You forgot MOVE your body!

Personally I don't like most of Amy's entrees and so opt for others. I also tend to cook my own food in abundance and seperate into meals. It's only an annoying hassle once a month but then I only get paid and get to the store once a month.

"Organic" foods are no healthier than any other food. Save some money and buy foods with out the expensive organic label.

Organic foods are healthier than other foods. First off, the long term effects of genetically modified foods and toxic pesticides are strangely absent from current studies. There is financial motive to thank for this on the part of large agricultural companies.

No, the results are absent, because there are no (zero. 0.) studies that DO show any ill effects.

It appears the chemicals have damaged some brain cells...there are plenty of peer-reviewed studies that show the negative effects of chemicals and toxins on humans.

For me, the best reason to choose organic is to promote practices that reduce the agricultural run-off that destroy marine environments, which is a very serious problem in the US and elsewhere. I don't worry about ingesting non-organic produce, and I have yet to be convinced that it tastes any better just because it's organic. If you're buying produce from a farmer's market and it legitimately tastes better, it's arguably just a result of the fact that it's fresh rather than because it's organic.

I'm with BW - agricultural runoff is killing our lakes, streams and oceans. It's better to eat organic whenever possible (i.e. selection and price allowing) just for that.

Eating healthy? How about things that don't have a label on it at all? Cook from scratch and try to use organic if you can afford it. Whole, nutritious food fills you up longer, thereby reducing the needs for constant snacking. Keep fruits and veggies on the reading and in easy view on your counter and in the fridge. Ever since I don't make junk food even an option and fruit is always visible on our counter we all eat healthier. I go for light versions of organic yoghurt rather than additives. I saw some frozen OATMEAL in our grocers freezer the other day! Yegads! Is it so hard to cook oatmeal?

Step away from foods that even require you to read a lable and you'll be all the healthier for it! The amount of sodium, sugar and high fructose cornsyrup and all those g*dforsaken soy lecithins in convenience foods is scary and that's not even taking on the chemicals no one can pronounce or remember to spell.

Eat an apple!

I suggest using a little logic in what might be best to eat. Nature has a tried and true method of doing what is best. By man making genetically modified crops, it has done nothing more than to corrupt the work that nature has provided. Do you trust man's work or do you trust nature's work? While nature does not have a bias, man's work can have many levels of bias. Most of which being financial. Nature doesn't generally provide crops that don't create seeds. Nature doesn't create corn that generates it's own toxic poison. I'm going with nature on what I put in my body.

gm foods are an abomination, and the public's apathy towards them is revolting

philip - If GM foods are an abomination you should have no problem in showing me the Verse(s) in the Bible or Koran, (or any other Sacred text), that say so.

Of course, if you are an Atheist, you could show me the PEER REVIEWED papers.;-D

I didn't read anywhere in the bible that thermonuclear radiation was bad for me either, but it is.

FogOracle - 'Abomination' is usually used by preachers to label something as hated by God. I was commenting on philip's use of the word.

BTW, When you get a sunburn, it is an injury from thermonuclear radiation. Psalm 121 speaks of Yahweh, (God), guarding Israel: "By day the Sun will not strike you"

Actually in Deuteronomy or maybe it was Leviticus there are passages that talks about food and crops. I remember a portion that talks about not mixing crops to make garments. If God warned against mixture of natural fabrics I am pretty sure that Genetic Engineering would follow suit.

KMRD - Maybe, maybe not. What about cotton-synthetic blends? The Bible doesn't mention hybrid crops, either. It specifically talks about grafting branches of wild Olives to the trunk of cultivated Olives, (Romans Chapt 11, Verses 16-24), though.

Darth Vader, a Volcano-god Christian quoting his fairy-tale Bible is now invading health food comment sections! Your book of EVIL makes good TP, and that's ALL its good for.

You ghost and demon-believers (Christians) have caused more death, suffering and damage to the human condition than all the other cults on this planet combined.

You'd do well to keep to your time-proven strategy of brainwashing little kids and recruiting gullible half-wits. A forum for people who actually READ isn't the best place to find recruits for your social-misfit club.

Dan, I am with you. I don't even eat processed food. I cook my meals. And I want to point out that these "healthy eating" articles only include foods that people in the midwest and southwest have never heard of. I guess if you don't live in the east......tough. Not that I care about the food. I'm talking about the idea that no one else counts...

Very wise reply, you are on the mark!

