Old Man Winter is finally starting to release the hold he has had on my little part of the world for the last few months. Yesterday while waiting for the bus with my daughter we were serenaded by little birds gathered in the top of one of the trees. This past weekend our backyard was alive with grey squirrels, the first time I have seen them around in ages. And just this morning I saw a chipmunk, ...

I look back at the diet of my youth and cringe. I was the epitome of a junk food junkie. Memories of pudding that never saw a refrigerator make me shudder. I’m pretty sure I ate enough chocolate, cream filled snack cakes to feed a small country. In high school I bought the same lunch every day – chips, lemonade, and a brownie (packaged, definitely not homemade). Meals were highly processed as well. My mother was a good cook as ...

By the end of this year your favorite Nestle candy bar could be missing something, but chances are you won’t notice the change. Nestle recently announced they will be removing artificial colors and flavors from over 250 products covering 10 brands and 75 recipes. Instead of Red 40 and Yellow 5, the color for the crunchy center of a Butterfinger will come from the seeds of the fruit of the achiote tree – annatto. Likewise, natural vanilla ...

There is a revolution taking place in grocery stores across America, and its repercussions are being felt in boardrooms around the country. As consumers increasingly educate themselves on what is in the food they are eating and feeding their families, they are demanding higher quality, less artificial, non-bioengineered food. They are voting with their wallets, as more processed, chemically laden foods are being left on the shelf in favor of brands offering taste without the use of unpronounceable, unrecognizable additives. ...

There was a time not too long ago that I blindly roamed through the aisles of the grocery store, putting things that I had been buying for years in my cart and not thinking twice about them. While I knew some of the things I bought might not improve my health or that of my family, I also believed that the Food and Drug Administration kept a close enough eye on the food industry that I wasn’t buying anything that ...

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” This quote by Maya Angelou is true in many aspects of my life. I found myself thinking this just the other day, oddly enough as I was grocery shopping. Instead of grabbing the same fruit snacks off the shelf that I always buy for my children, I swallowed hard, ignored the difference in price, and reached for the organic ones. With regards to ...

A genetically-modified organism, or “GMO”, as they are commonly known, is created when the genes of a plant or animal are altered by the inclusion of a gene for a desirable trait from another species of living organism, bacteria, or virus. This results in a change being made to the DNA of the new plant, animal, or organism. GMOs are created in a laboratory and include combinations of plants and animals that would not typically occur in nature.

The reasons for ...

A large food manufacturer sells its popular cereal bars both in the United States and in Britain. The key difference between the two products? The one sold in Britain contains no artificial dyes. While the US version of the product gets its color from Red No. 40, the British version contains natural colorants such as Beetroot red, Annatto, and Paprika extract.

A Google search for “artificial dyes and childhood disorders” will return numerous links to studies and articles tying artificial dyes ...

Happy New Year! As 2014 drew to a close my Facebook and Twitter feeds filled up with talk of New Year’s resolutions. Who was making them? What were they? How did your New Year’s resolution(s) from last year work out? In reading the various posts and poking around online I noticed that the top resolutions seemed to stay the same from year to year. Among the most popular New Year’s resolutions are things related to personal improvement, such as losing ...

When we launched greenestbeans.com one of our most important considerations was keeping it free to consumers. We wanted to make it easy for people to come to our site, search for the food they were seeking with the attributes they wanted, and leave with some product suggestions. In the interest of keeping things simple we decided to not make it mandatory for people to sign up to use our service. While it is not necessary to join our community or ...