Category Archives: Eco Friendly Home

Sugary Cereals are Deceptively Labeled? You’re Kidding!

I’m rather pleased to see that the FDA is looking at food labels again. This ABC News article focuses on how cereals such as Froot Loops and other types of food are marketed and labeled to appear healthier than they really are.

The focus is on the Smart Choice label, which is supposed to be on nutritious food choices. While they may be fortified with however many vitamins, Froot Loops and other such cereals that focus on appealing to the sweet tooth scarcely qualify as healthy last time I checked.

Must be some new definition of healthy I’m not familiar with.

Admittedly, many healthier cereals may not be so good for you either once you’re done preparing them. I don’t know if the habit is common anymore, but I remember always having a spoonful of sugar spread over my cereal as a kid any time it wasn’t one of the sugary sorts. Wouldn’t eat them any other way back then. Thank goodness my kids haven’t heard of that habit.

My mother told me a while back that when a study was done comparing different kinds of cereals and the way they were really eaten, sometimes the sugary ones would come out ahead in nutritional value just due to how much sugar people would add at home to less sweet cereals. Now this may well have been done when different sweeteners were used, I don’t know, but it’s an interesting tidbit to consider if you still add sugar to your own cereal.

Better yet and potentially cheaper can be to buy oatmeal and have that for breakfast. No worry about artificial colors. You may have the sugar issue going again, depending on your sweet tooth, but you can easily add naturally sweet things such as raisins to make it a bit better. My kids love oatmeal, although they do want more brown sugar or honey in it than I really like to give.

There’s a good side to this kind of labeling, however. It’s a great teaching point for parents about advertising and how you really can’t trust everything you see on a box or on television. It’s a way to teach kids to be more cautious consumers.

It’s Pumpkin Time!

We went to our local pumpkin patch here in Yucaipa this weekend. It’s called Live Oak Canyon and it’s a pretty fun place.

yellow pumpkinOne of the employees told us that they grow the majority of what they sell there, but a few varieties came from other local growers. The variety of pumpkins, other winter squash and gourds was pretty amazing. So much more than your classic plain orange pumpkin, or even the white ones.

My daughter picked a yellow one. My son was just too tired as the day was a touch warm, so we’ll probably be back this weekend for his. Prices weren’t too bad either – a bit higher than grocery stores, but you just don’t get that kind of selection at the store.

They have a lot of fun stuff for the kids too. There’s a petting zoo, which we didn’t go into but my kids did get quite a kick out of the goat who had made his way to the top of some equipment they had. There’s a corn maze, some bounce houses and things like that. A bit pricey overall, but a bit pricey is typical for these kinds of places in my experience. We just used it as a chance for the kids to learn to budget their tickets to pick the things they wanted to do most of all.

Overall, it was fun. As I said, we’re going back for another pumpkin soon.

My Husband’s Amazing Experience with Bees

My husband had a really surprising encounter with bees this weekend, just about surreal.

He was mowing the lawn when he realized that he was in the middle of a migrating bee swarm. He was using a week whacker at the time, and says the buzzing was louder than the whacker.

Fortuntately, the swarm was migrating and so not hostile at all. It took he thinks about three seconds for them all to pass him, with so many bees that he said it was like looking through fog. He doesn’t think any even bumped into him. He was just an obstacle to be avoided.

He describes the experience as scary but also spiritual. After all, how often do you have thousands of bees come that close to you?

I really wish I could have gotten a picture, but who goes out with a camera to watch someone mow the lawn? But it would have been a really amazing shot.

Remember the Leftovers!

Going through the fridge is one of those chores I don’t particularly look forward to. While I try to use everything up, some things get tucked away just wrong and are missed, wasted.

That’s particularly true with leftovers.

I’ve found a few things that help our family actually use up leftovers a little more often. It doesn’t work all the time, but it helps.

1. Don’t cook so much extra.

This can be a little hard to predict, especially if you aren’t sure if the kids are going to like what you made. But the better you can predict what will really be eaten in one meal the fewer leftovers you’ll have to deal with.

On the flip side, if you have something your family will love, sometimes leftovers are a good idea. This is especially true if you have the freezer space to store the excess and the food freezes well. Makes a great alternative to prepackaged frozen dinners on those nights that you just don’t feel like cooking.

2. Leftovers for lunch.

I use leftovers for my lunch. For my daughter’s school lunch. I try to get my husband to take them to work for lunch, but that almost never works.

For school lunches you want foods that either go well in a thermos or still taste good cold.

3. Stir-fry!

Chop up leftover meat into bite-size pieces, add a sauce and some vegetables, and last night’s meat tastes new.

4. Leftover dinner night

When all else fails, skip making dinner one night and just reheat a bunch of leftovers. You have to watch the age of your leftovers, of course, but when you have enough that are good take advantage.

Time to Give Up on Aluminum Water Bottles?

If you decided to get an aluminum water bottle to avoid waste, and perhaps BPA, there’s a bit of rather frustrating news out today that I came across on Twitter. The Z Recommends website reports that Gaiam’s supposedly BPA-free aluminum water bottles leach far more BPA than Sigg’s bottles did.

Somehow oops doesn’t cover it.

Makes me really glad to have my daughter using a Klean Kanteen. She loves it, and it puts up with the abuse she gives it at school, which is plenty. Hers is going on a year old and has some small dents, mostly around the bottom, but is otherwise still in good shape. I just like that there’s no question of what kind of coating is inside, as stainless steel doesn’t need one.

It’s sad that you can’t always trust a company’s claims about the safety of its products, especially when they lie about specific selling points. But you can remember who gets caught in a lie.