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Mar20
Shelf Life of Food in Your Kitchen Pantry
Filed under: Health News;No CommentsHave you been taught if a can of food is bulging then it is bad and that is all you know about the safety and quality of food on your shelf? If your milk in your fridge has passed the expiration date do you still drink it until it tastes bad?
Do you know if the food on your shelves is still edible? Dates on the packages offer some clues, but these can be confusing because the United States doesn’t have a uniform system of food dating. Product dating isn’t federally required, except for infant formula and some baby food, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture fact sheet. Also, stores aren’t legally required to remove food once a “sell by” date has passed. It is up to us to be informed and make our own decision.
If there is a shelf-life date on a package, trust it. However, keep in mind that there’s a great variation with type of food, the temperature where it was stored, the original quality of the food, the amount of oxygen present and other factors, according to Oscar Pike, the department chairman of nutrition, dietetics and food science at Brigham Young University in Provo Utah, who has studied the shelf life of food. We as consumers would like it to be more consistent, but it just isn’t.
Valerie Phillips of the Deseret Morning News gives the following information on food labeling and packaging. Here are the dates you are likely to find on your package and what they mean, according to the USDA:
• “Sell by” tells the store how long to display the product for sale. For best quality, people should buy the product before this date expires, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the product is bad once it reaches that date.
• “Best if used by (or before)” is recommended by the manufacturer for best flavor or quality. This is not a safety date, according to the USDA. If the date says March 15, 2008 and today is March 16, that doesn’t automatically mean you have to toss it. The products, in general, are still safe to eat, but some consumers may detect changes in product flavor, color, taste or texture.
• “Use by” is the last date recommended to use the product, such as “Do not use after March 15, 2008.” The date has been determined by the manufacturer.
• “Closed” or coded dates are packing numbers or dates, so that manufactures know when and where the product was produced. This is helpful in the event of a recall. The product may be stamped with a date preceded by the letters “MFG.” This tells you the date it was packed. You may have bought the product a month ago, but this date could tell you that it has been sitting in a warehouse or on a store shelf for several months.The manufacturer’s dates on packages and canned goods are conservative and based more on quality than safety, said Dr. Frost Steele, a BYU food science professor. “The quality deteriorates much sooner than safety will.” Toss out any cans or jars that are bulging, heavily dented, cracked, have broken seals, loose lids or “any compromise with the packaging,” Steele said. It is best to rotate food on a first-in, first out basis.
Marilyn Bohn’s Bio
Marilyn is a creative organizer who has been organizing for over 20 years. She is a member of the National Association of Professional Organizers and is working towards becoming a Certified Professional Organizer. Professionally she has been organizing homes and offices for over two years. She holds a bachelors degree in Social Work. She has reared five daughters and currently lives in Utah.Go to her website http://www.marilynbohn.com where you can find free organizing tips and interesting blogs and helpful articles on organizing.
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Mar20
Are There Some Diets that Will Never Work?
Filed under: Healthy Outlook;No CommentsThere are diets that work for certain people, there are diets that do not work for certain people and then there are diets that never really work for anybody at all. Dieting is the most popular past time in the Western world and, makes no mistake that this is not a women-only issue. If you are a man and want a lot of women around you, then you have to stay fit.Pessimists would say that a diet is a bunch of foods we don’t like, in too tiny portions for our appetites and we must eat all that at specific times of the day. As nobody really eats this way, nobody can successfully diet and change their life style. I would say that dieting is, more than anything else, finding a structure.
It’s been said that people cannot eat healthy with so many temptations around them and this is why diets don’t really work, but the truth is that way too few diets offer a healthy structure that is both easy to follow and tasty. We cannot eat bland food all our lives and we can only drink this much grapefruit juice before we decide enough it’s enough.
Add to that all the scientific discoveries that stress out the importance of our genes to our overall body type and the naysayer do seem to make a valid point when they argue that diets never work. The fact is that, as one medical study showed, 80% of the children who have two obese parents are at risk of growing into obese adults themselves and only 15% of the children who have two normal-weight parents are at risk of growing into obese adults.
So genes do play an important role, but so do your environment and your life style. It doesn’t matter how skinny your mother and father are if you drink a gallon of high sugar fizzy drinks a day and eat only the greasiest burgers with XXL portions of fries.
We are all at risk of being involved in a car accident, whether we drive or not, but very few of us would ever have a car accident and even fewer will cause one to happen. Not drinking alcohol prior to driving and not being too tired to stay focused really does help.
And the same case can be made for dieting. Dieting is more than something you try for a couple of weeks every now and then. Dieting is changing the perspective you have on food. For example there is no such a thing as good foods and bad foods, but there is something that is called moderation. And it means that if you know you should cut out sugar and fat, and then avoid eating huge portions of anything that contains a lot of refined sugar and a high amount of fat.
It won’t get you very far to start on a frustration diet that demonizes chocolate and burgers! You should be able to adjust to a healthier burger, though. Like not buying a burger, but trying to make your own, buying a lean cut of beef and having the butcher grinding it for you. Dieting and healthy life style is not as much about giving up on foods we love, but on making choices that are sustainable for long term – for a life time actually!
There are diets that work for certain people, there are diets that do not work for certain people and then there are diets that never really work for anybody at all. Dieting is the most popular past time in the Western world and, makes no mistake that this is not a women-only issue. If you are a man and want a lot of women around you, then you have to stay fit.
Pessimists would say that a diet is a bunch of foods we don’t like, in too tiny portions for our appetites and we must eat all that at specific times of the day. As nobody really eats this way, nobody can successfully diet and change their life style. I would say that dieting is, more than anything else, finding a structure.
It’s been said that people cannot eat healthy with so many temptations around them and this is why diets don’t really work, but the truth is that way too few diets offer a healthy structure that is both easy to follow and tasty. We cannot eat bland food all our lives and we can only drink this much grapefruit juice before we decide enough it’s enough.
Add to that all the scientific discoveries that stress out the importance of our genes to our overall body type and the naysayer do seem to make a valid point when they argue that diets never work. The fact is that, as one medical study showed, 80% of the children who have two obese parents are at risk of growing into obese adults themselves and only 15% of the children who have two normal-weight parents are at risk of growing into obese adults.
So genes do play an important role, but so do your environment and your life style. It doesn’t matter how skinny your mother and father are if you drink a gallon of high sugar fizzy drinks a day and eat only the greasiest burgers with XXL portions of fries.
We are all at risk of being involved in a car accident, whether we drive or not, but very few of us would ever have a car accident and even fewer will cause one to happen. Not drinking alcohol prior to driving and not being too tired to stay focused really does help.
And the same case can be made for dieting. Dieting is more than something you try for a couple of weeks every now and then. Dieting is changing the perspective you have on food. For example there is no such a thing as good foods and bad foods, but there is something that is called moderation. And it means that if you know you should cut out sugar and fat, and then avoid eating huge portions of anything that contains a lot of refined sugar and a high amount of fat.
It won’t get you very far to start on a frustration diet that demonizes chocolate and burgers! You should be able to adjust to a healthier burger, though. Like not buying a burger, but trying to make your own, buying a lean cut of beef and having the butcher grinding it for you. Dieting and healthy life style is not as much about giving up on foods we love, but on making choices that are sustainable for long term – for a life time actually!
By: MN_Nikk
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