Hello everyone!
Wow, what a great introduction by Denine. I’m seriously touched. I’m truly excited to be here at We Know Stuff. I can’t wait to share with you guys all the things I’ve learned over the past 17 years.
My husband (The Stud Muffin a.k.a TSM) and I began our Real Food journey in December of 2012. One night while I was battling with another bought of insomnia I stumbled across a Facebook post that talked about GMOs. I remembered seeing that word before and couldn’t remember what it meant, so I Googled it. That led me to a fantastic documentary entitled Genetic Roulette by Jeffrey Smith and the Institute of Responsible Technology. For 85 minutes I sat there with tears streaming down my face, with thoughts racing through my head such as; “Was this the reason I’d battled 18 years of infertility?”, and, “Was this why I was so sick all the time?”, and, “Could this be why TSM and I can’t lose weight?”… Dozens of thoughts and questions racing through my head and the tears became hot and I became enraged.
I’ll spare you the nasty words I had for our government officials for allowing companies like Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Bayer and several others to bastardize our food supply with untested, unproven, franken-“foods”, while singlehandedly turning the American population into the largest community of unwilling, or unknowing participants or lab rats if you will, for these things called GMOs. I was sick to my stomach and I was madder than a cat getting a bath.
The very next morning, I told TSM of the things I had learned and said that from this day forward we will only eat organic, non-GMO foods. I also said that we will do our best to eliminate as many highly-processed foods as possible and we were taking our health, wellness and our food choices back into our hands because food companies, pesticide and chemical companies, drug companies and our government had screwed it up beyond recognition and they had no business being in the food business. That’s how it all started. That’s what pushed me over the edge. That documentary did in 85 minutes what I couldn’t do on my own in 15+ years. …you can lead a horse to water…
So what is a GMO? GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organism. It can also be referred to as GE- Genetic Engineering, or GM, Genetic Modification.
“Genetic modification is the process of forcing genes from one species into another entirely unrelated species. Genetic engineering forcefully breaches the naturally occurring barriers between species, causing both known and unknown / unintended consequences that have never been proven safe by the FDA or the United States Government. Because the injected genes may come from bacteria, viruses, insects, animals or even humans, GMOs are also known as “transgenic” organisms.” (Quoted from GMO-Awareness and used with permission.)
GMO-Awareness.com is my favorite site for information and educational resources. It is a wonderful place to start as you begin to educate yourself on the evils of GMOs. I personally know the person behind this site and I’m impressed with this individuals level of knowledge and commitment to putting out fully researched, helpful and accurate information! If you’d like to learn more about GMOs, and I hope that you do, please check out my blog. I have some helpful information there that will be a great place for you to start. HERE, and HERE.
My goal over the next several months is to empower, equip and enlighten you to make more educated and informed choices about food, not shame you into feeling like you can’t possibly do all the things that I or other Real Food bloggers or Real Food ‘followers’ are doing on a daily basis. The goal will be to get you buying, cooking and eating more Whole, Real, from scratch, cleaner, less processed foods. Isn’t that exciting? You should be excited!
We’ll discuss organic foods, non-GMO, what are the differences, if any, and if you can’t buy organic or if you can’t find non-GMO, what is the next best thing? I’ll also teach you how to chose the lesser of two evils when it comes to processed foods. If you absolutely have to have a round, buttery cracker for your nightly cheese and cracker snack, then let’s find an organic one that has fewer ingredients and better yet, ingredients you can pronounce and that aren’t synthetic or chemicals.
I’ll teach you guys about The Dirty Dozen and The Clean Fifteen. We’ll go over a list of ingredients that you should try to avoid, and if you can’t, then you’ll at least know why you should try to. In other words, you’re going to learn more about the ingredients on those food labels than you ever thought possible, and once you do, I think you’re going to join the ever-growing number of people who are choosing to take control of their diets and learn exactly where their food is coming from, what’s in it and how it can heal them and nourish them.
I suppose I should let you guys know that I’m a classically French-trained Chef. So not only am I Real Food Girl, but my food is REAL good. Real Food Girl Unmodified means that I do my best to keep it real, share with you my real struggles, real successes, real thoughts on Monsanto and GMOs, and my real food concerns. I strive to use as many unmodified ingredients as possible. Sometimes I’ll take a recipe that contains a lot of processed/modified ingredients and unmodify it, or “Foodify” (as we real foodies like to say) it. Because I want to teach you how to take any recipe you have at home and make it healthier, cleaner and more Real. I don’t do a ton of fancy, difficult recipes on my blog. I keep things are real as possible so that real people can achieve real success and see real results.
