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News You Can Use – Jan 22 – 29 2012

Dr. J Renae Norton — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 14:28:16 +0000

There is so much information in the news about our health these days, that it can become quite overwhelming. In hopes of relieving some of the stress this can inflict on both my patients and my readers, I’ve highlighted some of the weekly health news that was of particular interest to me. Here is your news update for the week of Jan 15-22 2012!

Deception Diet: How Optical Illusions Can Trick Your Appetite
Why McDonald’s In France Doesn’t Feel Like Fast Food
USDA Sets Guideline for Healthier School Meals
Think Positive (Seriously, it could lead to healthier behavior!)
One More Reason Not to Eat Microwave Popcorn: Vaccine Effectiveness
Prisoners Lawsuit Against Soy Products Given Green Light by Judge
Raw Milk Vending Machines Growing in Popularity Across Europe
Obesity Tops List of “Winnable” Health Battles

Were there any news articles that you saw this week that really grabbed your attention? Leave a comment with a link. If the article helped you, it will likely help some of my other readers!

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Medical Advice Disclaimer: The information included on this site is for educational purposes only. It is not intended nor implied to be a substitute for professional medical advice. The reader should always consult his or her healthcare provider to determine the appropriateness of the information for their own situation or if they have any questions regarding a medical condition or treatment plan. Reading the information on this website does not create a physician-patient relationship.

Your Health In The News – Nov 27 – Dec 4

Dr. J Renae Norton — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:38:24 +0000

Your weekly health news update!

Do chemical flavors turn us into food addicts?

Yoga may ease insomnia, menopause problems

The Increasingly Absurd Fight Over High Fructose Corn Syrup’s Name

Many Anorexics Struggle with ‘Authentic’ Self

Your Ideal Weight Could Be Making You Fat

Fast food nutrition facts – mystery ingredients are industrial chemicals

How Exercise Benefits the Brain

Were there any news articles that you saw this week that really grabbed your attention? Leave a comment with a link. If the article helped you, it will likely help some of my other readers!

Book Review – Dark Side of Fat Loss

Dr. J Renae Norton — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 16:53:00 +0000

The Dark Side of Fat Loss (Photo from www.darksideoffatloss.com)

I rarely write book reviews, but Dark Side of Fat Loss is a diamond in the rough for those interested in being proactive about their health and nutrition at a time when so many foods contain hidden neurotoxins, carcinogens, and obesogens. This book is a must for anyone on the road to good health. Whether you are happy with your current weight, trying to lose weight, or trying to restore weight, Dark Side of Fat Loss is a required read.

As stated in Croxton’s biography, after graduating from San Diego State University in 2001 with a Bachelor’s in Kinesiology (emphasis: fitness, nutrition, and health), Croxton began his journey as a certified personal trainer. Despite his extensive education in health, he was met with much failure as clients got heavier and sicker. Client programs consisted of endless cardio and the horrific Food Guide Pyramid. Rather than accept defeat, Croxton took his failures as an opportunity for growth. He has since spent thousands of hours educating himself on the many truths that eluded him throughout his formal education, often joking that he got his Master’s from Amazon.com. He is also a Functional Diagnostic Nutritionist (FDN) and Certified Metabolic Typing Advisor (CMTA).

Croxton has created a book that is full of life-changing information. While in many books, all this information might be overwhelming, Croxton’s writing style not only makes it easy to comprehend but a pleasure to comprehend. The real draw to this book is the holistic approach Croxton suggests for obtaining health. He doesn’t suggest to try to correct health issues solely by diet, but by examining the five pillars of health (diet, hormones, digestion, detoxification and immunity). This may be the book that changes your life in the way it needs to be changed.

He discusses how our hormones affect our health goals. He explains how our hormone system are “Like dominoes, when one hormone falls out of balance, others soon follow”. He provides information on hormones (leptin, insulin, cortisol, NPY and ghrelin) and how the body reacts when we have too much or too little of these hormones. He not only explains this in words, but also with the use of graphics. The graphics in this discussion are especially helpful in the explanation of how our hormones interact with our bodies.

He uses a very common-sense approach to addressing some of the dietary issues that many people have. He introduces the concepts of just eating real food, and becoming healthy and fit by doing what healthy and fit people do. He is very down to earth in his approach to choosing healthy foods. He provides solutions to eating healthy when on a budget. He makes suggestions of what foods to eat and what foods avoid and provides information about why certain foods should be avoided. He even provides a handy reference sheet of all these foods.