I start scratching my head when the first example is salad from McDonalds. WTF is a health-conscious person doing there in the first place

This is the best way to know what you are eating. If you eat foods with chemicals you can't pronounce in the ingredients, you're just asking for problems later in life. All these things have a cumulative effect on your health and a lot of people attribute the effects to old age, which is not true. Look at how younger and younger people are going into nursing homes now. It's the food and water that people think is OK to ingest.

If a fresh organic Honeycrisp or Pink Lady apple tastes like cardboard to you, your taste buds have been destroyed by Big Macs.

Organic eggs scrambled with red peppers, onions, and mushrooms taste like cardboard? Eggs are the highest-quality and yet cheapest protein you can buy.

Amy's organic tomato bisque soup tastes just like the Campbell's you loved as a kid. With a freshly-ground almond butter sandwich and a little raw honey, it's pure comfort food.

I could go on for pages. This is the food we eat every day. It tastes great and if you shop carefully, it doesn't cost much more, unless you're accustomed to buying 70 cent Banquet Pot Pies.

Ingredients are listed in order based on the amount. Just because an ingredient is 2nd or 3rd on the list doesn't always make it significant. If Lawry's salt is 99.999% salt and 0.001% sugar, sugar would be the 2nd ingredient. A 1 gram serving, (1000mg), would only be 1mg, not likely to break your diet.

Federal law requires the label list the total calories per serving from fat, sugar, etc. If the calories from an ingredient, such as sugar, aren't listed, they are negligible.

The sugar may be acting as a 'natural' anti-caking agent, for instance, or Lowrys may have found a tiny amount helps keep the pepper fresh. That would be a well-guarded trade secret!

To tell you the truth, I rarely look at the nutrition information on labels anymore. To me, it's much more beneficial to read the ingredients. It's more important to not eat certain things: only organic corn, no corn sugar, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, modified corn starch, corn solids, corn oil, etc.. it's likely all genetically modified. No aspartame or sugar substitutes. No sugar unless it's pure cane sugar because now sugar is made from genetically modified beets if it just says sugar. Pure honey, organic molasses, organic maple syrup, and agave are good sugar substitutes.

Wrong wrong wrong!

"Good Calories, Bad Calories", by Gary Taubes.

Then there's the question of soy's estrogenic properties. Traditional soy foods that have been fermented, such as soy sauce and miso, have none Soy protein, edamame, and other soy products that have not been fermented do. There is even a drug, brand named Cenestin, made, from soy, that is marketed as a replacement for Premarin, (Conjugated Estrogens). Excessive intake of estrogens can have a variety of undesirable effects, especially on men!

I think it is in fermented soy also. I know mercola says fermented is better than non but I don't think it is because the estrogen-like substances disappear. It's something else, just don't recall right now what it is. I know I was tempted to eat some tempeh yesterday but passed because I just feel like I'm done with all soy for now.

The sources I Googled said that fermenting removes essentially all the estrogenic compounds, (plant sterols).

I think the McDonald's salad was included because many people think that they are eating healthy when they choose a salad over a burger. The prepared fast food salads have a lot of hidden calories and sodium that most people don't expect from "a salad". This was not a comparison of burgers so Red Robin's menu has no bearing.

What's even sadder is that sodium is different from sodium chloride, so you don't notice the high levels when eating it. It just peeves me when everyone blasts Mickey D's and you can get a 3000 calorie disaster at Red Robin, Applebees, and TGIF and no one even mentions it. Mickey D's is not for health food, but a quickie, sure...One of MSNBC good features lately is the comparisons and the "Eat this instead" comments. You know it's sad when instead of a Red RObin Designer burger, they say it is equivelent to several Big Macs and to eat the "regular" 1200 calorie burger instead. 2500mg of sodium should be your MAXIMUM intake folks and you easily get that from your regular intake. Adding a days worth in one burger, not to mention the bottomless fries is why we are so fat and falling in the health rankings.......

Can you elaborate? I didn't understand yoru message. What is the problem with Amy's?

I haven't tried many frozen Amy's products but their pizza is definitely not that great. They don't use organic cheese. I wish there was a decent organic frozen pizza out there, rising moon doesn't do it for me either. Amy's salad dressing and mac & cheese & ketchup is good, politics not withstanding

Politics...not knowing enough about who you buy your products from. Involvement with cult groups is enough to exclude me from buying their items.

I always considered lard to be the "other white meat".

