbell Soup to put a chemical in foods that masks bitter flavors by turning off bitter flavor receptors on the tongue and enhancing salty and sweet flavors. This would allow the companies to tout claims such as "less sugar" or "lower sodium" by reducing the actual sugar and/or salt by approximately half, but the foods will retain the same level of sweetness or saltiness when they touch the tongue by fooling your brain.

All of the companies, although admitting the exclusive contracting rights, decline to identify which foods and beverages the chemical additives have been or will be added to.

These chemical compounds are not required to be listed separately on food labels. On the contrary, they will be lobbed under the umbrella of "artificial flavors" which is already found on most food labels.

The foods that seem to be most in jeopardy of an insurrection of these new chemicals: soups, juices (fruit and vegetable), ice cream, and sauces.

"We are helping companies clean up their labels," said Kent Snyder, chief executive of Senomyx.

Mark Zoller, Senomyx's chief scientist, says that his company has used the human genome sequence and identified hundreds of taste receptors. Senomyx's chemical compounds enhance those receptors to heighten the taste of salt or sugar. Under this premise, they go on to claim that their newly added chemicals are completely safe because they will be used in tiny quantities of less than one part per million whereas artificial sweeteners are used in 200-500 parts per million. This fact alone allows them to forgo the rigorous FDA approval process when introducing new food additives into the marketplace. Attaining the status of GRAS (generally recognized as safe) from the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association for their most advanced product that replaces MSG, took this fledgling company less than an 18 month time frame by introducing a safety study of rats conducted for 3 months.

Executive Director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Michael Jacobson, commended Senomyx's strides to reduce MSG, salt, and sugar but warned against introducing a new chemical additive into the food supply without strenuous testing. "A three-month study is completely inadequate," he said. "What you want is at least a two-year study on several species of animals."

After pouring a total of 30 million dollars into research and development, the companies that have invested into Senomyx's products have been secretive, to say the least, about their involvement within the company. Some, like Kraft, have declined to divulge any specifics regarding their relationship with Senomyx but instead stated that Kraft was committed "to reducing the sugar and salt levels in many products

Courtesy of Healthy Cooking Tips

Chef Tim Johnson

Remember...grace is upon you so eat to live!

We are what we eat, for better or for worse.

First, we go to a natural/organic food market and buy most of our food there. Organic is our first choice. Natural is the second choice.

"Organic" means that 95%+ of the ingredients are organic, excluding water and salt. "Natural" means at least 75% are organic.

What we can't find at a natural/organic food market, we buy at an upscale supermarket.

Most metropolitan areas have one or more upscale supermarkets. There are usually a number of downscale supermarkets, too, with Wal-Mart Supercenters usually the market share leader in the downscale segment.

When we discuss organic food with people, they always ask, "aren't organic foods too expensive?" Answer: not really. They're more expensive to buy, but you need less of them to feel satisfied. On a net basis, then, with organic foods, there is no real increase in your total food cost.

Many people asking the "too expensive" question cheerfully squander their food dollars on worthless, dangerous items like sodas, cold cereals, white bread, bottled water, junk meat, candy, baby food in jars, and bakery items - to name a few. People can save serious money by not buying these needless items, instead investing the savings into organic and natural foods, earning higher returns - better health and increased stamina.

Supermarkets today are sophisticated palaces of poisons. Their factory fresh "foods" come in cans and various kinds of packaging. They're loaded with excessive salt, sugar, toxic sugar substitutes, allergenic glutens, and questionable chemicals.

Sugar substitutes are particularly noxious.

* The most used is high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). It's in almost all packaged foods. It's used because corn is plentiful in the US, it's very cheap, sweet, and it significantly enhances people's appetites, thereby enhancing their waistlines, hips and chins and, at the same time, enhancing manufacturer profits.

* Aspartame (using brand names like Equal) is considered a leading toxin by professional toxicologists.

* Sucralose (Splenda is the big brand name) is a chlorocarbon, made by marrying chlorine and carbon molecules. Chlorine undermines the immune system.