Like many in his field, Croxton suggests logging calories daily. But, he also does something that is really rare in this type of book. He stresses the importance of listening to our bodies and logging what our bodies tell us. This is so important to him, that he even created a print-friendly body language log. Once again, Croxton doesn’t leave his readers hanging here, he provides solutions to some of the negative body language that many people experience.

Croxton provides a nearly 100 page real food cookbook of recipes that were submitted from real foodists from all over the world. From healthy breakfasts to healthy desserts, this book has it all. Again, the addition of the cookbook truly show Croxton’s mission to make being healthy attainable for all. He knows that if people stress out about what they are going to eat, it will affect their results. He does everything in his power to make the transition to eating real food an easy one.

The Dark Side of Fat Loss is definitely a must-read for all. This will not be a book that you read once and never pick up again. If you are interested in becoming healthy using a holistic approach, this book will be a great ally in fulfilling this goal.

The Dark Side of Fat Loss e-book can be purchased at: http://darksideoffatloss.com/
Check out the Underground Wellness Website at http://undergroundwellness.com/

News You Can Use

Dr. J Renae Norton — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 16:54:27 +0000

Your weekly health news update!

Lawsuit Against the Corn Refiners Association Moving Forward
Why the New Corn Syrup Labeling is Misleading
O.N.E. Coconut Water Pledges $10,000 to Nonprofit Whole Planet Foundation to Help Fight World Poverty
Organic Apples Make the Perfect Health Food
Which cereal brands are truly committed to producing clean, organic food?
Eat Your GOMBBS!
Label Plan Offered to Rate Food Nutrition
Leptin Levels Linked To Anxiety And Depressive Symptoms
Genetically Modified Salmon: The Fishy Risk the FDA Is Taking with Your Health

Were there any news articles that you saw this week that really grabbed your attention? Leave a comment with a link. If the article helped you, it will likely help some of my other readers!

Our Health in the News

Dr. J Renae Norton — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:14:47 +0000

There is so much information in the news about our health these days, that it can become quite overwhelming. In hopes of relieving some of the stress this can inflict on both my patients and my readers, I’ve decided to start a new weekly series. This series will highlight some of the weekly health news that was of particular interest to me. With no further ado, here is your weekly health news summary for the week of October 9th-16th. Enjoy!

The Health Benefits of Raw Cheese

Eat your fruits and veggies and improve your memory

Heart Disease Rates Fall

Teenage Obesity Worse for Girls than Boys

Eating Disorders a New Front in Insurance Fight

The Latest Class Action Lawsuit Against General Mills

Healthier Foods Earn Healthier Profits

The Dangers of Transfats

Coconut Water Compares Favorably to Sports Drinks

Were there any news articles that you saw this week that really grabbed your attention? Leave a comment with a link. If the article helped you, it will likely help some of my other readers!

Coconut Oil and Malnutrition

Dr. J Renae Norton — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:58:03 +0000

It’s a great honor to have Dr. Bruce Fife as a guest writer today. Dr. Fife was kind enough to write about some of the effects of coconut oil on malnutrition. Dr. Fife is an internationally recognized expert on the health and nutritional benefits of coconut oil and all coconut products. He operates the ‘Coconut Research Center’, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to educating the public and medical community about the many benefits of coconut and palm products. He has authored many books, including: ‘The Coconut Oil Miracle’, ‘The Palm Oil Miracle’, ‘Coconut Lover’s Cookbook’, ‘Eat Fat, Look Thin’ and most recently ‘Stop Alzheimer’s Now’. These books are highly recommended reads, and can be purchased at Amazon.com, and Piccadilly Books.

Coconut Oil Can Help Prevent Malnutrition

By: Dr. Bruce Fife

Coconut oil can be an excellent way to increase the nutritional content of foods and improve nutrient absorption. Coconut oil is different from other fats and oils because it is made primarily of a unique group of fats known as medium chain triglycerides (MCTs). Most all others fats in our diet are composed of long chain triglycerides (LCTs).

One of the advantages of MCTs over the more common LCTs is their speed and efficiency in digestion. MCTs digest very quickly, with minimal effort and stress placed on the body. LCTs require pancreatic digestive enzymes and bile in order to break down into individual fatty acids. MCTs, on the other hand, break down so quickly that they do not need pancreatic digestive enzymes or bile, thus reducing stress and conserving the body’s enzymes. The digestive systems of those people with malabsorption problems often have a difficult time digesting LCTs. Not so with MCTs. Consequently, MCTs provide a superior source of energy and nutrition than do LCTs.

