How the FDA Has Let Me Down, Again

If you read my 25 Things, you'll see that aspartame gives me migraines. Aspartame is an artificial sweetner that my body responds to with vision loss and vomiting followed by a severe headache. I used to be able to avoid this neurotoxin by not eating anything labeled as light or diet. But, it is becoming so common that I have to read all food labels and I never eat homemade sweets at picnics.

My MIL is most put out by this. I recently gave her 6 pages of articles on why artificial sweetners are evil. This was my last resort after asking her repeatedly not to feed them to my kids or buy us food with rat poison aspartame. I won't bore you with the info, its easy enough to find. Unless, you are the FDA.

While the FDA is researching the evils of stevia, mercury is the lastest contaminant they have allowed to leech into our food system. I received this link from a special needs homeschool email list.

http://www.iatp.org/iatp/press.cfm?refID=105025

I do my best around here to avoid HFCS, but I don't always have time to cook from scratch or the money for alternatives. Example: Heinz ketchup w/ HFCS is about $2 while Annie's Naturals w/o is $4 at my grocery store. The nearest Whole Foods is an hour away.

The girls and I went through the cupboards to see what we had with HFCS. Just a box of Rice Krispies and some Dole canned grapefruit. Mini Me asked about the iced tea she drinks at school and I told her it would be better for to switch to water. She, too, has a milk allergy. Does anyone know if Silk makes individual soy milk cartons?

Good-bye Anemia

I just talked to the very pleasant lady at the GI office who said Goldie's hemoglobin is up to 13.7! (normal is 10.5-13.5) Whoa, I never expected that. It was 9.8 at the end of September. Then 10 about mid November after giving her iron drops 2X a day. It looks like eliminating the dairy from my diet was what really did the job.

The truth is while I paid close attention to what I ate and have been giving Goldie lots of iron rich pasture raised beef (a perk of living in the sticks), I wasn't so good about giving the iron supplement. Lately, when I did give it to her, it was causing some painful potty issues. This makes me think her body wasn't absorbing it because it knew she didn't need any more.

I know this really a pretty small health issue, but none the less its made my day. Nice to know my mommy sense was right about what was bothering my little girl.