OneHealthyGirl.com - Carla Golden's Get Healthier! Blog

RAW SNACKS, SOAP and QUOTING MY KID!

While I was in Florida (what seems like forever ago) my mom took me to Whole Foods. I was hunting new foods and generally observing what is "out there" on the market. Living in a small town, I like to see how many of the products in Whole Foods are actually available on our little island, albeit in different stores, where we don't have a giant health food supermaket. One would be surprised how much we have available to us even though we often pine for a delectable place like Whole Foods. 

Anyway, I found Two Moms in the Raw. Now if the name doesn't grab you like it did me, then you'll love the snacks. They had me at the brand (I was instantly willing to be the third mom!) and I was determined to love what was inside the bag. Boy, oh, boy are these yummy!! I got the Garden Herb, Pesto and Tomato Basil Sea Crackers. They are gluten free, dairy free, wheat free sea crackers homemade from 100% raw and 100% organic ingredients in harmony with the raw lifestyle. No added oils, no sugars, good for you, good for the planet and kids love them! (This is what the packaging reads. I haven't yet tested my kid. I' haven't been willing to share! Yet.) Check out the site, their story and place an order for crackers and/or granola!

Last night while taking a shower, I accidentally got some soap in my mouth while washing my face. HORRORS, yes, I use body soap on my face...with a loofah mit. It was strange because my first thought was "What's that sweet taste?" then I realized what had happened. I was so pleased by the non-terrible taste that I took a swipe off the bar with my fingers and smeared it on my tongue. I kid you not! Wow. There was NO icky soap taste, so you're welcome to wash out my mouth any time! If I am going to say that I don't want to put anything on my skin that I wouldn't eat, then I should test-taste it, right? The soap is African Black Soap which I get from the health food store. There are not mystery ingredients and the taste confirms it.

Lastly, while feeding my child breakfast this morning before school she said:

"Mom, let's pretend for the whole summer that we're from a different country (or did she say "planet"?). Let's pretend that we live in a forest, that we pray, we live mostly outdoors and that we eat healthy."

Dang, isn't that just how people used to live? Kids now think that this concept is other worldly. So I told her to say a prayer over her breakfast, which she did. Then I pointed out the trees around us. I'll remind her of the outside part when she next bee-lines for a DVD to watch and the eating healthy part is under control. 

Enlightenment from the mouth of babes. Live Light, xo-C.

PS - Yesterday I erroneously stated that I'd be starting my Six Week Jump and Juice Fast Feast Fest on March 11th. Wooops! I meant Monday, MAY 11th. ;o)

MY MOTHER GAVE BIRTH TO ME *AND* SHE SAVED ME FROM MY SHAMPOO!

So my mother is researching safe cosmetics and personal care products and asks me about this site called OrganicDivas.com. Well, if you know me one little bit, I am so NOT diva'esque that I can hardly bring myself to even pull up the site. I don't wear make-up, don't color my hair...in fact, I'm growing it back out because I can't stand getting it cut all the dang time to keep it short. I am so low-maintenance when it comes to my personal grooming. I use bar soap (for washing & shaving), organic shampoo, organic conditioner, rubbing alcohol and a variety of essential oils. My one foo-foo item is my loofah sponge. Gotta have the loofah-fah! Far from diva, however.

So my mom is getting down and diva-dirty with the ingredients of all her stuff and I tell her not to worry about me....I use organic from the health food store. Well, she said you know even the health food store brands have "bad" ingredients. I said I know that, knowing good and well that MY brand of shampoo and conditioner wouldn't fall into THAT category. Geeze, Mom.

So I go to the Environmental Working Group site which hosts the Skin Deep Cosmetic Safety Database. I typed in my shampoo - Nature's Gate Herbal - and HOLY SMOKES it has the moderate hazard score 5 out of 10 (with 10 being bad) with warnings against cancer, developmental/reproductive toxicity, violations, restrictions & warnings, allergies/immunotoxicity and other concerns for ingredients used in this product. YIKES! I think I freakin' need to change shampoos especially since I share the bottle with hubby and child (we're all low maintenance). 

