Here is a word of advice for those of you who are prone to kidney stones or kidney pain. Stay away from Michelina's frozen meals. Yes, they're a cheap alternative to Lean Cuisine's and Healthy Choice meals during a recession, but there is a reason they're cheap. Read the label, and you'll find that you get what you pay for.Monday night I cooked one of the meals, the Santa Fe Rice and Beans one. I have had to cut out most of the other Michelina meals because the white sauce that they use on the pasta tends to make my stomach do spasms for hours on end, no matter how many peppermint oil or digestive enzyme pills I take. However, the rice and beans didn't seem to hurt my stomach, and they were a tasty companion to the tequila lime marinade that I used on my grilled chicken.
Well, Tuesday morning I woke up feeling like a horse had kicked me in my right kidney. It gets that way after I eat something that's too salty, and within hours I usually feel the telltale signs that a kidney stone is making its way from my kidney to the Outer Banks of my urethra. Anyone who has ever experienced a kidney stone knows what I'm talking about when the pain starts migrating southwards. I felt that way all day Tuesday. Now I know why. I dug the Michelina box out of the garbage can and found that it had 710 mg of sodium. The marinade had another 400 mg. That means in one tiny little meal I consumed 1110 mg of salt, possibly more because I can't remember if I drank tea, water, or a Coke (Coke has another 50 mg) with dinner. I'm sorry, but that's an insane amount of salt.
My kidney hurt all day Wednesday as well, albeit not as much. Yesterday, the pain finally let up. I'm still a little sore in the physical sense this morning, but I'm more sore in the mental sense because I realize that I'm going to have to start reading my food labels. I've been reading and analyzing dog food ingredients for years, but I've mostly ignored my own labels. I tend to do a cursory check for fish or fish oil in order to avoid an allergic reaction, but that's about it. Now if I want to avoid stomach pains, I need to check for things like preservatives. If I want to avoid kidney pain, I need to check for salt.
The easiest solution is probably going to be cooking things from scratch. However, cooking from scratch costs more. Fresh food costs more than prepackaged foods. Organic food costs even more than that. Cooking from scratch is also a lot more time consuming, and, seeing as I'm culinarily challenged, it's more likely to lead to a kitchen fire. So what I'm I willing to risk, a smoke-filled kitchen or kidney stones? It's a toss up at the moment, but if this week's pain is any indicator, I'm more likely to risk the fire.