Baldenario! I remember you. You tried to tell somebody that gm corn sticks to your insides and they said it was digestive trouble from aging, fools. What they did to corn soy canola etc on this continent is beyond belief. as to those ingredients, modified food starch is msg, mono & di glycerides are bad news also along with often msg laden vegetable gums which are even in Breyers now due to penny pinchers trying to save the company some bucks at the expense of the lowly consumer. The products with the least # of ingredients are usually the best

@ken:

You wrote this:

I always considered lard to be the "other white meat".

Absolutely!

I like frijoles refritos, and a little bit of lard and lot of butter is what makes it great . . .

Great!

In the same way that chicken stock is the chef's secret ingredient for just about everything, lard and cilantro are the secret ingredients for Mexican food, which is fabulous . . .

Fabulous! :)

@philip:

You wrote this:

Baldenario! I remember you. You tried to tell somebody that gm corn sticks to your insides and they said it was digestive trouble from aging, fools.

Everything was fine until about 15 years ago when the Frankenscientists switched into overdrive and began an highly orchestrated effort to Frankenize everything on this planet, including people . . .

However, the first widespread Frankenization happened in the early-1980s with the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup, which soon replaced pure cane sugar virtually across the spectrum with the only exceptions being certain types of candy and cookies that simply cannot be made with anything but pure cane sugar . . .

And over the years, with the full support and approval of the FDA and USDA, the Frankenscientists have managed to adulterate nearly every fruit, grain, and vegetable that is sold in grocery stores, which is where a virtual festival of "experiments gone terribly wrong" comes into play, with the Starlink Corn and LL601 Rice disasters being among the more patently disturbing examples . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenic_maize#The_StarLink_corn_controversy

http://www.coextra.eu/news/news752.html

A reasonable person might expect that the folks at the FDA and USDA who have formal university training would have at least a few clues and lot of common sense, but this is not the reality at the dawn of the early-21st century, where the most recent completely and totally mind-boggling bit of Frankenscience support by the FDA and USDA involves cloned diary and meat animals, which is based on the patently goofy "generally recognized as safe (GRAS)" perspective that if it looks pretty much like "food", then it probably is "food" . . .

From my perspective, the most disturbing aspect of this involves the apparent inability of everyone at the FDA and USDA to comprehend even the most basic principles of probability and statistics . . .

At present, from the information gleaned by astronomers, astrophyicists, exochemists, exobiologists, and so forth and so on, it certainly appears likely that the statistical probability of the existence of planets like Earth are slim at best, where so far the early results of the NASA Kepler Space Telescope have found one planet ("Kepler-10b") that is "sort of like" Earth except that it has a surface temperature sufficiently high to melt iron, which tends to remove it as a candidate for being anything other than an inferno . . .

The basic problem is that none of the Frankenfood stuff existed on Earth prior to 25 to 50 years ago, which in the grand scheme of everything makes it abundantly clear that the human body has very little ancestral knowledge of how to interact with these strange and bizarre, effectively alien biological and chemical entities, with the consequence that the human body generally treats Frankenfood for what it is--specifically, highly toxic poison . . .

Some of the Frankenfood is sent to the liver, which is one of the organs that attempts to rid the body of toxins and poisons, but along the way other organs like blood react to Frankenfood as a surprise attack by allergens or for all practical purposes "gnarly alien entities" . . .

Common sense strongly suggests that if the natural foods on this planet were not safe for humans, then either (a) that there probably would not be any humans or (b) that humans would be very different in a virtual festival of ways, some of which might not map to being "human", at all . . .

In the 1950s and 1960s, there might have been one child at a typical public school who had diabetes, one child who was clinically obese, and one child who had asthma or severe allergies, but not today . . .

Today, people tend to know so little about food that fruit and vegetables need to have tiny labels attached with bar codes and register numbers, and reading the ingredients of processed foods requires at least a full year of inorganic and organic chemistry, along with being highly literate and highly numerate . . .

In the 1960s, for the most part the only things that were sold in plastic containers where potato chips and some types of cookies, but today nearly everything is sold in plastic containers, which also is the case with baby bottles which in the 1950s and 1960s were glass, except that most children were breast-fed by their mothers, which also is becoming the exception rather than the rule . . .

Until the mid-1960s, antiperspirants and deodorants where reserved for infrequent social events, and in the late-1930s and early-1940s if a medical student wanted to specialize in the treatment of breast cancer or cancer in general this required attending medical school in New Orleans, since the dumping ground of the Mississippi River was the only place in our great nation with a steady stream of patients who had various types of cancers . . .