Are you ready to jump down into the rabbit hole with me? 
Just trying to start this real food journey because we are sick of being sick and tired all the time. Money is a major issue for us so we can’t always shop organic but we can raise some of our foods here on our acre and a half farm.
My grandson has anger issues as does my husband. Both are on meds to control it. This is what our food is doing to our bodies. We also deal with every little cold that comes around. We need help with the transition and help getting our bodies back to normal.
One of the things that started this journey for us is that I have become very sensitive to chemical taste in our foods.
Julie,
Feel free to follow my blog to get more help and resources for the best way to implement real food into your diets. You can also find me on Facebook. 🙂 Real Food Girl: Unmodified
Aww, Beth- hugs to you and I’m so happy that your journey led you to be able to have children! That is so wonderful! Sadly, I think GMOs just destroyed my body and my husband’s and that wasn’t an option for us- but- I have two beautiful, grown step kids and four fantastic grand children.
I hope that this series will empower you to continue on your journey, know that you are not alone, and inspire you to share what you’ve learned with others. 🙂 Thank you for the kind words!!
HI Beth,
Wow! Thank you so much for sharing your story with us. We’re so glad you found the root of your infertility and went on to make such a lovely family. Infertility is very difficult; even though mine was explained (bad tubes), I understand your journey.
Kristine is really a lovely person. She came to my sister and I when we were feeling really stressed out about “not being good enough” – and more or less told us that it’s called a journey for a reason.
We hope you’ll stick around. We do really lovely things on this blog. 🙂
Big fan of Kristine’s here, just learning for the first time of her journey with infertility. It makes me sad and makes me want to share my story too as maybe it will help someone else today.
To tie my story up in a bow, I went from unexplained recurring miscarriages to fertile myrtle after I eliminated GMOs from my diet.
Here’s the more indepth version: I struggled with infertility – not getting pregnant and then not staying pregnant for over a year and just as I had scheduled my 1st apmt with an infertility specialist, I was lucky and managed to stay pregnant with my first born. It was one hellacious pregnancy where I threw up literally everything I ate and drank which at the time was processed foods in boxes (okay, I know now that’s NOT food) and unfiltered chlorinated water. I was so freaking sick, completely debilitated on the couch all day or throwing up in the bathroom all day, and eventually I ended up with liver and kidney failure and almost died. But I was blessed with a healthy premature baby. Then my little baby went on to have extreme reactions to processed foods (gmo, hfcs laden baby formula) and to her routine vaccines. Literally I could not give this child a dum dum lollipop without her becoming feral and banging her head and body into things on purpose. As she grew she taught me many things – about the myriad toxins and gmos in our food, water and medications, and while this was going on, I was deeply affected by secondary infertility and the pain and sadness of recurring pregnancy losses. For 3 years I would conceive and miscarry again and again. D&C day and every loss a huge disappointment. Then over time, as I learned from my little lady, I cleaned up her diet and mine and transitioned our family to real food, organic food, full fat dairy, nutrient-dense diet, and removed GMOs. I also sought natural approaches to fertility (traditional chinese medicine) and to my delight, I overcame my unexplained infertility, literally got pregnant with ease and went on to have 2 more healthy babies. With baby 2 I was still learning about real food and can remember getting sick everytime I ate processed food. I remember thinking…”it’s just chick-fila”….”why is that making me sick”. Clearly I still had a lot to learn! And learn I did. As long as I steered clear of GMOs and processed chemical laden foods I was good. One slip – one bite of hfcs jelly on a piece of toast and it was expelled immediately!! That’s how sensitive I was/am to gmos!
I think people really have a right to know if it’s GMO and they need to know what scientists have found with lab animals fed gmos….liver and kidney failure – these are our filter organs – and infertility.
I experienced all of these conditions on a GMO standard American diet and I over came them all by getting off of GMOs and processed foods.
I’m not 100% compliant with a non-gmo diet as it’s still difficult in the US to find animals not fed GMO diets but it is getting better as people wake up to the issues and demand that the animal-based food items they eat are also spared the extreme inflammation that comes from eating gmo foods.
Okay, enough of my story. Grateful to Kristine for sharing and for educating folks so that they too can improve their health and well being.