Read stickers and labels

READING MY NEWSLETTER FROM NOMI SHANNON I CAME ACROSS THIS PIECE OF INFORMATION about stickers on produce which I know a lot of my blog readers are not aware of although she says that it's a repeat - every now and then I find we have to repeat what we assume every body knows e.g. eating fruit before, not after, meals..... because every day somebody new comes into healthy eating awareness so it's always worth repeating:

Stickers on fruits and veggies
The little stickers on loose fruits and vegetables have valuable information on them! According to a letter from 'a scientist knowledgeable in the field of genetically modified organisms (GMOs)' in an issue of Gourmet magazine: "a..useful tip to the consumer [would be] a primer on how to read the little stickers on loose fruits and vegetables. Besides providing the store's cash registers and computers with product identification and price information, these stickers can tell you a lot about the food you are buying. A label with four digits indicates conventionally grown food. Labels with five digits starting with an 8 indicate that the food is genetically modified. Labels with 5 digits starting with a 9 indicate that the food is organically grown." Well as soon as I read this I looked at all my little stickers and it's true! All my organic food had stickers with have 5 digits beginning with 9 and all the conventional food had stickers with four digits. There were no five digits beginning with 8, nor do I plan for there to be, but what a great thing to know! Am I the last one to know this?

Reading those stickers and labels has made my own life so much easier, things that don`t have stickers, you or someone you know should have grown them.....I am a little less tense when I shop in the market but once I step in the supermarket all antennas are on alert - even when I am shopping at the mighty Whole Foods whose CEO, John Mackey just likes to keep putting his foot in his mouth. The following article in this week's Economist lifts the curtains on Mr.Mackey:

“A-HOLE FOODS” reads the image adorning one of the more supportive articles to appear in the past week about John Mackey, the boss of Whole Foods Market, an organic retailer. In an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal on August 11th, Mr Mackey set out some right-wing ideas for reforming health care strikingly at odds with those currently being pushed by the Obama administration. This provoked uproar in the online community that now rules the world—with an army of bloggers demanding a consumer boycott of the company, around 13,000 joining a "Boycott Whole Foods" group on Facebook and Twitter circulating countless pledges never again to darken the doors of its stores.
The company soon issued an apologetic clarification, noting that Mr Mackey had expressed his own views, not those of the company. He went even further on his personal blog on the firm’s website, pointing out that the title of the article in the Journal, “The Whole Foods Alternative to Obama Care”, had been added by an editor, and setting out the original, unedited version. This still contained enough dynamite to have ensured controversy by challenging the views of many Whole Foods customers—including opening with this observation by Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”
Clearly, Mr Mackey is a boss who likes to speak his mind, usually with a directness and disregard for political correctness that makes him a journalist’s dream. Earlier this month he was quoted in the same newspaper saying that (as well as its healthy stuff), “We sell a bunch of junk”.

So make sure you are not fooled by the name, a lot of the FOODS in Whole Foods have nothing WHOLE about them. You have to read the labels and stickers just as how you would do anywhere else.
How many of you know that Cheetos is so delicious because of the MSG in it?
If we would just read labels, life would be so much easier and we would be so aware of how much sugar and salt we put in our bodies on a hourly basis. I love the people who tell me they don`t eat salt or sugar when they mean added salt or sugar....trust me you don`t have to.