The difference in the way MCTs are digested is of great interest in medicine because it provides a means by which a number of medical conditions can be successfully treated. Replacing a portion of the LCTs normally found in the diet with MCTs has allowed doctors to successfully treatment of a variety of malabsorption syndromes including defects in fat digestion and absorption, pancreatic insufficiency, liver and gallbladder disorders, defects in protein metabolism, cystic fibrosis, and celiac disease. MCTs can even, speed recovery after intestinal surgery.

Because of MCTs are digested more efficiently, they also improve the absorption of other nutrients. As far back as the 1930s researchers noticed that adding coconut oil to foods enhanced the food’s nutritional value. For example, researchers at Auburn University studied the effects of vitamin B-1 deficiency in animals given different types of fats. Vitamin B-1 deficiency leads to a fatal disease called beriberi. When rats were given a vitamin B deficient diet, coconut oil was effective in preventing the disease. Coconut oil doesn’t contain vitamin B-1. So how did coconut oil prevent a vitamin B-1 deficiency? Coconut oil made what little of the vitamin that was in the diet more biologically available, thus preventing the deficiency disease.

A number of studies have found similar effects. Coconut oil improves the absorption of not only the B vitamins but also vitamins A, D, E, K, beta-carotene, lycopene, CoQ10, and other fat soluble nutrients, minerals such as calcium, magnesium, and some amino acids—the building block for protein. Adding coconut oil to vegetables can increase the absorption of beta-carotene, lycopene, and other nutrients as much as 18 times!

What this means is that if you add coconut oil to a meal, you will get significantly more vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients out of the food than if you used soybean oil, canola oil, or another oil, or if you used no oil at all. Simply adding coconut oil to a meal greatly enhances the food’s nutritional value.

This fact has led researchers to investigate its use in the treatment of malnutrition. For example, coconut oil, mixed with a little corn oil, was compared with soybean oil for the treatment of malnourished preschool-aged children in the Philippines. The study involved 95 children aged 10-44 months who were 1st to 3rd degree malnourished. The children were from a slum area in Manila. The children were given one full midday meal and one afternoon snack daily except Sundays for 16 weeks. The food fed to the children was identical in every respect except for the oil. Approximately two-thirds of the oil in their diet came from either the coconut oil/corn oil mix or soybean oil. The children were allocated to one of the two diets at random: 47 children received the coconut oil diet and 48 children the soybean oil diet. The children were weighed every two weeks and examined by a pediatrician once a week. At the start of the study the ages, initial weight, and degree of malnutrition of the two groups as a whole were essentially identical.

After the 16 weeks, results showed that the coconut oil diet produced significantly faster weight gain and improvement in nutritional status compared to the soybean oil diet. A mean gain of 5.57 pounds after four months was recorded for the coconut oil group, almost twice as much as the weight gain of the soybean oil groups of 3.27 pounds.

Coconut oil or MCTs is included in all hospital infant formulas. Premature infants whose digestive systems are not fully matured have a difficult time digesting most fats. However, they can handle MCTs. When coconut oil is added to their formula they grow faster and have a higher survival rate. Adults also benefit with the addition of coconut oil. For this reason, coconut oil or MCTs are also included in the feeding formulas given to hospital patients of all ages. When MCTs are added to nutritional formulas, patients recovering from surgery or illness recover faster.

What Whole Foods Market Is Doing To Help Us Reduce Our Exposure to Obesogens – Part II

Dr. J Renae Norton — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 15:55:09 +0000

As discussed yesterday in the first installment of ”What Whole Foods Market Is Doing To Help Us Reduce Our Exposure to Obesogens“, Whole Foods Market is taking steps to make us more aware of products containing obesogens. Yesterday, we discussed their use of obesogen-free take-out containers, and changes that are being made in their “Cleaning Supply Aisle”. What else is Whole Foods Market doing?

4. Whole Foods Market is also helping us make more informed choices when it comes to personal care products. They clearly label products that they have rated “premium” or “organic” body products. All of these products had to meet a strict set of criteria, set by Whole Foods Market. They have banned the use of over 400 chemicals in the personal care products they sell. Whole Foods implemented this rating system because there are few government standards set in regards to what the word “natural” means when it came to body care products.

