Holographic Health Insights

Whole Foods Over Chemical Shortcuts: Read Your Labels And Save Your Health

• Rev. Ann Marie Byars & Rachelle Gianaris • Episode 26

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Do You Know Your Food Ingredients?

Ever scan a label and wonder what “natural flavors” actually means? We pull the curtain back on the most common ingredient traps—artificial colors like Red 40, excitotoxins such as MSG, refined sugars and corn syrup, seed oils, and thickening gums—and explain how they can nudge your body toward inflammation, headaches, and blood sugar swings. You’ll learn how to read packaging with a skeptic’s eye, spot vague wording, and choose products built from real, pronounceable ingredients.

We also share the swaps that make cleaner eating practical, not preachy. For sweetness, we talk through when coconut sugar, maple syrup, and honey make sense—and how to adjust recipes to avoid soggy results. For fats, we outline a simple trio that covers most cooking: extra-virgin olive oil for low heat and salads, ghee and coconut oil for sautéing and baking. We highlight why refined seed oils often work against your goals and how oxidation fuels chronic inflammation. Along the way, we touch on carrageenan and gums in plant milks and dressings, plus the case for heritage flours like unbleached einkorn to get great texture without additives.

This is a practical tour of the grocery aisle and your pantry, paired with a few kitchen stories—like building a better pumpkin pie by swapping dairy, ditching refined sugar, and keeping the ingredient list short. By the end, you’ll have a checklist you can use right away: avoid unnamed “natural flavors,” skip artificial colors, steer clear of corn syrup and questionable sweeteners, choose stable cooking fats, and favor whole foods with short labels. If this guide helps you rethink your cart and your recipes, subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a quick review to help others find it.

To learn more about Holographic Health visit:
https://www.HolographicHealth.com
Holographic Health
800-566-1522

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Holographic Health Insights, the podcast where science meets goals for complete well-being. Join hosts, Reverend Anne-Marie Myers and her daughter Rochelle Generis, as they explore transformative health approaches that integrate body, mind, and spirit. From energy medicine to holistic practices.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, the old saying goes, you are what you eat, and what you eat shapes your health. So let's uncover the hidden truths behind everyday ingredients in your food. Welcome back, everybody. Skip Monty here, uh back in the studio with Reverend Ann Marie Byers and Rochelle Janneris, owners of Holographic Health Inc. Ladies, how are you?

SPEAKER_03:

Wonderful, Skip. How about you?

SPEAKER_01:

Doing just fine. Doing just fine. And uh looking forward to today's episode because I think we've talked about off recording that uh, you know, my kids uh won't eat out of my refrigerator unless they look at the back of a bottle or whatever food they're looking at in my refrigerator, they're gonna check out the ingredients. So I'm very interested, um, you know, with starting with knowing your food ingredients. So I'll let you ladies take it away.

SPEAKER_03:

