This week my 5 year old daughter attended her first summer camp. Since it was the week after school ended I was still in the mode of packing lunches and finding lost shoes or bathing suit bottoms. The paperwork with the list of what to pack and other camp details was lost in the mail. The night before some kind moms texted me pictures of their camp paperwork so I would be prepared. To my surprise, they were planning on feeding my daughter instead of me packing her a lunch. This is not ideal since we eat organic and healthy. As a result of eating this way, my daughter responds pretty bad to sugars and chemicals. The menu was full of junk and sugar but what shocked me even more was the health shaming that was written on the paper work:

“We eat a log of garbage. One week away from the “perfect diet” isn’t going to hurt anyone.” 

I couldn’t believe they wrote that. The first day, I picked up my daughter and she was almost in tears because her tummy hurt so bad and she was exhausted. Her water bottle was full, her extra lunch I packed was untouched and she said she didn’t like the tater tot casserole they served (who would?). Don’t worry. She didn't have an empty stomach for her 7 hours at camp. She had ice cream, cobbler and a snow cone! That night as my daughter watched the movie Leap, I was so angry. But I decided to take a line from her movie and use my anger for good.  

I realized that people who don’t take health seriously or shame others that do, don’t understand how their bodies work or how the consequences of what they eat are forming gradually inside. They don’t know what happens to the red dye and sugar after you swallow it. Even more so, they don’t know how hard it is to detoxify those elements out of your body so that they don’t become cancer, diabetes and heart disease. 

So, I dedicate this blog to those who lead this unnamed, nationwide camp in hopes that they think differently as they shape our girls this summer. 

First of all, we need to know the basics of how our digestive system works. Here is a short video that explains this better than I ever could. 

Our body works very intentionally to break down our food into usable parts to be absorbed into our blood stream and distributed to the areas of our bodies that need it. The vitamins, minerals and other nutrients feed our mitochondria which is where we get our energy from. 

Every time we eat, we really have 2 choices. Eat real food or fake food. Real food is anything that is organically grown or raised. Fake food generally consists of chemicals, plastics, refined sugars, genetically modified vegetables, grains and meats and even wood shavings. You’d be surprised how many foods contain modified cellulose. 

When it’s written like that, it seems pretty black and white. Why do we ever choose fake over real? There are many reasons but I believe a big reason is the instant world we live in. Let me explain. We are obviously living in an instant gratification society. We want fast food and a quick fix pill. We text instead of call and we want a response asap. We want two day free shipping or we reconsider. We fast forward through commercials and pre-buy tickets to skip the line. The faster we can consume the more we can consume. There is a flip side to this. If we consume something toxic and don’t drop dead instantly, then it must be fine. If we spray certain weed killers in our yard and don’t get the cancer tumor the next morning, it’s not biggy. 

Oddly enough, when we do get the cancer diagnosis, we think “how could this happen out of no where?” It’s not out of no where! We just pay attention to what is instant and disregard what is gradual. 

Now that you have seen the previous video on how your digestive system uses the food you give it, check out this short, 4 minutes video on how your body processes sugar. It’s fascinating! My hope is that when you are making your food choices, these are the facts that can help shape your decisions.

That 4 minutes explains our country quite well, doesn’t it. Sugar is usually the first focus when we talk about bad foods that cause disease. But there are so many other toxic, fake foods out there as well. In order to keep this blog post from being too long, and in honor of my daughters camp giving her a snow cone every day this week, (que the smoke coming out of my red ears) I’m going to also highlight artificial dyes. 

Americans are consuming 5 times more food dyes now than in 1955. Do you ever wonder what those dyes are made of? Red dye #40: petroleum distillates or coal tars. According to the center for science in the public interest, red #40 and other AFCs can cause allergic reactions in some people. Research shows they can also cause hyperactivity in children and immune system tumors in mice. Red 40 contains p-Cresidine, which the US Department of Health and Human Services says is “reasonably anticipated” to be a human carcinogen. An other study found that it lowers reproductive success and causes neurotoxicity in rats. 

The obvious places to find artificial dyes are in fake foods like slushies, snow cones, colored cakes etc. But here are a few places you may not have expected dyes to be. How about yogurts, pickles, oatmeals, popcorn, peanut butter, maples syrup. Eat This wrote a great article on unsuspecting products that contain dyes and other carcinogens. Click here to check it out. Most of this I already knew but they open their post explaining how many salmon farmers add pink#20 and orange-red#34 to their fish food to make the meat the color you’re expecting. What?!

We may think one slushy is not that big of a deal and maybe if you’re eating a purely healthy organic lifestyle and have truly 1 slushy, you’re probably going to live a long life. But if we aren’t realizing that there are carcinogens in our breakfast cereal with our genetically modified strawberries on top, followed by our peanut butter sandwich with added dyes with an orange juice full of sugar and orange#40 and frozen pizza for dinner full of the same, then we are kidding ourselves when we say “One week away from the “perfect diet” won’t hurt anyone.” It's more like one week of double the junk will hurt you.

I urge you to think twice about your sugar and dye intake. Read those labels! If you can’t pronounce and/or don’t know what it is, then don’t eat it. If it has colors listed in the ingredients, don't eat it.  If you need a treat, there are so many options out there there that are organic and some that are even healthy.