So, avoid sugar substitutes, except for Xyitol and stevia.

What should you eat? Exercise guru, Jack La Lanne, on the "Larry King Show," answered that question recently, saying "If man made it, don't eat it." That says it all - very simply. We agree with Jack, age 93, and still able to work out strenuously for hours.

Not only is a supermarket a palace of poisons, it's also a perpetual P.T Barnum marketing circus. Barnum is famous for his quote, "there's a sucker born every minute."

Americans are vastly deceived when it comes to food.

They assume that the government (especially the FDA) would not allow manufacturers to make and market unsafe food. Wrong! Can you say, "campaign contributions for nice little boys and girls - senators and representatives - from agribusiness and huge food companies?"

I'm convinced that, similar to the cosmetics industry, the packaging of supermarket foods often costs the manufacturer more than the contents. The ambiance of today's upscale supermarkets is rather sad, if not bizarre. Examples:

1. Older people with poor teeth and poor posture shuffling along slowly, filling up baskets with soft foods (pudding, jello, white bread, cold cereal) to rot their remaining teeth even more and trash their brittle bones even faster.

2. Obese people waddling along laboriously and short of breath, pushing overflowing baskets of mostly snack junk food.

3. Small children lying on the floor screaming because Mom refuses to buy a worthless box of cold cereal, the package adorned by a monster or action hero.

4. Twenty-something women trying to stay slender, living on purchases of white wine and tasteless lettuce.

5. Working families and singles buying salt-laden, microwave boxed dinners for a fast meal.

6. My wife, Shirley, discovering an angel food cake with eight ingredients, including propylene glycol, a major ingredient in antifreeze.

Oh, well, it wouldn't freeze in the freezer, I guess, staying moist for 20 years perhaps. Thanks for small blessings.

7. And me, using a flimsy loaf of processed bread, standing in the isle and using the loaf as an accordion, squeezing it, and singing joyfully, pretending to be Lawrence Welk.

Upscale supermarkets offer more healthy foods than downscale supermarkets, which skillfully manipulate people with limited means, modest educations, and the pauper mindset with triple coupon "bargains" of huge bags of processed white flour, for example.

And, believe it or not, many poor inner city people have to buy their groceries at convenience stores, since no supermarket is nearby and they don't have autos. It's hard to be healthy consuming sodas and cupcakes for dinner.

Eat right, take nutritional supplements and vigorous exercise.

But if you eat poorly, health insurance, hospitals, doctors, synthetic drugs, exercise and supplements are all useless. If you refuse to stop eating poorly, it's a good idea to pre-plan your funeral now. Only an undertaker can give you the help you'll need, if you will not eat right.

If you put garbage in a can, it becomes a garbage can. Don't put garbage in your temple, your body.

Courtesy of Healthy Cooking Tips

Chef Tim Johnson

Remember...Grace is upon you so eat to live!

Have you ever wondered why companies use artificial colors? You might think it's because they want to make their food look good, but there's another reason -- a far deeper reason -- why companies use artificial colors to make their foods more appealing to consumers. Keep reading to learn what that is.

Why do foods with more vibrant, saturated colors look more appealing to consumers? Why does a bright-red apple look more appealing than a dull-red apple or a green apple? Why are foods sold to us in neon green, yellow and orange packages? The reason is that of the color of food speaks to humans' innate perceptions about the value of food items.

Humans are born with brains that are preprogrammed with the ability to learn language; or to recognize certain inherent dangers such as falling off a ledge. We also have all kinds of behaviors built in for survival. One of the survival strategies our ancestors developed was the ability to recognize foods containing usable energy or nutrition. They could walk through a field and instantly spot foods that contained potent, healing phytonutrients and calories that would give them usable energy, healthy brain function, boost immune function and boost overall survivability. The natural medicines found in food often appear in bright colors, and calorie-rich foods designed to appeal to primates (such as apples or berries) are also brightly colored. It is these colors that appeal to our built-in perceptions about the value of food. (Birds have a similar system and also tend to judge food by its color.)