Well, this has become so much more important as time has passed in this country. The European Union really jumped on certain ingredients years ago, and the US is finally having to follow suit with certain things, and number one really is red forty. You need to avoid that, it's been uh listed as a carcinogen since I was a child back in the 50s. So food colorings in general, if they are not from natural sources, like beets or some type of food-derived color, then they're a mix of chemicals and you really don't know what they're going to do to you. So artificial colors are really important to avoid. Another really important thing to avoid is natural flavoring. Natural flavoring in this country can literally be anything. They have deter certain things like the anal glands of beavers can be used as natural flavoring. That is often used in popcorn, microwave popcorn. So we all know about excitotoxins, things like MSG. MSG is known to cross the blood brain barrier and cause a lot of issues in the body, especially of children, and well, really anybody sensitive to it, it can cause migraine headaches and a lot of related issues in people, people who are especially sensitive to it, but in anybody really, that is a natural flavoring. So even though it may say this food is natural, natural is not organic. And even organic, if it contains natural flavoring, you really should avoid it unless it tells you what that natural flavoring is. And unless it is something you are willing to eat, don't eat it. So natural flavoring, artificial colorings, artificial flavors, all of those are to totally be avoided. Some other things that can be easily substituted to make things a lot more well, one more thing to avoid while I'm thinking of it is uh corn syrup. Corn in this country has become just an a GMO poster child because it is rare to really find corn that's even edible for the human body. Corn like our forefathers had, like the Indians grew when this country was founded, is nothing like the corn we have today. It's been bred to be a lot sweeter and just is full, most of it is GMO. Now, unless you get an organic corn, but even the organic corn is not like what we once had as a true good-for-you corn. So corn syrup and some of these corn sugars from that are GMO and regular processed white sugar has no good ingredients for your body whatsoever. And really terrible diseases like cancer and other diseases of this era, diabetes, etc., are not going to do well with corn syrup, sugar of any kind, etc. So, in order to replace some of these ingredients, reading your labels is very important. And you know I advocate organic food bar none, because organic food is twice as nutritious as non-organic or conventionally grown food. And you definitely want to look for things that are non-GMO. There are certain lists of foods from the European Union that they are very very careful about, and that they won't import from this country certain things like chicken, because of the way chicken is grown, and because of some of the ingredients that they put in it. So just think about that, that other countries in the world will not import our food, our cereals, our wheat, our corn, our chicken, etc. So if that is the case, you need to be really careful about what is in there. So read your labels, avoid your artificial coloring, artificial flavorings, and anything you really can't pronounce. Google is a great resource, look it up, see what it is. And if you don't want to eat that, don't. So organic foods, simple foods, foods with a lot less ingredients. And you can replace one for one your ri standard sugar with coconut sugar. And organic coconut sugar works very well in recipes. I made a pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving using my grandmother's recipe, and what I replaced though, was the milk with coconut milk. And I buy the simple coconut milk, it's a full-fat coconut milk, but it doesn't have keratinin in it. That's another thing that has been found to not be good for you, and it's a thickener. So you don't want to buy things with keratin in them, and then I replace the regular sugar with coconut sugar. And Rochelle, how was my pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving? It was pretty good.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, what about what about cane sugar? Is cane sugar? Cane sugar?

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah. Cane sugar, it's from sugar cane, but it has all the good qualities processed out, it's been bleached, and so you don't want to, it it has no food value and a lot of calories. And so what happens when you eat something like that, if you're eating, for example, if you're eating a fruit, you're gonna get the fruit sugar, but that fruit has some good inulin fiber, it has a lot of good vitamins and minerals, and and the inulin fiber helps to balance out that blood sugar rise and fall, and it also helps you to process things out of your body really well. So the cane sugar, though, is gonna spike your blood sugar, then you're gonna it's gonna drop out the bottom, and you're not going to feel good at all. Then you're gonna want something else to eat because that is what your body is craving because it had that spike, now it's lost it all. So um you want to really avoid processed sugar of any kind. And you know, maple syrup is another good thing that you can use. Honey, maple syrup, you have to kind of play with that and reduce the liquid in the recipe a bit, but you can search for recipes containing maple syrup online easily. But coconut sugar, you can even replace one for one. And even Walmart has organic coconut sugar, so it is easy to find, easy to replace, and it won't give you as much of a spike as traditional sugar. So those are simple things, and of course, avoid the sucralose, the aspartame. Sucrolose is derived from chlorine, it is a partial chlorine atom, and so that is not at all good for your body. And aspartame we know, or nutra-sweet, whatever they call it, is a carcinogen. This was proven many years ago, and I remember asking my gynecologist when I was pregnant with Rochelle here, and that was back in the 80s, what about aspartame? And he did a lot of research, and he said, Well, it crosses the blood-brain barrier, and I'm just not a fan of anything that might cross into your baby's system and harm the baby. And so he determined it was not good for me, it was not good for her, and that is when I really have been looking at food my whole life, ever since my oldest son was born, because I felt like it was my responsibility to raise these children to be as healthy as they could, and so I started looking into food and ingredients and how to have a balanced diet and healthy food back in the 70s. And if you want to do your own research, great. But the food babe, uh, Vonnie Hari, who runs TrueVonnie, that's her company, but she has a lot of good information about healthy ingredients, non-healthy ingredients. She has a lot of recipes, she has a recipe book, and I actually used some hints from her recipe for pumpkin pie and modified that with my grandmother's recipe for the pie that I created for Thanksgiving. And I used eincorn flour to make my crust, so it was a healthy crust. It's easy to make a pie crust. You look at a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, but use unbleached eincorn flour, and all it takes is ironcorn flour and water and salt. And uh the the key there is to use cold water out of the refrigerator, and you can make a pie crust very easily that's so much healthier than all the junk out there, and so give that some thought. All of these things are you can find the substitutions online, plant the food, babe, companies like Plant Strong have some really good um simple foods and um sunrise flour meals, has some great flour that you can get to make some, you know, you some of your own bread and um treats, even. I make some really good ironcorn flour cookies that have molasses and coconut sugar and ironcorn flour and spices that are, you know, there's there they still have sugar. You still have to recognize that even coconut sugar is a sugar, so you don't want to overdo that. But Rochelle have my cookies. And they're they have dates for sweetening, they have some good and you know, cashews for um, you know, the protein, and they have very few, very simple ingredients. So you can get things like that for your children and for yourself that are healthier as well. Rochelle, would you like to comment on any of this?

