Go Raw Bars & Fed Up Documentary

In a recent swap, I was given a Go Raw Spirulina Energy Bar. I didn't eat it for a while because I had tried Go Raw's cookies before and wasn't a fan at all, so I wasn't too excited about trying it.  Then I did one day & since then I've been hooked. Yes it's green which might weird some people out but I really love the taste.  It's very crunchy.   I love it as a pre-workout or post-workout snack or a snack on the go.  I love that there's only 5 ingredients in it.  I recently decided to try 2 of their other bars: the Banana Bread Flax Bar and the Granola Bar.  The Banana Bar only has 4 ingredients! and the Granola Bar has 6.  The last two I mentioned are softer than the Spirulina Bar. I also wound up buying their granola cereal, which has the same ingredients as the bar.  As for the bars, the Spirulina one remains my favorite.

I love that these bars have such few ingredients and that they're healthy! They are high in calories and fat but it's healthy fats.

I haven't tried the Apricot Bar or the Pumpkin Bar because they both have agave in them, which brings me to my next topic.. the documentary Fed Up. 

I first heard about this movie several weeks ago, through a woman I know, whose daughter was one of the producers. Since I am into health & nutrition, I wanted to see it.  After seeing it, I can say , it's a movie EVERYONE NEEDS TO SEE! It's all about the sugar industry and what it's doing to children and our society. It's very sad; children who are 13 and weigh 400 pounds, the lunches they give kids in schools these days etc..

At the end of the movie they suggest going on a 10 day "Fed Up Challenge" which is giving up all sugar & all sweeteners for 10 days.   I've gone without sweets before, once for 2 weeks, but have never given up sugar completely.   It's crazy sugar really is in EVERYTHING!  Here are some other names sugar goes by that you may not be familiar with:

 

In my opinion, sugar should be left for things like cookies, cakes, ice cream etc.  It shouldn't be in the food we eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner & it's kind of maddening how it really is in everything.  "Found in 80% of the 600,000 food products found on American shelves." An Odwalla juice contains almost as much sugar as Coke. Three Oreo cookies contain the same amount of sugar as a Luna Bar.  For a while (though not in several years), I did drink Odwalla and eat tons of Luna Bars thinking I was eating & drinking healthy.

I recently bought the new (or new to me..I've never seen it before) Pacific Foods Unsalted Vegetable Stock which has a lovely 6 healthy ingredients, whereas before, I had been buying the 365 Low Sodium Vegetable Stock, which has more than 6 ingredients, one being cane sugar!! Why would one add sugar to vegetable stock?!  Before seeing this movie, I did look at ingredients, but now that I'm doing this challenge, I'm thinking about it in a different way. I would avoid foods that were high in sugar, but now it makes me angry! 

The Go Raw bars for instance, do have on average 12-14g of sugar, but the sugar is from dates and bananas and our bodies don't process natural sugar the same way as added sugar.

The movie isn't going after the desserts we eat, but about how the industry adds sugar to all these food products.  My parents thought they were eating healthy by eating fruit from a can (which I've always been against them doing & they would tell me it's just the fruit and the juice from the fruit).  However, upon inspecting their cans..95% of them had added sugar! [After they're done with what they have, they said they won't buy them anymore]  

Even so called healthy places like the chain Juice Generation add sugar to everything.  Some of their smoothies have bananas, dates AND agave.  There was a period where I was going almost daily and would always say "no dates or agave" and the smoothies with just bananas and other fruits were still SO sweet.  I thought to myself "can bananas really make a drink this sweet?" and I finally asked them why their smoothies are so sweet.   Turns out they use sweetened almond milk AND sweetened acai! Ridiculous.  I found this so maddening.  I thought I was being healthy (& of course I still was in retrospect to other things I could have been eating/drinking) but it was upsetting to know how much sugar is added.  I've asked other smoothie places & almost all use sweetened almond milk or soy milk.  When I asked why they' ve told me people didn't like it when they used unsweetened.  

Conclusion is of course it's better to make your own smoothies & food which I have been doing a lot of this year.

The American Heart Association recommends no more than 6-9 teaspoons of added sugar a day..of course how can you know how many teaspoons you're eating because everything is listed in grams, well I have this handy formula:

Some candy bars have 24g on their own! so this is a really good equation to think about.

I highly recommend just going and seeing this movie & reading labels & trying to avoid sugar/sweeteners in your every day meals. Look at your pasta sauces, breads (I'm a big fan of Ezekiel Bread), your drinks, your protein bars,  yogurts, dressings, cereals, veggie burgers and other boxed food, etc)