Color is a reliable indicator of the healthful quality of foods. An apple that has red in its peel, for example, actually sends a message: "Hey, I'm here. I have some healing medicine in my skin." That's why humans are naturally attracted to more vibrant-looking apples. Berries, fruits, root vegetables and other foods broadcast similar messages through their own coloring.

Eating the rainbow diet
You may have heard of the rainbow diet, in which you eat foods of different colors. It is based on the idea that different foods carry different energies and provide different types of nutritional medicine. There is a real science to that, and an art as well. You can examine phytochemicals and their healing effects, and categorize them by color. There are foods that are purple, blue, green, yellow, red, orange, brown -- all the colors of the spectrum -- and each food has a different medicine. Our ancestors learned to recognize foods by their color, and they also learned that foods with more vibrant colors in their natural environment contain a lot more medicine.

For example, a red cabbage that is actually a dull grey doesn't look very appealing, but a purple cabbage with a saturated, bright-purple color looks fantastic. That's because we have an innate perception gauge telling us we should be attracted to these foods -- they are healthier for us, and the health quality is indicated by the saturation of the color.

This is what food-manufacturing companies are exploiting when they enhance colors artificially.

Food makers use harmful dyes to get you to buy
When you shop for oranges, you're looking for a bright, deeply colored orange. You don't want a yellowish orange, because that tells you it's not ripe; if it's not ripe, it hasn't developed all its medicine. (That's one reason why so much of the produce available in grocery stores lacks real nutrition these days -- it's all picked before it has a chance to ripen on the plant.)

Growers know about this color preference, so some of them -- in Florida for example -- hijack that instinctual process by dipping some of their oranges in a cancer-causing red dye that makes the peel look more orange. The FDA has banned that dye from use in foods, because it is a carcinogen, but they say it's okay to dip an orange in it, because people don't eat the peel. If a consumer is comparing two oranges -- one of them is yellow, and one of them is deep, rich orange -- most consumers are going to pick up the deeper, richer looking orange.

Food manufacturers use artificial colors because, when they make their foods more colorful, it turns on the light switch in our brains that says, "This is good stuff." We've been fooled; we've been drawn like a moth to a flame. If you took one nacho chip with flavors but no color and put it beside another nacho chip with the exact same flavors but lots of artificial colors to make it look more orange, and you asked people to pick which chip they think would taste better, almost everyone will choose the chip with the color. The color can actually fool your mind into thinking that these foods taste better.

Food colors are made from petroleum
Coal tar and petrochemicals are the sources of the artificial colors that go into our foods, and these artificial coloring ingredients are dangerous to our health. The human body was not designed to eat petrochemicals. You don't see people digging up petroleum and drinking it with a straw. That's not the kind of energy we're designed to run on. So why are we putting petrochemicals in our foods?

The food companies are doing it to sell a product and generate a profit, regardless of the health effects on consumers -- and the health effects have been worrisome. In fact, more than one artificial color has been banned and pulled off the market over the last several decades because it was ultimately found to cause cancer. The safety of those still allowed on the market is highly questionable.

Eventually, artificial colors used in the food supply will likely be outlawed because they contribute to all sorts of health problems, the most notable of which are the symptoms diagnosed as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a behavioral pattern often brought on by Yellow #2 food dye. Children are being fed these chemicals in such large quantities that they begin to have nervous system malfunctions that ultimately are misdiagnosed as ADHD, learning disabilities, or violent behavior.

If you want to reverse these so-called diseases in your children, one of the best things you can do is stop feeding them petrochemicals. That means you, as the parent, have to understand that your very instincts are being hijacked by food companies' use of artificial colors to sell their garbage products. It's automatic, it's innate and it's unconscious. You look at foods and you instantly evaluate them by their color. It's something that you can't stop doing because it's part of your perception hardware. Food companies know this and they exploit it to sell you unhealthy foods artificially colored to look nutritious.

