Processed food and soda health food? Dieticians paid to say yes!

I’m lucky we didn’t have soda or processed foods in the house much as a kid. It just wasn’t part of the Italian/Albanian cultural way of eating I grew up with. We ate a lot of simple, healthy foods like pasta e fagioli (beans), homemade pizza with tomatoes and olives (and no cheese), escarole and white beans, and lentil soup. The only “processing” I can think of was my grandmother asking me to go through the huge pile of uncooked lentils on her table to look for stray pebbles.

lovelowfat-lentils

On holidays we’d have my Italian grandmother’s homemade cookies, or my Albanian grandmother’s homemade baklava. On very rare occasions we had a soda, either root beer or cream soda, as a treat. But that’s what sugar should be, an occasional, festive treat. Yet for many it’s Continue reading