In the last article we covered how many companies selling natural sweeteners such as stevia and monk fruit, knowingly or unknowingly cut their product with artificial sweeteners by 60% or as much as 100%.

They can do this because the only way to tell for sure is to do very extensive chemical testing.

Yet these artificial sweeteners can pose real health risks, from heart trouble to gut trouble.

And they're in about 99% of non-sugar sweetened products today.

But if it takes thorough chemical analytical testing to be absolutely sure it's natural, and you probably don't have access to that, what can you do to know what's real or not?

Well, there are a few ways.

There is an idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and so blood pressure, and this isn’t the case.

Your body needs saturated fats. About 25% of each of your cells are made from saturated fat. And they wouldn’t function without it.

Even more, it’s necessary if we want soft, healthy skin.

But there is another type of fat which has been confused with saturated fats, and which is very destructive: Trans Fats.

We aren’t hearing as much about them today, but they exist in many processed foods and we need to check for them as they cause inflammation in the blood vessels that does lead to high blood pressure.

So let’s see what these are and what they do.

Environmental toxins are getting worse.

And I don’t mean that as a generality. I mean it on a very real, very personal level.

We’ve passed the point where taking “reasonable caution” or “buying all organic” is enough.

We’re exposed to too many chemicals every day. They’re in our personal care products, the clothes we buy, the fabric of our car seats, and our dishwashing liquids. We even have toxic heavy metals in our baby foods.

But we’ve heard all of this before, seen all the stats and figures.

What does it really mean? How does this work, how do these things actually harm us? And is it really that bad?

Let’s have a real example and you tell me.