Healthy Living in Connecticut Blog

I wrote about the dangers of aspartame a few months ago. I wanted to follow up on helpful ways to switch from aspartame to stevia, an all natural sweetener with zero calories that comes from the stevia plant.

First, give up the soda! It's not good for you at all. Diet soda contains aspartame and other chemicals that you should avoid in your diet. It is also considered a diarrhetic, which means it will dehydrate you. A good alternative for this is unsweetened iced tea. Add in your own stevia packets and avoid the Sweet N Low (saccharine), Equal (aspartame) and Splenda (sucralose). Unsweetened iced tea has a lot of antioxidants in it and soda has nothing good to offer.

Americans should eat healthier, that's a given. But for all the many good reasons there are to eat healthy, many of the low income families cannot afford the better foods.

Take organic food as an example. Why is organic food twice as expensive as the regular counterpart? It seems like they should actually be cheaper than the "bad" non-organic food because the farmers aren't using the pesticides on the organic foods. Pesticides must cost money, right? So, it got me curious, why would the non-organic food cost less?

I'm sure you remember the failed policy that New York Mayor Bloomberg attempted to pass earlier this year, the ban on sodas 16 oz. or larger. It's not surprising that such a policy didn't work out as people need to make better choices on their own. However, I do agree that something needs to be done about the sugary drinks as so many people are obese.

One solution might be to stop offering self service for sodas at fast food restaurants. I don't know how many times I've witnessed people refilling their large sodas at McDonald's. Not only have these people ingested what was probably a huge meal full of calories, they went and piled more sugar and calories on by having 2 or 3 servings of soda. I think the only self service machine should be for water, coffee or unsweetened iced tea.

Pomegranates are in season and they are once again in abundance at most grocery stores. I had a tough time finding them last spring, but it's nice to see them in so many stores again.

I've written about pomegranates before. I thought they were worth mentioning again as this fruit really is a super food.

I know a lot of weight loss challenges are going on this fall and I thought this is a good time to remind people of the superfoods I eat. I did a post months ago where you can read my list of the favorite superfoods, click here for the link.

The list is pretty much the same, but I wanted to stress the importance of a few of the foods and a few more that I've tried since then.