◦ “Premium Body Care Products” do not contain parabens, polyproylene glycol, polyethylene glycol, sodium lauryl sulfates or sodium laureth sulfates. The only permissable “fragrances” will be those made from “natural essential oils” and “components of natural essential oils”.

◦ “Organic Body Care Products” will meet all the requirements of “Personal Body Care Products”, but will also be required to meet other standards. These products are the highest quality products available.

▪ If a company labels their product “organic”, the product must contain at least 95% organic ingredients and meet USDA National Organic Standards

▪ If a company claims their product is “Made with Organic X”, the product must contain 70% organic ingredients and meet USDA National Organic Standards

▪ If a product is labeled “Contains Organic X”, the products must contain 70% organic ingredients and meet NSF/ANSI 305 standards

5. Whole Foods Market is making many positive advances in their product packaging. According to their website, they have done more than any US retailer when it comes to keeping the customer informed and taking the actions needed to find safe packaging alternatives. Some of the advances they have made include:

◦ They use Polyethylene Terephthalate (PETE) in packaging for their ‘private label’ products, when possible. PETE is a plastic that is not known to leach any carcinogenic or hormone- disruptive chemicals.

◦ They have banned child cups, baby bottles, and individual refillable water bottles that are made of polycarbonate plastic.

◦ When there are safe alternatives to packaging containing BPA, Whole Foods Market uses that alternative.

◦ They are putting pressure on their current suppliers to switch to BPA-free packaging.

It doesn’t stop here! Whole Foods Market is continually doing research to do everything they can to go completely BPA free. They hear us when we tell them we are concerned about the use of BPA, they are on our side. I feel relief that they are thoroughly investigating all of their options, instead of making an uneducated change.

The standards set by Whole Foods Market are helping us make more informed purchases. They are allowing our voices to be heard in telling the industry that we want full disclosure of the substances that we are allowing in our households, that we want non-toxic cleaning products!

Sources:

Whole Foods Market – Products (http://wholefoodsmarket.com/products/)

Whole Story – Are Your Cleaning Products Transparent? (http://blog.wholefoodsmarket.com/2011/09/cleaning-products-transparent/

Inhabitat – EATware Compostable Food Containers (http://inhabitat.com/compostable-containers-by-eatware/)

Is There Such Thing as a Healthy Sweetener?

webmaster — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 23:49:35 +0000

Yes there is! Coconut Crystals and Coconut Nectar are the best tasting, safest, most nutritious way to sweeten up your life I have found yet. This is it, the mother load of nutrition and great taste! A company called “Coconut Secrets” makes them. Check them out: http://www.coconutsecret.com/index.html.

They also have a Coconut Nectar, Coconut Vinegar and Coconut Aminos (a substitute for “Bragg’s” Aminos which is loaded with MSG) that are all fantastic! Here are some recipes from their website. I tried the dressing, the marinade and the Gluten Free Brownies. Excellent! http://www.coconutsecret.com/recipies2.html.

Sweeteners, No Good News Here!

webmaster — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:17:00 +0000

NutraSweet and Equal are two popular sweeteners on the market today. Both are made primarily of Aspartame. Aspartame is another very dangerous substance that you and your loved ones should think twice before consuming. It is comprised of three ingredients: It is 40% aspartic acid, which is an excitotoxin that stimulates the neurons of the brain to death, causing brain damage according to Dr. Russell Blaylock; It is 10% methyl ester, which eventually breaks down to formaldehyde and formic acid; (You remember Formaldehyde, that horrible smelling stuff from the biology lab that is used to preserve dead bodies?) The remaining 50% is phenylalanine, which by itself, is a neurotoxin that lowers the seizure threshold, thereby increasing the likelihood of brain seizures. Phenylalanine also depletes serotonin levels, which triggers severe psychiatric and behavioral problems. The break down of these chemicals into increasingly toxic substances is hastened with exposure to heat. Do the sniff test if you don’t believe it. Let a can of diet soda get warm and smell it. It smells like Formaldehyde!

