Recently I was discussing diet with someone and they offered me some of the MIO water enhancer for my water. ….I live in the most amazing state in the union when it comes to water.  My tap water tastes better than any imported foo foo water you can find.   Once it goes through the brita and is ice cold it becomes the nectar of the Gods, man! 

I commented that the fake sugar was just as bad for them as the real thing and I got looks like I was from the planet formerly known as Pluto.  If I hadn't been hungry and ready to eat I would have argued immediately… it’s a chemical.   It’s either been manufactured and is a foreign chemical to our body OR if it’s ‘made from real sugar’ as so many advertise then it’s a thing from nature that has been stripped and processed so much that it is just as bad as a chemical.  I’ll pass on that.  Don’t get me wrong, if I’m going to drink a cup of coffee I’m not going to waste my precious calories on sugar and will put Splenda in it.  If I decide to splurge on a soda it’s going to be a diet and have Aspertame….. but I have really been pushing to keep that junk out of my body.  The truth is that we don’t KNOW what it does to us.  I don’t care what testing it has gone through or how many rats were forced to consume it before they passed it on to us humans to gobble down.  We don’t know what sort of cancers/diseases/hormonal problems it causes ..but in light of the failing health of Americans…it  AINT GOOD!

After thinking on it, and reading Bob Harper’s: The Skinny Rules I realized it’s just as bad for us mentally.   Commercial junk food has filled us with chemicals and flavor enhancers.  Doritos has ‘new cool ranchier’ chips and Cheetos have ‘new extreme flavor’.  Well, how do you think they get those extreme flavors?  They add more salt and more additives.   Well of COURSE when you eat a plain carrot it’s going to taste bland after eating those for a lifetime.    Americans eat out more often now than they ever have and restaurants aren’t worried about your sodium levels or the carb content of their food or if you are getting enough fiber.  They add tons of salt and sugar to substitute for quickly prepared food that’s of a lesser quality than you can make at home. 

We are bombarded with salt and sugar everywhere.   When we eat REAL food suddenly it tastes bland to us and we need to add enhancers.   The most amazing thing happened when I stopped eating that kind of stuff.  I made myself some iced tea with a real lemon slice, I hadn’t had tea in a while because I always liked mine sweet and I was off the sugar and avoiding the fake stuff.  I drank that tea and wow….. the taste of the TEA was amazing.  I don’t mean my ice tea was good, I mean I could TASTE the tea.  The complex flavors that make up tea and the zing of lemon behind it were just out of this world.  So why on EARTH would I need a water ‘ehancer’ added to my water to make it taste like sweet tea?  A chemically created and falsely sweet approximation of tea?   Today I had baby carrots with my lunch and you know it occurred to me that those little buggers are pretty sweet tasting.  Now, I KNOW there isn’t sugar in there, how did I never notice that they were so sweet?  Well why WOULD they be considered sweet when side by side with monsters like Mountain Dew?

Give it a try.  For one MONTH swear off sugar/salt/artificial sweeteners as well as foods that contain them.  Give tasting your actual food a try.   Enjoy what REAL water feels like in your mouth as just a cold soothing drink instead of bogged down with pretty colored fake goo squirted into it.   Enjoy snacking on something that came from the earth and wasn’t developed in a lab.