Last weekend I was sitting at the kitchen table with my dad while he thumbed through the coupon section in the Sunday paper.  He grumbled, “There’s nothing in here that I’d wanna buy.”  Let’s see what he meant.

This week I found coupons designed to entice consumers to buy the following edible products: Fiber One chewy bars, Betty Crocker cake mix and ready-to-spread frosting, Bisquick pancake mix, V-8 splash, a new breakfast cereal (more on that here), salad dressing (more on salad dressings), Pam cooking spray, Texas Toast croutons, YoCrunch Fruit Parfait (more on yogurt), Snapple iced tea, Temptations by Jello, Crystal Light (more on beverages here), Ore-Ida hash browns, Dole Fruit Crisp, and a variety of candies, including Hershey’s kisses, Reese’s peanut butter cups, Cadbury eggs, and chewing gum.

If you’re a coupon clipper, you want to be really careful not to clip coupons for anything you wouldn’t have considered eating before you saw the coupon.

Just because Jello has figured out a new way to package the same old flavors doesn’t mean you have to try it.  Even if it’s a bargain (this week).  Just because two (!) different companies have now begun to market their usual thing with oats to sprinkle on top doesn’t mean you have to try it.  First of all, it’s not a particularly nutritious product to begin with, loaded as it is with excessive amounts of sugar.  Secondly, it’s a very expensive way to buy oats.  And you probably have some in your kitchen anyway.  You wanna sprinkle oats on your yogurt or your fresh fruit?  Go right ahead.  You don’t need a coupon.

I am happy to report that I did find a few items that my great-grandparents (or somebody’s, at any rate) would have recognized as food.  Compared with the large number of creatively designed, manufactured products, there weren’t that many.  But there were a few.  They included turkey bacon (Butterball); cheese (Babybel and Alpine Lace); butter, half-and-half, and eggs (all from Land o’ Lakes); and tomato juice.  There was also a coupon for California mandarins.

Remember that processed products are made from very inexpensive ingredients, and they are sold for a good deal more than they cost to make.  The profit margin is high, so manufacturers stand to benefit even more if they can convince you to buy processed food-like products.

I also found coupons for razors, skin and hair products, glass cleaner, paper towels, plastic containers, plastic bags, and cat food.  I have a cat, and I pack lunches.  I use some of these items, and they cost less when I use coupons.

So coupons aren’t always a bad deal.  But they aren’t always a good deal either.  In many cases, they are designed to get you to buy something you would not otherwise have considered.  That’s where you need to be careful.  Caveat emptor — let the buyer beware.

I spend a lot of time reading books written by people who really, REALLY, like to eat.  Lately I’ve been listening to Tony Bourdain, American chef and author of Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly and A Cook’s Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, as he traipses around the globe eating the most extraordinary assortment of what once slipped, slithered, slid, or flew straight into the hands of his hosts.  You think that’s gross?  In defense of his diet, and with tremendous concern about what now passes as acceptable fare in America, he says:

“Do I overstate the case?  Go to Wisconsin, spend an hour in an airport or a food court in the Midwest.  Watch the pale, doughy masses of pasty-faced, pringle-fattened, morbidly obese teenagers bulked up on cheese that contains no cheese, chips fried in oil that isn’t really oil, overcooked grey disks of what might once upon a time have been meat.  These are the end products of the masterminds of safety and ethics?  Then tell me I’m worried about nothin’. 

A steady diet of ho-hos and muffins, butterless popcorn, sugarless soda, flavorless lite beer.  A docile uncomprehending herd led slowly to a dumb, lingering, and joyless slaughter.”

I’m not the only one who’s noticed that there is something terribly wrong going on out there.  That’s Tony Bourdain, with his unique commentary on the monstrous consequences of eating a diet that consists largely of manufactured calories.  Very difficult to ignore.  Go, Tony!
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Quite a few years ago, I decided to make my home in northeast Ohio.  But my folks are still in New Jersey.  So over the past 25 years, I’ve made the trip between Ohio and Jersey at least a hundred times.  This has made me an expert at highway food offerings.  Which is not necessarily a good thing.  A few years ago I started seeing trail mixes among the fast food, doughnuts, potato chips, and pretzels being offered for sale at the highway stops.  For a while, I was trying to figure out why the amount of carbohydrate is so much higher in commercial trail mixes like, for example, Planters Trail Mix (R), than in virtually identical mixes of non-commercial trail mixes that I put together myself.  Yes, that is true.  But why?

