How to Switch to Homemade Ketchup

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This is a post I really hope my kids don’t read.  It could ruin everything.  Kids, if you’re reading…stop now.  See…it’s just spinach.  Move along.

Are they gone?  Shhh.  Lean in a little closer.

I’ve been secretly replacing the ketchup in their favorite bottle with homemade.  Gasp!

Their favorite brand is made with High Fructose Corn Syrup and while the effects on blood sugar are about the same as table sugar, the effects on gut health are way worse than that.  High fructose corn syrup is a pre-biotic that firmicutes thrive on.  Don’t let that name fool you.  Firmicutes don’t make you FIRM or CUTE.  Think F for Fat.  Studies have shown that people with higher levels of firmicutes in their gut biome struggle with weight control versus people with higher levels of bacteroidetes who tend to be naturally thin. Source

In our quest for health, I’ve been slowly getting HFCS out of our diet.  I started with switching from Aldi peanut butter to Costco’s organic peanut butter, where the ingredients are just organic peanuts and salt. It was a little more expensive but not too bad. The kids are eating it, but have been asking for their old peanut butter back (sigh.) Then I switched from Aldi grape jelly, to Welch’s made with real sugar.  They like it even better, because it spreads well. It’s still a lot of sugar, so next stop is buying all fruit jam or making homemade.

I decided to be a little more stealthy when it comes to their ketchup. I noticed the bottle was half empty.  I made a homemade version and filled the bottle back up, shaking well. When it gets half empty again, I’ll repeat the process.  Pretty soon the bottle will be 100% homemade ketchup and the kids might not ever notice.

Here’s our recipe, which I adapted from Whole New Mom.

Homemade Ketchup

6 oz Tomato Paste

1 oz Apple Cider Vinegar (2 Tbs)

2 1/3 Tbs Erythritol (You can use Turbinado sugar or 1 2/3 Tbs honey instead.)

1/4 tsp garlic powder

1/4 tsp onion powder

dash cayenne

dash allspice

1/2 cup water

Whisk everything together and chill.  If you want it super smooth, use a blender. It makes about 12 oz of ketchup, which fills our bottle halfway.

I’m also working on a homemade BBQ sauce.  In the meantime, I’ve been buying  this one.

What do you think?  Are your kids ketchup fans like mine are?

The Secret to Great Energy and Well-Being

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Back before we moved into this giant project house, I made homemade bread, had a garden, and sewed our own clothes. I cooked a meal every night and we sat around the table as a family.  Since we moved (6 years ago — aak!) I just haven’t had the energy for it. It might have coincided with adding our 6th child, plus all the extra work from DIYing the house. Plus I took a part time job outside the home and then my health fell apart.

This picture is awful and I was definitely miserable, but it’s not the sickest part of my journey.  Just a year or two before this, I couldn’t walk unassisted because my blood pressure was so low.  If I tried to stand, I would sometimes black out and the room was spinning so fast, I couldn’t keep my balance. It was hard to even lift my arms off the bed.  Some days I was afraid my heart might stop beating in the night.

All that time in bed, I spent reading and researching.  I found a doctor who could help me. Traditional doctors scratched their head and wrote prescriptions for prednisone and other immunosuppresants. Some even suggested it was all in my head, but she guided me through nutritional healing.  The details of that process is a book all in itself, but it has motivated me to help others.  It’s why I’m in school right now to become a personal trainer and going on to become a health coach and fitness nutritional specialist.

Friend, your health is everything. While I was laying in bed, the only thing I had was God. (Which was huge!  I can’t imagine walking this journey without Him.)  I had no family life.  I missed sports games, music concerts, birthday parties, Christmas.  The world kept going with me trapped in bed on the sidelines. The kids did so much growing up in the years that I was sick. Those lost moments are my biggest regret.

I have energy to bake again! No more additives in bread for my family.

Even after I was well enough to get up off the bed, I had a long road of recovery ahead. I’m still on it and sometimes take a step back.  While each regression is frustrating, it also teaches me a lot about my body.