Don't mess with my baby's head unless you want to see something ugly happen! I'm livid! It makes me want to stop washing my hair. OK, that wouldn't last long. 

The Skin Deep Database easily helps you to pull up "safer" shampoos to look for in stores or to order online. And the GoodGuide reviews all kinds of household products - including personal care items - for their safety. 

Incidentally, the GoodGuide rates Nature's Gate Herbal as "good" pulling a rating of 6.5 out of 10 (with bad being 1). So I'm not going to go throw out all my current and back stock, but when we use up ol' Nature's Gate know that I'm going to be choosing a new shampoo with a pristine rating!

Thanks, Mom! Three little heads over here appreciate you watching over us!

Live Light, xo-C.

FEED 100 BAG = 100 SCHOOL MEALS

I admit that I am really hard to buy a gift for. I don't want much, I can't stand clutter and my life already feels so amazingly abundant that it's hard to fathom wanting more stuff. This must be why you always see me wearing the ol' same clothes, my home decor hardly changes and why you don't hear me complaining about the lack of good shopping. The quicker I can get in and out of a store, the better. But today I was gifted with the gift of a bigger gift by a dear, dear close soul friend. It is a cloth reusable shopping bag/billboard/contribution. She knows me so well. And she knew that I would want to share it on my blog. And the gift gives on....

From the tag on the bag:

The FEED 100 bag will provide 100 nutritious school meals for hungry children through the UN World Food Program (WFP).

This is more than a bag: It's an opportunity for you to join a movement. It's a voice in support of children around the world. Together we can make a profound statement to end child hunger. It's you connecting with something bigger. Be part of the whole.

Each night, 400 million children go to bed hungry. Hunger and malnutrition kill more people than AIDS, malaria and TB combined. Every six seconds a child dies of hunger. For a hungry kid, school is not even an option. Yet, there is hope. When boys and girls are given a free, nutritious meal in school, research has shown that attendance increases by 100% and performances improve greatly.

For many kids this is the only meal they will receive all day. Yet is is enough to empower them to survive, learn, and improve their lives. For more information on WFP or to make a donation visit www.wfp.org.

You can purchase Feed 100 bags at www.FEEDprojects.org or at Whole Foods Markets (nationwide starting May 1st)

Thank you my beautiful, AC. I will treasure the bag and carry it's message proudly and with purpose. 

Live Light, xo-C.

CONTACT ME IMMEDIATELY IF YOU SPOT A GIRL SCOUT COOKIE TABLE OUTSIDE A HEALTH FOOD STORE!

I am persona non grata with my local Girl Scout Area Chairperson and the almost 60 volunteers for whom she speaks because of my blog post on Girl Scout cookies. Apparently I was "compelled to express all negative opinions as to what Girl Scouts do" and that my "commentary implies the entire Girl Scout mission and philosophy is false."

I'd like to go back and restate my original opening paragraph, copied precisely and directly pasted here without change:

"I must word my opinion very carefully because I have dear friends who are very involved with the Girl Scouts. The goal of this post is to isolate only the activities surrounding Cookie Time. I am not bashing Girl Scouts of America in general, anyone who was or is a Girl Scout or the positive attributes of Girl Power. "

I stand by my analysis of the nutritional value (or lack thereof) in Girl Scout cookies. I welcome any critical feedback if I have overlooked nutritional merit in these cookies. 

I encourage, again, my readers to support Girl Scouts by making monetary donations directly to the troops. A $20 tax-deductible donation made directly to the troop would otherwise cost you $126 in cookies to benefit the troop equally after the baker (Kellogg's) and district office take their cut.

If you are buying the cookies to support Girl Scout troops, know that you have an option. You can skip the cookies and just give money.

If you are buying the cookies because buying them from the Girl Scouts justifies a cookie purchase, choose instead to purchase an organic or more wholesome cookie brand from a store and then donate $20 to the Girl Scouts. You are making a better choice for your health while still supporting the Girl Scouts.

If you just absolutely love Girl Scout cookies because of the tradition, memories, excitement and taste, then buy one box for $3.50 and make a $20 donation to the troop. 

