Day 14 - Eating Clean Mini Challenge

Day 14: No more than 5-ingredients – Avoid any and all packaged food products that contain more than five ingredients no matter what ingredients

Today's Mini Challenge is about reading the ingredients on packaging and paying attention to how many ingredients are in there!!! This week I'm going to ask you to avoid any and all packaged food products that contain more than five ingredients no matter what ingredients are listed.  Obviously it would be ideal if these ingredients adhered to the other mini challenges we have already completed.   

Here is Michael Pollan's take on this rule:

“Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients. The specific number you adopt is arbitrary, but the more ingredients in a packaged food, the more highly processed it probably is. Note 1: A long list of ingredients in a recipe is not the same thing; that’s fine. Note 2: Some products now boast, somewhat deceptively, about their short ingredient lists. Häagen-Dazs has a new line of ice creamed called ‘five.’ Great–but it’s still ice cream. Same goes for the three-ingredient Tostitos corn chips advertised by Frito-Lay–okay, but they’re still corn chips.”

Try to find products where the ingredients are all real food and have a max of 5 listed!  It's a challenge but I know you can do it!!  These last two weeks have prepared you for this!

The main goal of this rule is to get people to start reading and scrutinizing the ingredient labels on their food.

To give you a leg up here is a list of groceries that typically have less than 5 ingredients listed: 

• All fruits, vegetables, local meat/animal products, and wild-caught seafood
• Dried fruit, nuts and seeds
• Popcorn
• Carrot Raisin Manna Bread (Freezer Section)
• Lara bars
• Triscuits
• Fruit leathers
• Applesauce
• Whole-wheat Matzo crackers
• Brown rice crackers and cakes
• Oats
• Cheese
• Brown rice
• Whole-wheat pasta
• Olives
• Beans
• Peanut butter
• Puffed whole-grain corn cereal
• Shredded wheat cereal
• 100% pure maple syrup and honey

Share your 5 Ingredient or less finds with us in the Eating Clean Mini Challenge Event on Facebook! 

Day 3 - Eating Clean Mini Challenge

Day 3 Eating Clean Mini Challenge: Meat and Eggs – All meat consumed this today will be locally raised (within 100-miles of your hometown). Seafood should be caught wild if possible. 

I want to take a few moments to explain the reasoning behind this one. And just to make sure there is no confusion we are defining meat as beef, turkey, chicken, pork, lamb, venison, duck, etc.  There is no restriction on other animal products (like milk and cheese) but Eggs should be easy enough to get locally but if not try for organic or at least free range for the rest of the week. For Seafood, if I'm buying salmon I do like to get wild salmon as it tends to be fresher and they aren't fed pellets but rather eat what they are meant to in nature. Check out David Suzuki's Top 10 Sustainable Seafood guide!

Local Meat: Of course it's always nice to support local business but also just about anything you can buy through your local farmers will be better for you and the environment. Not only do fruits and vegetables lose nutritional value during their trek, but the by-products from all of that travel also have a very negative impact on our environment. When it comes to industrialized meat, not only does the travel aspect take a toll on our environment, but the resources used to raise, feed, and slaughter the animals do as well. Secondly, the only way to truly know if the meat you are eating was humanely raised is to ask the farmer yourself. Factory farms treat animals like commodities, and they are kept in tightly confined pens and often never move more than a few feet their whole lives.  And even if the meat comes from an organic factory farm it doesn’t necessarily mean they were raised or fed properly. And the health of the animal directly affects the nutritional value of the food you consume. If you aren't sure where you can find locally raised meat today, post in our facebook event to see if anyone there can help or do a quick google search!  But if you can't, just go vegetarian for the day!

I'm lucky in that my sister lives on her husbands family farm which raises cows and now pigs as well.  The cows are fed fresh grass and hay grown on the farm and are treated very well.  There is one cow that my brother-in-law is very fond of (though he wont name him), the cow loves his head to be scratched and is so friendly.  It's sad knowing that he will one day be taken away to be slaughtered but at least these cows are living a good happy life and fed well.  

Here are a few reason why not to eat Farmed Salmon!

• Wild salmon are more nutritious than farmed with eight times more Vitamin D and three times more Vitamin A per 100 gram serving.
• Wild salmon range in colour from pink to red because of the food they eat. Since farmed salmon do not benefit from a wild diet, natural and artificial colourants are added to their feed to alter their flesh from an unappealing grey to a marketable “salmon” colour.

The way to look at it is; if your food eats it you are eating it.  So feeding cows and chickens GMO feed is just like you eating Genetically modified foods too. I think we all know how food effects us when we have eaten something greasy etc.  We don't feel well afterwards.  When the animals are left to feed on natural foods in their environment we are getting the same nutrients they are. This is how nature intended it! Plus if you have ever eaten locally and humanely raised meat you will know the difference, the colour, taste everything is better!