Sugar...

Here are a couple links I found while researching the effects of sugar. I specifically wanted to know if sugar can cause depression.

Sugar's Health Effects

Processed Sugar Can Cause Addiction and Depression

From the above link, here are just a few of the effects of sugar that really stood out to me:

Sugar can cause hyperactivity, anxiety, difficulty concentrating, and crankiness in children.

Sugar can cause arthritis.

Sugar can cause heart disease.

Sugar causes food allergies.

Sugar can cause a permanent altering in the way the proteins act in the body.

Sugar can cause headaches, including migraine.

Sugar can adversely affect school children's grades and cause learning disorders.

Sugar can cause depression.

Sugar can contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.

Sugar feeds cancer.

A quote from http://www.holdthetoast.com/httblog/archives/000169.html:

Please, please, stop looking for a way to have lots of sweets without consequences. Stop trying to make your low carb diet look like your old diet. There's nothing "normal" or "natural" about eating a lot of sweet stuff; the typical American intake of sweets, especially sweetened beverages, is nothing short of pathological, and changing sweeteners doesn't make it any more normal, historically speaking.
We need to back to the notion of a "treat" being something that we have on special occasions, not something we have every day.

One of the Marans hatched out a single chick today! But, I feared for it's life so I took it from her. Red can get in the chicken house... or she could! Kris fixed that problem this afternoon.

But the reason I was really worried is that there are two broody hens in two of the upper level nests. There is a little platform outside the nests that the hens can walk on if they want. Both hens jumped out to eat some scraps that Erinn gave them, and that is when she saw that one chick had hatched. Then, hen #2 got back in her nest making a clucking noise.

So the chick decided to travel the dangerous path from it's own nest over to where the other hen was. When it somehow arrived without falling off, the other hen was NOT happy to see it and she started clucking madly and ruffling her feathers up. At which point I snatched it away from the beak of death and brought it in the house. I brought the other eggs in and put them in the incubator. Out of the 10 eggs, only 5 looked like they had something in them. I sure hope we don't end up with a lone chick to raise! I gave the hen the eggs that had been in the incubator since Feb 11, so she can try again. This time I will move her to a safe place BEFORE hatching time!

On 2-12, we had a nice surprise visit from Kris' cousin Jeff and his family. They were on their way home to Chicago, and stopped by briefly. The kids sure enjoyed riding Susie and looking for arrowheads.