If you want to buy stacks of Girl Scout cookies and eat them all, I can't help you here. 

Until the day arrives when troops have all the financial backing they need to continue their good work and deeds on a local level with the girls, and the Girl Scouts of America is stuck with thousands of cases of unwanted Girl Scout cookies, then the Girl Scouts of America isn't going to consider changing the recipe to exclude harmful, unhealthy ingredients. The only way to get the attention of mega corporations is to hit them in the pocket. 

The reason why you will not see Girl Scout cookie booths set up outside health food stores is because people who study their food and are particular about what foods they choose to put into their bodies would more than likely not purchase Girl Scout cookies. 

If you spot such a table in such a location, be sure to contact me asap!

Live Light, xo-C.

PS - On my previous post about the Girl Scout cookies, when sent via email to email rather than read on the web, the cartoon image gets lost. In its place appears the image title which was determined by the owner of the image. The National Action Against Obesity gave their image the title of "Boycott Girl Scouts." These words are and were always theirs. Because these words appeared in the textual version of my blog post doesn't mean I penned them. I am not advocating the boycott of Girl Scouts, just the boycott of Girl Scout cookies.

I DON'T BUY JUNK FOOD...NOT EVEN FROM THE GIRL SCOUTS!

The time has come to address this issue on a wider scale. I've put it off because it can be so controversial, but my daughter's Girl Scout cookie permission form is due today.

I must word my opinion very carefully because I have dear friends who are very involved with the Girl Scouts. The goal of this post is to isolate only the activities surrounding Cookie Time. I am not bashing Girl Scouts of America in general, anyone who was or is a Girl Scout or the positive attributes of Girl Power. 

But the cookies are crap and GS Corporate policies surrounding the sale of those crappy cookies are crap.

First, every single cookie offered by the Girl Scouts contains one or more toxic ingredients: partially hydrogenated oil, artificial sweetener or added refined sugars and sugar alcohols. Girl Scouts of America is helping to perpetuate the FDA "no trans fats per serving" scam. It is well known by now that all trans fats (partially hydrogenated oil) should be avoided even in small amounts which add up to a larger amount as you eat more than one serving per sitting or over the course of days. Really, who eats two cookies and disposes of the rest? 

Dextrose, invert sugar, corn syrup, sorbitol, maltitol, lactitol, polydextrose, maltodextrin, and sucralose are all used in the creation of Girl Scout cookies, except for the Trefoils which includes just refined white sugar. Not familiar with the disasterous effects of these sugars? Read up on the Food Additive Safety Chart. The Samoas cookies list sugar as the first ingredient...even before flour, and the Sugar Free Chocolate Chip cookies contain a cocktail of diarrheal agents: maltitol, lactitol, polydextrose, sorbitol, maltodextrin AND sucralose! No wonder there is a warning not to eat too many!!

Secondly, there are a couple of marketing phrases on the cookie order form with which I take issue. Aren't we trying to help educate young girls so that they may grow up to be healthy, savvy adults? 

• "Cookies can be part of a balanced, healthy lifestyle." - True. But not these cookies. Trust me, the Goldens like cookies. But we don't eat garbage in the shape of a cookie. 

• "Food is fuel for your body." - True. But these cookies do not fall into the definition of food. They fall into the category of Empty Calories. Yes, eating GS cookies may be better than starving to death, but they are not whole foods designed to promote optimal - or even adequate - health.

• "Samoas have real coconut." - Gee, I feel so much better now! Especially considering that sugar is first on the ingredient list and coconut is thirteenth.

• "Mint is good for your breath." - True. Fresh mint is a delight. But when your guts are rotting out because of the crap fed to the body, no food grade "oil of peppermint" in a Thin Mint is going to help.

• "Milk and cookies strengthen your bones." - I don't even know where to begin. Homemade cookies from scratch ingredients alongside a fresh glass of raw milk can nourish your bones, yes. Girl Scout cookies and pasteurized milk have nothing to do with this picture.