How to defend yourself against dishonest food companies
So what's your defense against this? How can you take control over your own mind and make better decisions at the grocery store? You're taking the first step right now by reading this: you're educating yourself. All you have to do is take this information and apply it by reading ingredient labels. Look for artificial food coloring ingredients like Yellow #2, Red #5 or Blue Lake #40, and then avoid them. Don't buy those products. It's as simple as that. Instead, you look for natural food coloring ingredients. There are products colored with beet juice, a much healthier way to color food; annatto, a very healthy plant source; or turmeric, a fantastic herb with anticancer, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.

With a little checking around, you will discover that all the cheap, low-grade, disease-promoting products in the grocery store tend to use these artificial colors. You will also find that the same snack chips, processed foods, boxed dinner meals, and junk food made by the biggest food companies also contain refined white flour, MSG and hydrogenated oils. It's really no surprise they mostly all contain an artificial color of one kind or another.

Also, you should watch out for artificial colors in fruit drinks and candy. There are loads of artificial colors in candy, which makes for a very bad combination -- especially for children. If you give kids a load of sugar and petrochemicals together in the same meal, their nervous systems go crazy. That's why you have kids climbing the walls after feeding them candy and sugary drinks with artificial colors.

Another repeat offender in this category is "sport drinks," which are loaded with petrochemical artificial colors that have no purpose other than to make the beverage visually appealing to consumers. There's no nutritional value whatsoever to using artificial colors, which means most sports drinks are a complete waste of money: they're just salt water with sugar and artificial colors added. If you want a real sports drink, you should juice some celery and cucumber, or just drink coconut water. That's real replenishment.

The confectionery industry relies heavily on artificial colors to make its foods -- like cake and icing -- look appealing as well. Icing is usually made of hydrogenated soybean oil, which is a nerve toxin, combined with refined sugars, which are dietary poisons that cause diabetes. The petrochemical-based artificial colors are used to top it off. If you really want to commit nutritional suicide, eat a lot of icing. Get yourself some iced doughnuts, cakes and pastries, and load up.

You'll notice artificial colors in foods like blueberry muffins or blueberry bagels, too. Read the ingredients on blueberry bagels at your local grocery store next time, and you'll find that there are really no blueberries but plenty of artificial blue and green colors to create the impression of little blueberry bits. They can't even put blueberries in their bagels. They have to trick you with artificial colors.

Do you know what liquid they're using to hold the color? Propylene glycol -- the same chemical you put into your RV when you want to winterize it. It is antifreeze. You're eating antifreeze and petrochemicals -- and that's just the blueberry part. We haven't even gotten to everything else, like refined sugars, chemical preservatives and refined bleached white flour, which has diabetes-causing contaminants. A blueberry bagel is no longer a blueberry bagel. When you really understand what's in the foods, it's mind blowing.

Artificial colors sometimes find their way into salmon before it even becomes food
Artificial colors turn up in a lot of interesting places. Many salmon farms are adding artificial color to their food to make the salmon flesh appear more red because that's what consumers will buy. They'll buy red or pink salmon over grey salmon any day of the week because their instincts tell them deeper, richer colors are healthier. Imitation crab meat has artificial colors added to make part of the meat look red -- but at least the label includes the word "artificial," so you can avoid it if you read labels.

The biggest form of dishonesty across the entire food industry is the use of artificial colors that influence you to buy and consume foods that actually harm your health (such as snack chips made with MSG). The food companies have figured out how to hack into your perception hardware. They send one message to your eyes, but they manufacture foods out of something entirely different. The bottom line is that foods, through the use of artificial colors, are sending an incongruent message: "I'm a healthy food." But the reality is, "I'm harmful junk food."

These companies employ tens of thousands of food scientists in the United States alone. They figure out how to make foods more palatable and less expensive by using the cheapest ingredients possible while prettying them up with artificial food colors made from petrochemicals.

Food coloring from insects
I have one more interesting tidbit I'd like to share with you. You may be familiar with