Yet, in great contrast to the patently goofy Frankenscience that suggests eliminating or masking all natural body odors is a fantastic way to enjoy a productively romantic experience, the FACT of the matter for the guys is that mansweat makes the ladies very happy, which is something that Baldenario discovered quite intuitively while playing bass guitar in a garage band in the mid-1960s . . .

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6896262/Women-can-sense-attraction-in-mens-sweat.html

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479819,00.html

Stated another way, there are significant merits to embracing ancestral knowledge, and the fact of the matter is that none of it includes Frankenscience, which is fabulous . . .

[NOTE: This the "basic rhythm section" done in Notion3 (Notion Music) for a song my pretend band (The Surf Whammys) is doing after becoming quite inspired this week by "Hold It Against Me" (Britney Spears) . . . ]

http://www.surfwhammys.com/Put-It-On-Me-1-12-2011-N3.mp3

Fabulous! :)

@ Baldenario - You're absolutely correct about our FDA/USDA being the real culprit behind the current epidemic of diabetes, obesity and overall disease in America!

However...

"At present, from the information gleaned by astronomers, astrophyicists, exochemists, exobiologists, and so forth and so on, it certainly appears likely that the statistical probability of the existence of planets like Earth are slim at best, where so far the early results of the NASA Kepler Space Telescope have found one planet ("Kepler-10b") that is "sort of like" Earth except that it has a surface temperature sufficiently high to melt iron, which tends to remove it as a candidate for being anything other than an inferno . . ."

Slim at best? You sound like a logical thinker, yet you don't consider all the facts. The reason that we've mostly only found gas giants is because the techniques for finding planets around other stars are in their INFANCY - our space telescopes and instruments are all relative rookies in an underfunded discipline that's less than 2 decades old. Kepler's the FIRST scope dedicated to finding earth-like worlds and its barely even started looking! That's like saying hundreds of years ago that exoplanets probably don't exist because Galileo's first telescope didn't find any!

The scientific consensus is that what we've found so far with only the 1st generation of instruments points to MANY earth-like planets. Not common, but many.

Your other comments were right on, but their legitimacy is brought into question by the inclusion of that medieval-thinking paragraph.

No disrespect, just advice.

PEACE MAKES PLENTY!

@Markus_Demetrius:

I agree! :)

I did not want to wander too far into my perspectives on the NASA Kepler Space Telescope and what it really is finding, which few people will know perhaps for decades . . .

Whether this is part of a grand conspiracy is another matter, but some of the federal officials were in a bit of tizzy last year when one of the astronomers was a bit too candid about the expected results, which as I recall was somewhere in the range of the project identifying hundreds of "Earths" at minimum, with the consequence being that the fellow nearly was removed from the project and essentially was forced to make a public retraction and apology . . .

Mathematically, there is so much stuff in the universe that the existence of inhabited planets virtually is a FACT, unless what we perceive as being the "universe" actually is a very sophisticated virtual world and we are simulacra, which is one of the first thoughts one has after having what I call the "microscope ~ telescope" or "big eye" epiphany, where soon after observing something for the first time with a microscope one connects a few dots and realizes that we and everything we perceive might be just as microscopic to a much larger entity, which for reference makes our activity of viewing the "universe" through telescopes a bit like an amoeba with a tiny telescope trying to see the person looking at the amoeba through a microscope, which is an optical physics problem that I continue to ponder, since it is an interesting thought puzzle, for sure . . .

For sure!

In other words, is there a way to construct a device that makes it possible to look through a microscope in the reverse direction in such a way that transforms the microscope into a wide-angle telescope, such that the tiny entities on the magnifying end of the microscope will see the large entity and its space?

Explained another way, the retina of the human eye is curved, as apparently is the "universe", so perhaps what we perceive as the vastness of space actually is a snapshot of the retina of a considerably larger entity, which is yet another fascinating puzzle to ponder . . .

Yet, what is the probability that an inhabitable planet exists where a race of sentient beings includes an entity that just happened to concoct something called "Coca-Cola®"?

In retrospect, the probability is one--since it happened--but in the grand scheme of everything how probable is it that every inhabitable planet at some time or another will have sentient beings, one of whom concocts Coca-Cola, which several decades later is defined by the phrase "It's the real thing"?

Lots of FUN! :)