Diet pepsi - my new pet peeve!

Rob and I are headed down to Southern Oregon for the Raw Union fest. Hope to see you there!


While I was down visiting the folks I brought my dad a delicious raw lunch. This was what was on the menu:

• Cauliflower spanish rice
• sunflower seed "refried beans"
• guacamole
• organic lettuce from my mom's coworker's garden

I brought some Tabasco for my daddy-o too because I suspected that raw might not please his SAD palette. I really wanted to impress him so that he might think about incorporating more raw veggies into his diet. Now that he's been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, (which he is convinced is primarily genetic, aka not his fault) its important that he make changes now before he has to go on insulin.

My family's diet is primarily bread: toast for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, bread with a dinner of pasta. For my dad, that includes a beer. How many simple, crazy processed carbohydrates is that?? I don't even want to try to approximate the numbers. Now that my dad is trying to change his diet, he is cutting out the breads. My mom has bought him special "low-carb" tortillas to help him out. This is a great transition food, but I sure hope he won't continue feeling good about "low-carb" stuff. I want to know how they make it "low-carb". Do they just replace the carbohydrates with chemicals the body can't assimilate? What the heck is this "low-carb"?

After brining my daddy all that scrumptious food, you can imagine my upset when he bought himself a diet Pepsi as a drink. Diet pepsi? AAAAAAHHH! It is my pet peeve in nearly every way.

1. I hate Diet anything. I wish my dad could recognize that Soda is what caused his diabetes and JUST QUIT DRINKING SODA. It's got to be some kind of corporate conspiracy that they get people hooked on drinking sugar with every meal, and then once the people are so sick they can't drink that stuff anymore, they offer an equivelently bad alternative!! This alternative even makes people think they are being healthy. Diet my ass.

2. Aspartame. Aspartame is an artificial sweetener composed of two amino acids. Or as my dad said when I fussed at him "It's a protein". I'm not sure why anyone would think that aspartame would be a better source of sweet for diabetics than any other sugar, except that it is marketed this way. It's a chemical; something's wrong there. It's been a subject of controversy since its FDA approval in 1974 concerning some shady events around its release. It has also been linked to being a source of brain tumors, lesions, and other cancers, although the Aspartame Information Center says these are merely internet email hoaxes.

3. Aspartame is produced by Monsanto. Isn't that enough incentive to avoid aspartame at all costs right there? I mean, Monsanto was the one who manufactured DDT and used it on children and soldiers during WWII to kill lice. A swiss guy even got a Nobel Prize in 1939 for discovering that DDT kills insects (while they were using it to kill lice). Should we trust Monsanto that aspartame is safe? Hell, no. It took over 40 years for people to figure out that Agent Orange is really bad for people. Should we wait again to find out the effects of aspartame? I won't.


All in all, lunch with my dad was a success. He didn't say he liked it exactly, but he did suggest to my mom that she make the cauliflower rice sometime, and when I left for home he was dipping carrots into the leftover sunflower spread. I'll try again next time. :)