Cleaner Eating, part 2

So I just have to rant.  I have been trying really hard to eliminate the chemicals that we eat and I must say, it's really hard!  And here is the part that is the craziest to me.  Almost everything that is "reduced fat" "fat-free" or other various diet type foods are full of chemicals.  It makes sense because if they have to take the fat out they have to replace it with something to make it taste the same.  Makes you think that we may be making ourselves sicker by eating these diet foods.  Even today when I was looking at butter, it was shocking.  I have switched to real butter and use it only when necessary.  But I had some time today at the store and took a sec to look at the ingredients.  On the butter container, it said sweet cream, olive oil and salt.  Sweet, that's easy to read and understand.  Then I saw light butter and thought well that should be better, I'll check it out.  The ingredients on that were 4 lines long with plenty that I could not even pronounce.  Scary!
So my thoughts on this are, do we really know what we are putting into our bodies?  Many of these chemicals are newer to the market, so we don't really have clear research on how it affects the body.  One thought that keeps me focuses on making these better but sometimes more difficult and costly food choices is one that I heard last summer during the packing event for Feed My Starving Children.  The presenter talked about how the founder of the ministry started out by collecting food from the US and bringing it to the starving children in other countries.  Things like cereal bars, snack bars, and other packaged food.  Do you know what happened to the kids?  They got sicker than they were before.  Their starving bodies could not process the food!  If that doesn't say something about the crap we eat then I don't know what will.

So my conclusion to all of this...sometimes you have to make choices to eat things that might seem "unhealthier" as far as fat content or calories, but in the long run who is really benefiting?  Are we poisoning ourselves just to lose weight?  What if we just ate things in moderation and focused on the healthy foods such as fruits, veggies, lean protein and dairy, and whole grains?  That's one of the reasons why I love WW.