Fooled Again

I am exhausted-  Trying to find convenient, healthy food that my children enjoy, is getting the best of me.  Of course they want pizza, ice cream, french fries and cookies.  I want to give them healthy versions.  I wish I could say I enjoy making all those items by hand to ensure quality ingredients. But, on a Friday night when I want to get out of the house as soon as the sitter arrives, it is nice to have a frozen pizza ready to go. 

I know not to believe all the claims on the front of packaged food.  It is all advertising and mostly false.  I know to read the ingredients, fat, calorie and sodium content.  I know...  But when I saw this frozen pizza at Whole Foods - I grabbed it.  Its Amys - its organic - its dairy free - its gluten free.  Yippie.  What in the world could be wrong with this?

 Well, I got it home.  Baked it, and then saw the nutrition panel and ingredients.  This was a small pizza and it had a whopping 470 calories with HALF of the calories coming from FAT.  Sodium scaled the charts at 680mg.  Are you kidding me?  I could eat this small pizza in about two bites, still be hungry, meanwhile almost giving myself a heart attack.  I might as well eat a hamburger.  Well at least it was organic and no GMOs.  No more Amy's pizzas in this house.

And, it happened again this morning. 

I try to stay away from a lot of the "gluten free" products, as seen above. When they take the gluten out, they usually add back in sugar, fat and other weird ingredients.  But when it comes to making pancakes and waffles, it sure is easy to grab the Bob's Red Mill GF pancake mix, instead of trying to make my own.  I make the pancakes or waffles vegan and low fat by substituting apple sauce for oil, plant based milk for dairy milk and flax seed and water for an egg.  (1TB of ground flax seed with 3 TB of warm water - stir and let sit for a few minutes = one egg!).

This morning I made waffles (same way as pancakes, just add a little more apple sauce) and re-examined the ingredient label of the pancake mix.  UGH. 

Well, the mix is dairy free and gluten free. But it has corn flour and corn starch.  Because it does not say organic in front of the corn, it is most likely GMO.  Over 80% of today's corn is GMO, thanks to Monsanto.  So, unless it says organic, it is best to assume it is GMO corn.  To learn why this is a concern, one great resource is Genetic Roulette.  Another is Food Inc.  Yes, I did go ahead and make the waffles this morning.  Though, I  will now be looking into other alternatives for pancakes and waffles.  It is almost impossible to be completely GMO free, hopefully, someday, we will put a BAN on GMOs.  Like Peru just did!