Jam Your Own and Loose Weight!

Remember last week how I posted about making your own grape jelly, and you were like, "yeah right, I'm gonna keep buying the 2 for 1 deal of Smuckers cuz I don't have time for this ridiculous canning scheme." ??

Well, I have some more ammo for my war on fake food.

Check out the ingredient list in the Smucker's Concord Grape Jelly: Concord grape juice, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, fruit pectin, citric acid, sodium citrate.

Alright, we've got TWO familiar ingredients... Concord Grape Juice, and fruit pectin. 2/6. Awesome. So what else are you eating here? Uh, synthetic corn something, synthetic acid something, synthetic synthetic something....... It's not all that terrible. Citric acid is a natural preservative used to maintain freshness... if you squeeze lemon juice on a cut of avocado, it will prevent it from browning as quickly. I'm not gonna pretend like I know anything about sodium citrate beyond the fact that it's a preservative.

But the real thing I wanna point out is the high fructose corn syrup. You're thinking, "yeah yeah that's only been the go-to buzzword for unhealthy food since last year". I know, it's old news. But it's STILL on our shelves, and people are STILL eating it. So to further support my bashing of the stuff, here's a great article from scientists at Princeton.

It basically says that eating high fructose corn syrup is NOT the same as eating sugar. The synthetic stuff contributes significantly to unhealthy weight gain.

You can find HFCS worming food everywhere, and can be hard to pick out. Take this little cup of yogurt. It's LOWFAT, it's got PROTEIN, its got BLUEBEERIES (oh the anti-oxidants!)... but wait, high fructose corn syrup is in the top line of ingredients. And stuff like this (low-fat yogurt) gets tagged as 'healthy'. Sickening.

So, in defense of jamming your own, or at the very least, paying a dollar extra for real jelly....

do it for your taste-buds... and for your gut.

PS. I hope everyone understands the sarcasm in my title line. (I don't understand sarcasm very well, so I feel compelled to spell it out for others in my predicament.) I'm commenting on the ridiculous diet trends that seems to govern our predilections for certain foods.