Beautiful big breakfast

When you run two miles in the morning, and then bike four miles to a restaurant carting 70 pounds of kid behind you, there's absolutely no guilt as you're practically licking your plate clean of its three-egg omelet. This I know to be true.

What I do find a little guilt-probable is the food. We were looking at the table condiments and found each packed with high fructose corn syrup, which is essentially banned at our house. Sure, I understand this sweetener, which is not that much chemically different than plain table sugar but a crap-load cheaper, is used to sweeten jams and jelly.

But when honey contains sugar, high fructose corn syrup, plain old corn syrup and, oh yes, honey, in its top five ingredients, you know there's a problem. So maybe we don't use the tiny packets on our table, but what about the pancakes? What about the juice? What about the sausage?

What's in that stuff? And how many empty calories did I replace from my vigorous morning workouts?

It's not that I'm against sweet stuff. I happen to like sweet stuff very much. I'm just against mass-produced foods adding this stuff, and calories that could be contributing to our obesity epidemic (although this issue is up for debate), to items that don't need sweetening. It's not that this corn-product is worse than sugar, but it's contributing calories to almost every processed food.

Honey, for instance, doesn't need sweetening. It's sugar. Why would you sweeten sugar? That's why I find it's just easier to avoid high fructose corn syrup altogether.