Sheet Pan Suppers make healthy food prep easy

The cause of my illness can be summed up in one word, STRESS.  I used to think about stress as worry, money problems, or a calendar full of too many events, and while that’s definitely part of it, stress is much more than that.  It can be physical stress from exposure to toxic chemicals, like ammonia and bleach or even paint fumes. It can be from toxic load from food additives. Stress can even come from light sensitivity or undiagnosed allergies.  Whether stress comes from internal or external sources, it creates a perfect storm that is the root of ALL disease. Even when we have a genetic disposition to disease, it takes a trigger to turn those genes on.  That trigger is some form of stress.

Research scientists are now discovering that the deadly diseases of aging adults began in their childhood.  This link is specific to heart disease, but I strongly believe that cancers and brain diseases also begin in childhood with root nutritional stress causes.

I’m hosting a free live class through zoom on May 3rd, telling some of the tricks I use, including how to use essential oils to support the thyroid, adrenals and good sleep. How I ensure proper nutrition and reduce oxidative stress. I’ll also show my favorite snack that boosts gut health, encourages fat loss, increases metabolism, boosts detoxification, and is super filling. Plus I’ll be showing my favorite non-toxic cleaners and skin care routine.  Just pop in your email address above to get an invitation. (Plus it’s live, so you can ask questions like “But what about picky eaters? And how can I afford it?”)

Sometimes I still feel discouraged about how far I have left to go in my health journey, then I look back on my progress photos and realize how far I’ve come.

I put these photos side by side yesterday and shared them on instagram. I still have a long way to go in fitness and the scale has actually gone UP instead of DOWN! So frustrating when I’ve been working so hard and if all I had to go on was the scale, I would have given up long before now. Some days I ask myself how I think I can be a personal trainer and health coach when I’m so overweight. “Who do you think you are?” Then I see the progress here and realize the scale can’t tell the whole story, and I keep going.

Even progress pictures can’t show everything.  Remember when I told you a few years ago I couldn’t lift my arms off the bed? This is last weekend, me hiking with my family.  ME!  I’m crying with joy because I was there, participating, living an energy filled abundant life.  If I can do it, anyone can.

I’m excited to share more of my story with you live.  See you May 3rd!

 

 

Raw Almonds aren’t Really Raw (and might contain added carcinogens)

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I care about your health and never want another cancer diagnosis.  We try really hard to eat healthy, exercise, reduce stress, remove toxic cleaning products from our homes, and yet cancer. Today I want to tell you about a whole food I thought was healthy, but had added carcinogens that weren’t disclosed on the label.

Even though I have a super low grocery budget, I pay more for certain things.  For example,  I buy butter instead of margarine or shortening and I buy honey instead of corn syrup.  If it’s for a recipe that stays raw, I even splurge for raw wild honey. The health benefits of these foods, outweigh the costs. By limiting our purchase of junk foods and eating out, they still fit into our small budget.

Almonds are a food that I’ve upgraded in our budget.  It’s illegal to sell a truly raw almond in the United States, unless they are selling direct to the customer at a farmer’s market. (I’ll be looking for that next, but it may be hard to find in my area.)   Almonds must be treated with steam pasteurization or a chemical called propylene oxide (PPO), a known carcinogen.  In fact, my previous favorite “raw almond” source was Costco because of the fabulous price and “high quality” until I found out their almonds are treated with PPO.  Too many of my friends have cancer right now, for me to say “it’s the dose that matters” and continue to feed my family known carcinogens.

Recently I started driving 20 miles to Trader Joes for almonds because their almonds (even the inorganic ones) are PPO free.  While I don’t buy all my foods organic, the one sure way to tell if your almonds are PPO free is if they are certified organic.

The unnerving thing about PPO treatment (also called PPO pasteurizing) is that the tainted almonds are everywhere.  They might be in almond flour, in almond milk, in a cracker, in a granola bar, or in a breakfast cereal, and just because it’s a health food brand, doesn’t meant it’s PPO free. If it’s not labeled organic, we have to contact each manufacturer directly to find out which type of treated almonds they use.  They aren’t required to disclose it on the label.  Did you catch that?!  They can treat their almonds with a known carcinogen and aren’t required to disclose it on the label.  In fact, the label can still say “raw.”

For more reading on the subject:

The EPA page on PPO

Natural Society

Natural Grocers

Whole New Mom

Almonds.com

I’m open to learning more.  If you have information from the other side of the issue, send it to me and I’ll be happy to read it.