To meat or not to meat?

I am in no way going to ever become a vegetarian, however, I have never really been a big meat person (especially red meat). Typically though we do eat a lot of hamburger. Since I've been on my food kick I've been watching lots of documentaries, reading articles, etc. Just trying to get myself informed. There are two documentaries I'd like to share with you.





I do recommend both of these to watch, as they are about very different things. My favorite documentary is still Hungry For Change though.  Hungry For Change and FoodMatters are both very informative and not so biased. They are more about giving you the information you need so you can start to eat better, feel better, and become educated. Food Inc, while still informative, was (in my opinion) highly biased and didn't always give you a true interpretation. But, I still learned things and more importantly it started to make me think and ask questions. Where does our food come from? What is in my food? How many nutrients am I really getting?  It opened my eyes and made me think about things that I've never really thought about before.


After watching Food Inc., it is pretty safe to say that I will never think about hamburger the same way again. Not that I will never eat it again, but now I feel at least a little more informed. We were going to make the switch from ground meat to ground turkey anyway, but now I feel solidified in my decision. After watching the film I also did some research to see if I could back up the information they provided. One thing was that they said if we fed cattle grass instead of corn then they would produce less E. Coli. I found a few articles/studies that contradicted this and said cattle will have E.Coli in their tract no matter what they eat. They also hit on a company called Monsanto and upon further research I also found out that they left out a lot of information in their stories. Anyway, my point is to not believe everything you see and to do your homework first.

I also found this interesting news story about "meat glue"

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/iteam&id=8638238


My food changes are still going well, I had a healthy choice fudge bar thing last night and I didn't feel guilty about it. It's ok to eat some non-healthy things every once in a while and even still I have lost 4.4 lbs in the past week so go me!! So exciting that you start to see results in the beginning. Makes me feel good in knowing that I am making a change and my body is noticing the changes too. I am pretty good about juicing every day and eating lots of raw veggies. We have a salad as our main dish every night for dinner and then have a small portion of meat as our side. As a society we have it backwards on our portions and what we eat. Salads are a good, easy way to get so many raw veggies in since you can put whatever you want in them and you are still getting leafy greens, which is very important. The salad dressing is good to help mask the taste of some you maybe don't like as much too!  But don't drown your salad....lots of dressings out there have a ton of sugar in them.

I know quite a few of you out there are reading my posts, so I was thinking of doing a post that had lots of tips/tricks/ideas?  What do you think? Am I actually informing anyone or am I just ranting for myself, haha? Let me know! :-)