Stevia and the Quest for a Sugar-Free Life

Image via WikipediaA friend of mine asked me about sugars yesterday and I tried to explain my favorite replacement, stevia. This is essentially my email rewritten for the general public, and it's a quick-rundown for anyone unfamiliar with it, or perhaps a review for those who are. It’s worth reviewing the Wikipedia entry about it so that you know its history, but basically it’s unknown - or at least less widely known -  today because large sugar interests managed to get it labeled by the FDA as a dietary supplement. This essentially meant that you could eat it, and it could be sold in stores without health claims but companies couldn't use it as an ingredient for their products. Now, when people are finally starting to learn about the ways they’ve been deceived (and since the major manufacturers have come up with their own branded versions of stevia) the FDA has conveniently changed their mind about it. At least, they're not saying a distinct "yea" or "nay" about it.

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Milk Recall Affects Five States (but does it matter?)

Image via WikipediaAn upper-Northeastern dairy has voluntarily recalled 8,000 to 10,000 gallons of milk after it was discovered that a pasteurization machine failure. While it's very admirable that the dairy announced this massive recall in a precautionary measure, recalls like this - let alone the recalls such as the recent egg fiasco or other meat-related incidents that left people ill or dead - should be scaring people far, far away from the idea of purchasing food created in "factory" farms.

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Hurom Slow Juicer, a few weeks in and loving it

We have several juicers - four, to be exact - in our house, now. The first three that we owned were all centrifugal juicers. I've got one at work so that I can juice there as I feel, we've got an old one as a gift, from a garage sale, that we never really used, and we had our prior best one in the kitchen for nigh-daily use. It was a rather nice centrifugal one that we also received as a gift, but it had a tendency to leak. We never really figured out what caused it to leak but enough was finally enough.
Please read the follow-up review.

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How much do pharmaceuticals spend... to get your money?

Going to the mailbox today I found a letter - sorry, an advertisement - addressed to my mother-in-law, who currently lives with us. Knowing she wasn't going to be opening this junk mail, I was curious to see what exactly was inside. You see, it was from Walgreens and the only thing it seemed to be advertising was the flu shot. This, of course, is not really unexpected. One can find ads for the flu shot pretty much everywhere one looks at this time of year, and it's only going to get worse. I'm certain I will soon be seeing the ubiquitous, massive billboards by the local hospitals again telling us all to cover when we sneeze, wash our hands constantly, and oh, oh oh - don't forget your flu shot!

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