I happened to be sitting in a meeting recently, listening to a creative bunch of people solve the latest interesting problem, when somebody mentioned that commercial trail mixes spray their dried fruit with sugar solutions to increase the shelf life.  What!?  Did I hear that right?!  Well, that explains that, doesn’t it!?  You just can’t let your guard down for a minute, can you?!  Even when you try to do the right thing, buy the healthier food, make the smart choice, you’re eating hidden sugar?!  That really frosts me, I gotta tell ya.  Planters also mixes cottonseed oil into their trail mix.  I don’t know anyone whose great-great-grandparents ate cottonseed oil.

So here’s my solution.  I make my own trail mix, and that’s that.  Today I’m going to teach you how.  First, make a list:
1. Choose a nut or two: pecans, walnuts, hazelnuts (filberts), pine nuts, cashews, peanuts, brazil nuts, almonds, macadamia nuts.  Did I miss any?
2. Then choose a seed:  Sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, chia seeds, sesame seeds.
3. Now choose a fruit or two or three:  raisins (gold and dark), apricots, dates, apples, papaya, mango (Trader Joe makes an interesting chili-covered version), bananas, strawberries, pears, pineapple, cranberry.  I know that some of these (especially cranberries) are made with sugar, but you can make your own choice about that.
4. Finally, add small pieces of dark chocolate (or mini-chips) if you don’t plan to put it in a place where the chocolate will melt.  Remember that dark chocolate is good for you.  Avoid “yogurt-covered” raisins and stuff like that.  
5. Now add your choices to the shopping list, and don’t forget to go buy them.  Mix them together in a large bowl, and use a 1/4 cup measure to measure out individual-sized servings into baggies.  A quarter cup may not seem like a lot, but this is real food, and real food is pretty dense.  It will be enough, I promise.  And anyway, if it isn’t, you can just open up another baggie.
6. The next time you make it, vary your mixture slightly so it doesn’t get boring.

If you have a tree nut allergy, use peanuts.  If you are allergic to peanuts, use sunflower and pumpkin seeds.  Lots of options here.  The simplest mix is just peanuts.  The next step would be peanuts and raisins, which is a fantastic combination, by the way.  If you don’t like pineapple, skip it.  If macadamia nuts are ridiculously expensive, ignore them.  This project doesn’t have to be complicated, although you can certainly make it that way if you want to.

If you carry homemade trail mix, you will never find yourself overly hungry and without a smart option.  I put some in my kids’ lunch bags for years.  Toss a few in your car, briefcase, backpack, purse, and/or suitcase.  If you weigh more than 250 lbs., toss in a few more.  If you regularly travel with life partners, business partners, colleagues, friends, children, or teenagers, toss in a few more yet.  

And everyone will thank you for sharing.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that I see changes in peoples’ appearances when they stop eating manufactured calories.  This week I thought I’d share what I see, before and after.

A few months ago, at her wedding, Chelsea Clinton looked truly radiant, in precisely the way I would wish for every bride.  Her father, Bill, looked great, too, fresh off a 15-pound weight loss courtesy of his daughter’s vegan diet, to which I’ve heard he’d agreed for the sake of the coronary artery disease that he’s working to reverse.  Hillary?  No bashing here — she simply had the look of an individual with high insulin levels. 

Here’s what I see on the faces of most people who eat the standard American diet:  Large deposits of fat under the cheek bones (buccal fat pads).  Mild swelling around the eye, especially under the eyebrows (periorbital edema).  Thickened skin with slightly enlarged pores and a doughy appearance.  Fat deposits under the jaw, well known as a “double chin.”  And a faint yellowish cast to the skin.

You can see these features on the faces of lots of celebrities who had them once and then lost them.  Google images of Al Roker, Jennifer Hudson, Roseann Barr (plus plastic surgery), or Maya Angelou for starters.  All of them were once obese and hyperinsulinemic (high blood insulin levels), and then, with hard work, they were not.  One thing you can see right away is that the most prominent improvements don’t require plastic surgery.

Last week, I happened to see a photograph of Hillary Clinton testifying before Congress, and I knew that she had, at last, joined the
ranks of “real food” eaters.  It was inevitable; for the most part, people eat like the rest of their family.  Hillary’s puffy cheeks are gone, the swelling above her eyes is gone, the yellowish cast has been replaced by pink, and her skin looks more elastic and resilient.  Don’t be fooled by the shiners — those are often caused by allergies, or fatigue.  Her double chin is gone, too. 

Is it ever normal to look puffy and round with big, fat, red cheeks?  Yes, because there is a time in life when it is normal to have high insulin levels.  In the earliest weeks and months of life, we grow very fast.  We are working to store calories as quickly as we can.  That’s why babies have fat cheeks.  They are in a high-insulin state. 

I like to imagine that Hillary’s family got her to realize that her health is on her face.  I’ve heard that she wants to be a grandmother.  So you might say that she has skin in the game.  
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