Thirdly, for each box of $3.50 cookies, the troop keeps 55 cents (prices can vary with location/troop). The rest of the revenue goes to pay the baker (Little Brownie Bakers is owned by the Kellogg Corporation) and the remainder stays in the troop's district council....including what is kept by the troop. So if the troop is getting 55 cents, then the council is getting $1.90 and the baker is getting $1.05 per box. 

And then there are the Cookie Sale Incentives. For selling 600-799 boxes of cookies, your darling Scout can get a "free" jumbo plastic calculator! Woo Hoo! So for raising $1,518.10 for the troop's council, your daughter gets a plastic calculator. Of course, there are other selling levels with corresponding prizes, but it's just more of the same ol' glittery junk that hooks little girls like cocaine.

Girl Scouts of America claims that selling cookies helps girls to learn life skills. I do not want my daughter learning that it is ok to volunteer hours of her time (and inevitably mine too) to peddle junk food for a plastic calculator so that her troop can get $439.45, her council $1,518.10 and Kellogg's $838.95. 

If you want to support your local Girl Scout troop, consider making a tax-deductible donation. As long as you receive no cookies in exchange, you can claim a charitable contribution. For a $20 free and clear donation you would have to buy 36 boxes of cookies to benefit your troop equally. Spare your health and give the donation.

It's amazing to me that a huge corporation like Kellogg can't develop one healthy, organic cookie option in their line-up. Sell it for $6. All those healthy GS supporters like me would buy enough of this one option to rival the sales of all the traditional cookies. 

Here's what Dr. Mercola has to say:

Politics, religion, Girl Scout cookies....very volatile subjects. I encourage your comments in the section below, but please keep them respectful and on the topic of cookies. I hope I haven't offended anyone or gotten my daughter evicted from her troop, but rather brought legitimate issues to the surface. Girls Scouts of America in collaboration with Kellogg's can make healthy cookies if they want to. But so far, it's been much more profitable and easy to inject the mindless feeding frenzy with crap.

Let's do something good for the growing bodies and minds of Girl Scouts. Boycott the crappy cookies!

Live Light, xo-C.

Other Resources:

Just Say No To Girl Scout Cookies

National Action Against Obesity (NAAO) Boycotts Girl Scout Cookies

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE OL' FACTORY...

Excerpted from A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman

Breaths come in pairs, except at two times in our lives - the beginning and the end. At birth, we inhale for the first time; at death, we exhale for the last. In between through all the lather of one's life, each breath passes air over our olfactory sites. Each day, we breathe about 23,040 times and move around 438 cubic feet of air. It takes us about five seconds to breathe - two seconds to inhale and three second to exhale - and, in that time, molecules of odor flood through our systems. Inhaling and exhaling, we smell odors. Smells coat us, swirl around us, enter our bodies, emanate from us. We live in a constant wash of them.

Smell is the most direct of all our senses. When I hold a violet to my nose and inhale, odor molecules float back into the nasal cavity behind the bridge of the nose, where they are absorbed by the mucosa containing receptor cells bearing microscopic hairs called cilia. Five million of these cells fire impulses to the brain's olfactory bulb or smell center. Such cells are unique to the nose. The neurons in the nose are replaced about every thirty days and, unlike any other neurons in the body, they stick right out and wave in the air current like anemones on a coral reef.

Found at the upper end of each nostril, the olfactory regions are yellow, richly moist, and full of fatty substances. We think of heredity as ordaining how tall one will be, the shape of the face, and the color of hair. Heredity also determines the shade of yellow of the olfactory area. The deeper the shade, the keener and more acute the sense of smell. Albinos have a poor sense of smell. Animals, which can smell with beatific grandeur, have dark-yellow olfactory regions; ours are light yellow. The fox's is reddish brown, the cat's an intense mustard brown. One scientist reports that dark-skinned men have darker olfactory regions and should therefore have more sensitive noses.

