My Own Private Raisin Bran

Part of my plan to get healthy includes eating healthy. The breakfast part of that is easy, or at least I thought it was until I started reading nutritional labels. Ever since I was a little girl, raisin bran has been my favorite cereal. It didn't matter whether it was Post or Kellogg's; I just loved the stuff. I felt like if I ate a bowl of that with a sliced banana and 1 percent milk every morning, I was doing my body a big favor.

Wrong. The Post raisin bran delivers a whopping 46 grams of carbs and Kellogg's 45 grams of crabs, all thanks to a relatively new ingredient that doesn't even need to be there in the first place....high fructose corn syrup or HFCS.

Regular readers know that last fall I went on a 90 Day Walking Program. Despite sticking to it faithfully, eventually walking a half hour a day on my treadmill for six days out of every week, and despite really cutting out the junk, including soda and, I thought, sweets, I didn't lose any weight. It was one of the biggest puzzles ever.

Recently I got serious about eating organic and realized I was going to have to find an organic brand of raisin bran. To get a sense of where to start, I read the labels on my old faithfuls, Post and Kellogg's. That's when I got the shock of my life. Both brands were loaded not only with sugar, but also HFCS. What? What possible earthly reason could there be to adulterate a healthy cereal with HFCS? It's a substance that's been linked to unexpected increases in body weight, problems with satiety and hunger resulting in higher caloric intake, rapid increases in fat mass, and problems with the hormone signaling system the body uses to regulate food intake. Since HFCS is now a key ingredient in most packaged foods, it's harder than you think to avoid. So maybe that's the hidden reason why the mass of my ass won't budge.

HFCS is not just in foods where you would expect to find it. For instance, would you believe that almost all sausage contains HFCS as a major ingredient? Now why does something piquant and savory, that's flavored with garlic and onions, need sugar of any kind? It's bizarre. It's also in ketchup of all places, fruit juice (like that needs to be sweeter!), yogurt, premade pasta and piza sauce, canned soups and fruits, salad dressings, (another weird place for it to be...who needs sweet dressings?) breads, and sad to say, even breakfast cereals.

HFCS is the only sweetener in soda, so when I gave up my huge daily soda intake at the beginning of my walking program, I got rid of lots of HFCS. Yet, that didn't lead to any weight loss, probably because I was chowing down a huge jolt of HFCS every morning with breakfast, right along with my "healthy" raisin bran.

So, I went on a hunt for a healthy raisin bran to replace my Kellogg's and Post brands, one that had bran, raisins and little else. But I didn't have much luck. All the organic brans didn't have much fiber, which was weird, but worse than that, many brands had raisins coated with safflower or sunflower oil. It's amazing to me how companies that purport to be manufacturing "healthy" organic foods are so ignorant of the basic tenents of nutrition. Sunflower and safflower oils are among the polyunsaturates that contain a dangerous imbalance of omega fatty acids. Ideally, Omega 3 and Omega 6 should exist in a 1 to 1 balance. But in many polyunsaturates, the ratio is more like 20 units of Omega 6 to 1 unit of omega 3. If you ingest these oils as a regular part of your diet, this imbalance leads to a chronic inflammatory state in the body. So what? you may be asking. Well, chronic inflammatory states lead to disease...specifically heart disease, stroke, arthritis, cancer, kidney failure, fibromyalgia, pancreatitis, lupus and Alzheimer's Disease, among others. When you listen to the so-called experts and try to "lighten up' your diet by removing hydrogenated oils, which are truly deadly, and replacing them with polyunsaturates, which some uninformed journalists and even some doctors mistakenly call healthy, you are putting your body in a chronic state of inflammation, which, I assure you, is not a good thing.

So, to keep my brain from becoming even more inflamed than it is normally, I stay away from polyunsaturates that are high in Omega 6. So no raisins coated with oil for me. Once again, a manufacturer adds a bizarre ingredient where it isn't even needed and once again, I was unable to find a raisin bran to suit my needs.

Time to get creative. I quickly found some wonderful organic raisins by Tree of Life. The wheat bran flakes were harder to find, but I finally settled on Nature's Path Heritage Flakes, which have 22 grams of carbs per serving and 100 calories. Then I add two tablespoons of raisins which add another 15 grams of carbs and 65 calories, for a total of 37 grams of carbs and 165 calories. Now I know that's not all that much lower than the 45 and 46 grams and the 190 and 187 calories in the national brands, but I'm putting much higher quality food in my mouth by doing this. It's like I have my own private raisin bran, which I would take over my own private Idaho any day.

Planet Fat Cat
Trying a new orbit