Don’t Eat the Mints!

A lot of people don’t touch restaurant mints because of the germ factor–but here’s another reason why you should leave them alone: they’re not real food!

Behold an average ingredient list for mints:

Sugar, invert sugar, corn syrup, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, soybean oil, sorbital, salt, oil of peppermint, natural and artificial butter flavour, lecithin, Red 40, Blue

Unless you really have a craving for artificial butter flavour and Blue, my advice is to leave the mints alone!

Good news for tea drinkers!

Have a look at this article from the UKs Telegraph

I thought that UCLA’s Dr. Arab made a great point that “if we can find a way to prevent the stroke, or prevent the damage, that is simple and not toxic, that would be a great advance.”

I am not opposed to conventional medicine, but if there is something natural that works, it’s a great thing.  For example, if I have a bad headache, I take advil or tylenol…but I wash it down with a cup of strong tea.  For me, the heat of the tea is very comforting.  Plus, if I have a bad headache I’m sensitive to some smells so anything strong smelling or sweet smelling (like some herbal teas) make me feel nautious.  I drink less tea since the cleanse, I think three cups of tea sounds reasonable…especially if it reduces my chances of stroke!

Thanks to Flickr for this pic!

Eat Your Greens

Please check out this very interesting article in Time magazine about the benefits of a plant-based diet.

One great fact from Time’s Bryan Walsh:

“A meal at McDonald’s produces more carbon than your trip to the drive-through.” 

An interesting point: “The most efficient way to shrink the carbon footprint of your menu is to eat less meat, especially beef. Raising cattle takes a lot more energy than growing the equivalent amount of grains, fruits or vegetables: most produce requires about 2 calories of fossil-fuel energy to cultivate per 1 calorie of food energy; with beef, the ratio can be as high as 80 to 1. What’s more, the majority of cattle in the U.S. are reared on grain and loads of it–670 million tons in 2002–and the fertilizer used to grow that feed creates separate environmental problems.”

After reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma, my eyes were opened to the sorry diet that most cattle are receiving. But I wonder if a vegetarian world is the answer?  After all, if none of our land animals were eating, would this not produce problems?  What would happen to our wonderful Canadian beef farmers?  Our dairy farmers?  I think that people should eat less meat–it should be a side dish, perhaps, rather than a main–but I’m not convinced that meat should be removed from our diets altogether.