Food for Thought

When I found out I was expecting Sarah, my oldest, my doctor told me not to eat anything with Sodium Nitrate in it. He gave me a list of foods containing that preservative. I made the decision then and there that I wasn’t going to eat anything with that ingredient while I was expecting nor after I gave birth.- It wasn’t something I wanted to eat anyway, regardless of being pregnant. I also decided my child would not eat anything with it either.

Sodium Nitrate and Sodium Nitrite are widely used as preservatives in packaged foods such as hot dogs and lunch meats. Both of these salt compounds have the same effect. When mixed with meat in the body during digestion, they create a carcinogenic compounds. Carcinogenic compounds are believed to cause cancer and could affect the future health of both mother and unborn child. In addition to that, they react with hemoglobins and create a modified protein, methemoglobins, and they do not deliver oxygen effectively.

If you are pregnant – your baby is depending on your hemoglobin to deliver oxygen to the placenta. This is something that should be taken seriously because your baby’s development could be affected in a negative way.

As you can see- I take this seriously. I’m so sorry to bore you with the details but I feel it is important to explain.

Obviously my doctor had a profound effect on how I would look at feeding my kids throughout their young lives. I realized that what I fed them could have a lifetime consequence and I was obsessive about making healthy food for them. Making their lunch for school, making healthy snacks instead of buying convenience, and not eating fast food became our way of life. It wasn’t just about what I was feeding them. It was also about teaching them to want to eat healthy. Don’t get me wrong – we always had homemade cookies and ice cream in the house.

Next I became enslaved with only buying local meats. It was around the time that mad cow disease and chicken flu were in the news. I had already stopped buying meat at the grocery store because when I asked them they could not tell me where the meat was from , let alone what country. I started buying all of our meat at a local butcher shop. The butcher bought only from the county I lived in and I trusted him for all of our meat including deli meat and fresh uncured bacon.

During this time I didn’t want them eating fast food because I had read about steroids being given to cows so they would grow bigger and faster so they could be slaughtered sooner. I was not only disgusted by this, both for the cows and the use of the steroids, that I didn’t take my kids to McDonalds. When they ate at McDonalds it was because their Grandparents took them. I did not want them eating hamburgers from there!

Today it is easy to find organic options at the local grocery store. Now I’m obsessed about only buying produce from the USA. When I go through the produce isles, I will look at everything I want to buy, but if it’s from another country I don’t buy it. This can be limiting in the winter months but I can usually find some options from Florida or the southwest region. This is just my opinion but I do not expect quality to be the same in other countries as it is here in the good ole US of A!

I know – I was probably overly obsessive with what my kids were eating. It was the late 90’s, early 2000s. Fast forward to today and I’m right on queue with what matters today to moms everywhere! I guess I was just ahead of my time but people thought I was a bit crazy. I was a locavore before it was popular. And it all started with what my doctor told me when I was expecting my first child in 1989.