SPEAKER_02:

Sure. So you brought up keragenin, and that um there's kind of this family of thickeners that companies like to use. So that's a really big one. Also, Xanthem gum is one. Any of the gums and their job is to kind of create this thicker creamy texture, I guess, but they are all terrible. Um, they sneak them into creamers and milks and things like this. So watch even salad dressings, like anything that's kind of a liquid base, they'll sneak them into. It is possible to find good, healthy foods without them in it. So just look at those labels. Um, and another thing that is really it's becoming almost a staple in any processed food is these seed oils, um, peanut oil, sunflower oil, even canola oil. So the way that those they're just super processed. And anytime that you're squishing something to get something out of it, I mean, it's gross. Um, but what that does in your body is creates really bad inflammation. So the goal is to decrease the inflammation in your body. So any ingredient like the gums or the seed oils is going to increase that inflammation, the sugar. Um, so really trying to look for these more whole food um products, if you're not going to be able to make all of your breads or snacks or things, just looking at those ingredients and making sure that it's more of a whole food um ingredient list is going to be key to helping reduce the inflammation and the negative effects that some of these processed foods have.

SPEAKER_03:

And let me just say regarding oils, the only oils that I use now, I have an extra virgin olive oil to use for some really low temperature cooking or salads or when you need a liquid oil. And I use ghee or coconut oil. And so those are really the only three things. And for something to grease a pan, there's nothing better than using an extra virgin coconut oil followed by the organic ghee. You can keep things from sticking very well. And ghee, both all of those sit at room temperature. You don't have to refrigerate them. They're easy to use, they're flavorful, and they're much healthier.

SPEAKER_01:

So you said natural flavors can be anything, including, did you say anal glands of beavers? Is that what you said?

SPEAKER_03:

Yes. Yes. When I read that, I said, no more microwave popcorn for me unless it actually or anything. I don't buy anything that has natural flavor unless it tells me what that natural flavor is. It's just not worth it to wonder if it's if it has an excitotoxin or some animal derivative that I don't want to eat. And that is just, and if I don't buy it, the companies are less likely to use it.

SPEAKER_01:

So I think it in a nutshell, the best advice we can give folks, listeners and viewers, is if you can't pronounce it, don't eat it. If it's got natural flavors without a description, don't eat it. And avoid corn syrup and you know, all those other things. So in it, watch, look at your look at your label, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Absolutely, yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Very good.

SPEAKER_02:

And this goes for any on your body, too. Um, I'm really particular about the makeup and the skincare and the lotion that I use for that exact reason. Even shampoo, they will sneak in um fragrance. Who knows what that is? Just read those labels.

SPEAKER_01:

Read those labels. Very good. Well, thank you guys so much. I've learned a lot and uh appreciate you showing me and our listeners how awareness of ingredients can transform everyday life choices and your and and your health. So thank you guys so much.

SPEAKER_00:

Thanks for joining us on holographic health insights. If you're ready to dive deeper into transformative health approaches, visit holographichealth.com or give us a call at 800 566 1522. Remember, your journey to total well being starts here.