(Follow this link to see more of Dr. Blaylock’s work: http://web.mac.com/rblaylock/Russell_Blaylock_M.D./Articles/Entries/2009/4/13_Sudden_Cardiac_Death_and_Food_Excitotoxin_Additives.html)

Wonder what happens when you put NutraSweet or Equal into your steaming hot coffee? How come you don’t taste the Formaldehyde? Probably because these sweeteners also have Maltodextrine, also known as MSG, or some other form of MSG, in them, which makes everything taste good. Splenda, while it doesn’t have Aspartame, does have Maltodextrine as an ingredient. The main ingredient of Splenda, however, is Sucralose, kin to DDT, the extremely nasty insecticide. So don’t go there either!

Guess what happens when you put Aspartame and an MSG excitotoxin together? They potentiate, or excite each other in such a way that they are even more toxic than if you added their individual toxic effects together. This is a good thing to know about excitotoxins because their manufacturers often cop to the fact that they are present in very small quantities in our food supply. This actually isn’t true, but even if it were, what they fail to point out is that there are usually several different versions of them in the same product. In addition, they are in 90 to 95% of all processed foods, including many organic and “all natural” foods, such that avoiding them is virtually impossible. The upshot is that we ingest a lot of these excitotoxins, even when we are trying not to do so. So there may not be a lot of MSG per ingredient, but there are a lot of ingredients that are actually MSG masquerading as something as innocent as “citric acid.” When you add them all together……it’s not good!

In an article entitled: Still drinking diet soda? Don’t be a fashion victim!

BY Tom Philpott

10 FEB 2011 1:51 PM

Mr. Philpott reports:

“In findings involving 2,564 people in the large, multi-ethnic Northern Manhattan Study (NOMAS), scientists said people who drank diet soda every day had a 61 percent higher risk of vascular events than those who reported no soda drinking.”

What do they mean by “vascular events”? They mean strokes. Sixty-one percent? That’s a lot!

(Follow this link for the article; http://www.grist.org/article/2011-02-10-still-drinking-diet-soda-dont-be-a-fashion-victim-pepsi-strokes )

According Dr. Russell Blaylock the heart is also in jeopardy:

“ recent research has shown that the brain is not the only tissue  having glutamate receptors. Numerous glutamate receptors have been found  within the heart’s electrical conduction system, as well as heart muscle.  When an excess of food-borne excitotoxins, such as MSG, hydrolyzed  protein, soy protein isolate and concentrate, natural flavoring, sodium  caseinate and aspartate from aspartame, are consumed, these glutamate  receptors are over stimulated, producing cardiac arrhythmias.”

He goes on to report:

“High consumption of aspartame adds an additional cardiac muscle toxin, methanol. A number of studies have shown that consuming aspartame and MSG (and similar excitotoxins) together greatly magnifies the toxicity!”

(Follow this link for more information; http://web.mac.com/rblaylock/Russell_Blaylock_M.D./Articles/Entries/2009/4/13_Sudden_Cardiac_Death_and_Food_Excitotoxin_Additives.html)

So, strokes and heart attacks? What next?

Remember the Gulf War Syndrome? And all the poor kids that came back with their brains scrambled? Remember the methyl ester in Aspartame that eventually breaks down to formaldehyde in diet soft drinks? Guess what our troops are drinking? Diet pop! Lots of it, because trying to protect your country in the Persian Gulf is a thirsty business. It’s hot over there! But the pop they were drinking sat on pallets in 120-degree temperatures for weeks! Oh, and of course, the drinks were also in plastic bottles known for their propensity to off-gas as well when they got hot! They were basically drinking Formaldehyde, Brain Eating, Heart Attacking, Brain Stroking, but oh so refreshing soft drinks! This gives collateral damage a whole new meaning!

Do you know where your diet soft drink has been or how hot it has gotten? Do you know what’s in it? Maybe you should. Actually, you should stop drinking it and find something with low amounts of natural sweeteners to quench your thirst.

For a link on food additives broken down into levels of toxicity go here:

http://www.cspinet.org/reports/chemcuisine.htm

For a blog on healthy, safe foods and drinks stay tuned, we’re working on it. If you’d like to contribute a food item, a grocery store, or an organic farmer’s co-operative, use the contact form on this site.

Diet Foods and Artificial Sweeteners Cause Weight Gain

webmaster — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 22:12:11 +0000

So if sweeteners are so bad, why are so many people using them? Because they believe the alternative, weight gain, is worse. Think again: Research shows that people who use artificial sweeteners eat more than those that do not. We know that MSG, HFCS, and artificial sweeteners are all excitoxins, which means that they stimulate neurons to death. Excitoxins over-stimulate and damage the parts of the brain that regulate healthy eating behavior. In a study that included more than 18,000 people, researchers found that healthy adults who consumed at least one diet drink a day significantly increased their chances of gaining weight.

