Healthy Living in Connecticut Blog

The Christmas holiday is a tough time to keep in shape. I applaud Ryan's recent post about how to maintain your waist size over Christmas. It is something so many of us go through… Christmas parties at work, family get togethers, cookies everywhere. Everyone expects you to partake in all the eating and drinking, so if you're not prepared ahead of time, you can really overdo it.

There's pressure for those that have already lost weight too. Certain people may watch closely to see what food you will take. Maybe they'll make comments like "go ahead, eat some dessert", or "you're skinny enough, you can eat this"! It can get very uncomfortable when all the people there know that you lost weight.

Last week, Dr. Oz had a show about preventing pancreatic cancer. One of the things he mentioned is to avoid foods with nitrites in them. Other possible risk factors include obesity and family history.

Luckily, I don't seem to like the foods with nitrites in them. Many of you probably do though, as they are very common in the American diet. They include lunch meat, hot dogs, sausage and… bacon. Yes, the popular breakfast choice of many has nitrites in it.

I wrote about the dangers of aspartame a few months ago. I wanted to follow up on helpful ways to switch from aspartame to stevia, an all natural sweetener with zero calories that comes from the stevia plant.

First, give up the soda! It's not good for you at all. Diet soda contains aspartame and other chemicals that you should avoid in your diet. It is also considered a diarrhetic, which means it will dehydrate you. A good alternative for this is unsweetened iced tea. Add in your own stevia packets and avoid the Sweet N Low (saccharine), Equal (aspartame) and Splenda (sucralose). Unsweetened iced tea has a lot of antioxidants in it and soda has nothing good to offer.

Americans should eat healthier, that's a given. But for all the many good reasons there are to eat healthy, many of the low income families cannot afford the better foods.

Take organic food as an example. Why is organic food twice as expensive as the regular counterpart? It seems like they should actually be cheaper than the "bad" non-organic food because the farmers aren't using the pesticides on the organic foods. Pesticides must cost money, right? So, it got me curious, why would the non-organic food cost less?

I'm sure you remember the failed policy that New York Mayor Bloomberg attempted to pass earlier this year, the ban on sodas 16 oz. or larger. It's not surprising that such a policy didn't work out as people need to make better choices on their own. However, I do agree that something needs to be done about the sugary drinks as so many people are obese.

One solution might be to stop offering self service for sodas at fast food restaurants. I don't know how many times I've witnessed people refilling their large sodas at McDonald's. Not only have these people ingested what was probably a huge meal full of calories, they went and piled more sugar and calories on by having 2 or 3 servings of soda. I think the only self service machine should be for water, coffee or unsweetened iced tea.