When the olfactory bulb detects something - during eating, sex, an emotional encounter, a stroll through the park - it signals the cerebral cortex and sends a message straight into the limbic system, a mysterious, ancient, and intensely emotional section of our brain in which we feel, lust, and invent. Unlike the other senses, smell needs no interpreter. The effect is immediate and undiluted by language, thought, or translation. A smell can be overwhelmingly nostalgic because it triggers powerful images and emotions before we have time to edit them. What you see and hear may quickly fade into the compost heap of short-term memory, but, as Edwin T. Morris points our in Fragrance, "there is almost no short-term memory with odor." It's all long term. Furthermore, smells stimulate learning and retention. "When children were given olfactory information along with a word list," Morris notes, "the list was recalled much more easily and better retained in memory than when given without the olfactory cues." When we give scent to someone, we give them liquid memory.

More on the fascinating sense of smell tomorrow, Live Light, xo-C.

 

SOFT DRINK COMPANIES UNDER INCREASING PRESSURE TO HALT MARKETING TO KIDS

http://www.NaturalNews.com/023465.html

A group of organizations from 20 different countries has issued a public
call for soft drink giants The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo to halt all
marketing of their products to children.

Consumer organizations including the Center for Science in the Public
Interest sent letters to the companies asking them to stop marketing any
beverages that contain sugar or caffeine to children under the age of 16.
The products targeted include not only carbonated beverages, but also
sweetened juices, sports drinks and teas. The groups also asked that these
products be removed from all public and private schools.

In addition, the companies have been asked to prominently label the front of
all beverage products with the number of calories per serving, and to limit
their sponsorship of sports and health programs to blind trusts overseen by
governments.

In a blind trust, the investor -- in this case, a soft drink company -- is
unable to direct the specific course of an investment. Such trusts are often
used to prevent conflicts of interest.

The new call comes on the heels of new regulations in the United Kingdom
banning the television advertising of junk foods to children under the age
of 16, and shortly follows a voluntary pledge by major food companies to
stop advertising those foods to children under the age of 12. The voluntary
pledge, signed by 10 companies including Coke and Pepsi, is an effort to
avoid potentially stricter compulsory regulations.

The groups involved in issuing the new set of demands say that Coke and
Pepsi's marketing efforts contribute to increasing obesity levels,
especially in children. Mexican group El Poder del Consumidor points to a
misleading, Coke-sponsored nutrition campaign in Mexico that pushes drinking
Coca-Cola as a good way to rehydrate after exercise.

A recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that
the number of obese people in the United States now exceeds 72 million, or
24 percent of the population.

Why You Should be Worried if Your Kids' Cereal is Widely Known

From Mercola.com:

Breakfast cereals marketed the most aggressively to kids have the worst nutritional quality, according to a new analysis of 161 brands.

Children's cereals were classified as those that had a character on the box, toys or games inside, or the company's Web site listed the brand as a children's cereal.

Kids’ cereals had more sugar, sodium, carbohydrate and calories per gram than non-children's cereals, and less protein and fiber. Sugar accounted for more than one-third of the weight of children's cereals, on average, compared to less than one-quarter of the adult cereals.

Sources:

• Reuters April 23, 2008
• The Journal of American Dietetic Association April 2008; 108: 4(702-705) (Free Full Length Article PDF)

THIS is Chilling.

A NewsTarget investigation has revealed that the FDA knew as early as 2003 that Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) was not linked to cervical cancer. Despite this knowledge, the FDA, along with key pharmaceutical companies, has continued to push for the use of HPV vaccinations as a defense against cervical cancer, even when its own research showed no link exists.

Today, NewsTarget publishes, "The Great HPV Vaccine Hoax Exposed," a special report that cites from numerous FDA documents and clinical studies to show that HPV vaccines are not only ineffective, they may actually be dangerous! As revealed in the special report, the Gardasil vaccine has been linked to a 44.6% increase in precancerous lesions in some women, raising serious doubts over the sensibility of mandatory vaccination policies.

The report is available now at: http://www.newstarget.com/Report_HPV_Vaccine_0.html

Along the same thread, read 18 Medical Lies: why I abandoned medicine by Shane Ellis.

Fat, Carbs and the Science of Conception

In a groundbreaking new book, Harvard researchers look at the role of diet, exercise and weight control in fertility. Guarantee: you will be surprised.

Read the entire article here:
Newsweek, December 10, 2007