I find that my patients with the most intense food addictions consume diet soft drinks and diet gum in huge quantities. Many of them chew sugar free gum or drink diet soft drinks all day long. Some of them go through a pack of gum an hour while others have 5 to 10 cans of diet soft drinks a day and some do both. This is often a conscious decision to help them avoid eating. Of course, it doesn’t work. By evening, they are starving and usually end up overeating. For those with Bulimia, the intense hunger can trigger a binge/purge cycle. The research above would predict such an outcome. They are not experiencing normal hunger, they are voraciously hungry, psychologically and emotionally starving. This intense drive for food can take over their lives. They pass on social events, give up relationships and even put academic or career goals aside in the service of their nightly feeding ritual. At some point, they cannot wait until evening and that is when the addiction really becomes unmanageable.

“In a Purdue study, rats whose diets contained artificial sweeteners appeared to experience a physiological connection between sweet tastes and calories that drove them to overeat.”

The article goes on to say: “The information may come as a surprise to the 59 percent of Americans who consume diet soft drinks, making them the second-most-popular low-calorie, sugar-free products in the nation, according to a consumer survey from the Calorie Control Council, a nonprofit association that represents the low-calorie and reduced-fat food and beverage industry.”

(The Purdue’s researchers’ study, “A Pavlovian Approach to the Problem of Obesity,” appears in the July issue of International Journal of Obesity. Follow this link: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/html4ever/2004/040629.Swithers.research.html)

Most of these sweeteners also contain MSG, known for its propensity to destroy the body’s natural weight regulatory systems, as well as for its potential to increase the odds of heart attack and stroke. Is it worth it? Of course not! But this isn’t like smoking or drinking. You know when you light up or take that drink that you are putting a toxin into your body. And you know that it might be habit forming. But who would think that organic baby food, milk, or chicken broth would have a carcinogenic, neurotoxin in it? No one would knowingly eat toxic food additives while pregnant or feed them to their newborn baby, let alone have a steady diet of them for themselves and their families. But that is what’s happening. The result is that majority of us have unknowingly become addicted to these substances. For many, the problems are so severe, and the causes so obscure, that they suffer life-threatening medical and/or psychological consequences before seeking help. The saddest thing is that they blame themselves. Who else are they going to blame, none of the food producers take responsibility. There appears to be no accountability whatsoever. And where is the FDA? Isn’t its sole purpose to protect the consumer?

There is an epidemic of obesity in this and every other country that has become westernized and adopted our eating habits. A man in France went to jail for actively protesting against having a Micky D’s put up in his town. We have much to learn from the French! Other countries have not been so fortunate to have a brave man like this Frenchman. We are in the top ten fattest countries in the world. Of the other nine, eight are countries that import our food and have adopted our lifestyles. What more is there to say?

Want to help? We are presently putting together a list of grocery store chains as well as specific food brands that do not contain MSG or HFCS. Please help us. If you are an organization that produces food without these additives, please contact us at the address on my website. We will publish the information if it checks out. If you are a consumer and you find a brand or a specific food item, let us know! We can help each other.

Here is something else to try. Be an proactive consumer. I have been asking my local grocer every time I shop there for the past 5 years if they carry a particular item in an organic version. Whether it has anything to do with my efforts or not, the organic section at my Krogers is getting bigger all the time. In the past 6 months, I have started asking if they can help me find a box of cereal, or carton of milk, or a drink, for example, with no MSG and no HFCS. The saddest thing is that most of the time, they genuinely have no idea what to look for. They almost always tell me that all of their organic products are free of these substances! When I explain to them that this not so, and point out how many organic foods contain those substances, they find it hard to believe. I patiently explain how many different names the substances have, and whip out my list. I’m quite sure that they take me for a flake. But as often as not I end up leaving it behind at their request. I often see them looking at the list and shaking their heads. It’s overwhelming and a bit daunting to see how far we have to go, but it’s a start. Don’t be discouraged at the lack of information. Five years from now, most people will know much more about these things. Right now, my grocers run when they see me coming. One manager waves the list at me from across the store. I’m not sure if he is trying to look cooperative, or if he is trying to discourage me from approaching him again! I do anyway