A New Year
The quick answer: Want better health? America’s biggest dietary problem is excessive sugar intake—we each average over 100 lbs per year.
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A New Year, Again
We made a resolution for the New Year—to continue Word of Wisdom Living, but more effectively. It’s a lot of work but we’re encouraged by the growth in readers over the last year. You must be spreading the word so thank you But please keep it up—it isn’t easy to change the world.
This will be our 4th year of weekly posts. We’re improving the 52 Healthy Changes to keep up with your progress. We’ll also post more Skip’s Healthy Recipes, where I reinvent traditional recipes using today’s best ingredients and shamelessly attach my name. What else should we do? Please share your ideas.
A Cooking Show for Real Families
There’s one more resolution: To propose a TV cooking show where regular people compete to cook real food. I’m tired of the shows where professional chefs furiously whip up exotic dishes to impress fussy foodies. We want regular people cooking healthy but affordable meals that children and husbands love—food that’s deliciously ordinary, practical, and wholesome.
This will be a food program for real families where tips are shared and the winning recipes are posted for everyone to use. Stay tuned.
Back to Eden
The essence of the food reformation is eating food as close as practical to how it was first created. Corn on the cob, for instance, is healthier than high fructose corn syrup. An apple is healthier than a store-bought apple turnover. Our modest goal is to obsolete the factory foods invented in the last century by Food Inc.
Factory foods have three things in common (unfortunately, wholesomeness isn’t one):
- Long shelf life—this means eliminating the nutrients that nourish bacteria (and humans) and adding chemical preservatives.
- Cheap ingredients—combine the cheapest commodities (corn syrup, refined flour, soybean oil, salt, etc.) with artificial flavors and coloring.
- Addictiveness—they need you to keep coming back and sugar is our worst addiction. Thanks to Food Inc, America’s sugar intake steadily increased over the last century to exceed 100 pounds per person every year.
Slashing Sugar
Sugar is the lazy food flavor. In the food reformation, traditional spices and flavors replace sugar. Soda drinks are our biggest source of sugar. So Healthy Change #1 says to limit yourself to one week—this includes the so-called "diet" drinks. If you don't drink any soft drinks, give yourself a pat on the back.
Please comment: The Holidays are over and you've likely added 5-10 lbs. A key to losing weight is to reduce your sugar intake to below the AHA recommendation of 6 tsp per day (9 tsp for men). Please share your ideas for reducing sugar intake.
Thursday, January 2, 2014 at 10:52AM | by Skip Hellewell | 8 Comments | 70 References | Share Article | Email Article 
Reader Comments (8)
How many grams is 6 tsp?
I just found your blog and I'm very excited to use it to help our family better live the Word of Wisdom. I love the idea of going through the healthy changes to help the process. Is there anywhere I can access a list of all the changes instead of scrolling through all the articles? It would be nice to pick which one I would like to work on that week, or follow them in order. Thank you so much for all your hard work to make this accessible to me!
One tsp of sugar equals 4.2 grams. 6 tsp of sugar is roughly 25 grams.
One of the reasons I've loved reading this blog the last two years is for the ease with which you demystify the controversy in literature. You make it easy to understand what the experts are saying as well as what they aren't. Please keep up this facet of your blog. I'd be interested to learn more about why gluten and how it fits into the Word of Wisdom. I know there are legitimate food sensitivities and allergies, but what to say to friends who are pro-Paleo?
Recipes! Yes! All of the recipes I've tried from your blog have found their way into our family favorites. I'd love to see a more robust section of book reviews, too.
Thank you for all of the work you do here. I appreciate it.
Thank you very much for the time you take to make posts and make word of wisdom living blog. My wife shared this site with me a few years ago and it's truly been life changing.
I am so grateful to have found your blog through my own internet searching. I am a young mother with an autoimmune disorder and severe arthritis in my spine. I feel strongly that with a proper diet my symptoms will be lessened. All of my research on which diet would best help with inflammation and other issues I deal with has pointed me to the Paleo diet. I just couldn't reason cutting out all grain when the Word of Wisdom specifically mentions to eat grains. I look forward to being a part of your community and hope it brings answers to my prayers!
Brace yourself. This may be a bit long-winded.
I am grateful to have come across your blog. I have an autoimmune disease, like Marie who commented on this post as well, except my doctor had me fasting from gluten for the last two months to see if it would help. Quick background, I am also the Stake Home Storage Specialist serving in our area for the LDS Church. (After skimming your blog, I can see you may be familiar with this.) I have had many people approach me about storage and diets involving gluten-free items, but this was my first personal experience with it, and it was a little disconcerting from the very beginning. Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe disease such as Celiac and whatnot are genuine and should be made the exception. However, when the doctor told me my lab results after the fast, which concluded that the Gluten Free diet in fact had the opposite effect we wanted it to, but that she wanted me to continue with the diet, my spirit stirred. Call me passionate, or a nerd, I con't care. But I have always had a firm testimony of the WoW, and this has truly stirred something inside. A family member, who is not a member of the church but also has the same illness I do, suggested I go Paleo.
Crazy as it sounds, this is the most emotional I have been in a long time. Coming across your blog, and reading the Institute Manual's lesson on the WoW has helped a bit. I know I just need to be prayerful. But, I appreciate your input here, and if you have any other input regarding this issue, it would be great to hear.
Thank you.
I really love reading your blog and tell others who are interested in diet about it. The gluten free/grain free craze does really seem to be growing. It has me confused at times when I read expert opinions on it, but ultimately I can't get over the fact that the Word of Wisdom does say to eat wheat and other grains. I do feel better when I eat whole wheat sourdough, so I think properly preparing the grains helps them to digest easier.
I really feel like it's such an uphill battle against sugar for me with small children. I don't think it's a coincidence that after all the over-indulgence and everyone giving kids candy around Christmas that we all came down with the stomach flu and colds. Yuck!
On another note, I was talking to a friend about the WoW the other day and she had an interesting perspective on the word "sparingly" as it refers to meat. She feels like it means that we should use all parts of the animal: the meat, the bones for stock and the organ meats. This really resonated with me as I have been trying to do more of this lately. I'm very slowly coming around to liver ;)