Quote of the Month

Unpopular truth.

If you train 5 times a week and your nutrition isn’t aligned, you would benefit from dropping to 4 times and use the time you gain to sort your nutrition out.

Coach Benjamin Yeezus

@BenjaminYeezus

Glasgow Times

 

V – Virus Resilience

It’s almost winter. The virus is still with us. No nutrition can stop you catching it – so we comply with whatever rules and restrictions are in place at the time.

 

What you can influence is what happens if you do catch it. Young healthy people will mostly be fine. If you’re older, your risk of serious illness increases. You can’t change your age but you can reduce your risk when you improve:

• your health
• your weight
• your blood sugar stability
• your Vitamin D level

Looking after yourself is always worth it.

That’s why for November I’m offering reduced price consultations (£65 → £49) to people who want to take positive action.

Book now jackie@learntoeatwell.co.uk

What you eat and drink really matters so here are some tips to help you.

Eat more:

• Oily fish and eggs for vitamin D which has many health benefits, including priming our T cells

• Vegetables which give you lots of vitamins, minerals, enzymes and antioxidants plus fibre to feed the good bacteria in your gut

• Live natural yoghurt, kefir, lassi and fermented vegetables to repopulate your good bacteria

• Coconut oil which has anti-bacterial and anti-viral properties

Supplement with:

• Vitamin D (most of us are short of this unless we supplement – especially at this time of year when the sun is low).  The risk of needing intensive care is greatly reduced by having enough vitamin D.
  

• Magnesium (most people are deficient)

• Selenium (2 or 3 Brazil nuts a day is plenty)

• Zinc (good food sources are seafood, lamb, turkey and pumpkin seeds)

• Vitamin C

Avoid:

• Sugar – it feeds bad bacteria, unbalancing your system

• Processed food – you want your body to cope with the virus, not use all its energy fighting fake food

• Alcohol

Other tips:

• Eat right for your metabolic type (ask me about a test)

• Get lots of sleep to make the powerful anti-oxidant melatonin

• Exercise, especially out in the fresh air when it’s not pouring down and blowing a gale. It will help you sleep better too.

• If you smoke, give it up now

• Wash with actual bar soap whenever you possibly can. Coronaviruses are in a fatty ‘envelope’ which can be destroyed by soap. Also soap won’t damage your own protective bacterial like antibacterials do. Joanna Blythman retweeted this Tweet thread on why soap is so good.

• Solutions of ethyl alcohol and isopropyl alcohol at between 60% and 80%, plus 3% hydrogen peroxide are effective for cleaning surfaces

• Manage stress and prioritise self-care; your mental health, physical health and immune system are connected. We’ve really been through the wringer this year and very few folk are on top form. It helps to keep a sense of purpose and optimism. We won’t get back to normal for some time yet so look after yourself and do things that give you joy.

Top tips: Eat well and support your health.

 

Obesity Strategy

Have news reports about obesity and coronavirus alarmed you? Do they make you determined to lose the weight that’s putting your life in greater danger?

Boris has certainly been spurred into action by his time in hospital. He realised that carrying extra weight is one of the highest risk factors for becoming seriously ill with COVID19.

Obesity also makes you more likely to suffer from heart disease, diabetes, several types of cancer, fatty liver, respiratory disease, and mental health problems.

To tackle all of this the Government has launched a strategy to slim down the nation.

Pexels

So what is their focus?

Calories.

Sorry, that’s how we got into this mess in the first place. Calories don’t help you make good food choices; they drive you towards processed foods.

Surely cutting calories helps. Will you not burn more energy than you eat?

Only for a while.

Our bodies are survival machines. Cut the food you eat and your body shuts down your metabolism and hangs on in there until it can put all the weight back on again. That’s why 100 people on a diet will all lose weight but later 95 of them will find themselves back where they started or even heavier than before. And the cycle will repeat.

Let’s go back to the beginning. What are people eating now that causes obesity and poor health? Food-like products. And that includes the low-calorie ones.

• They’re addictive – so you over-eat.

• Chemicals make them taste great – so you over-eat.

• They’re low in the nutrients your body needs – so you over-eat.

• They interfere with your body’s control mechanisms and stimulate appetite – so you over-eat.

• The label says they’re healthy – so you’re fooled into thinking it’s OK to over-eat.

  

  A Colin Shelbourne cartoon from Survival Guide for the Skint.

Since calories became popular and the food industry got into gear 50 years ago, the weight of the average Briton has gone through the roof whilst health is in an ever steepening decline.

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The Government rightly blames advertising and the food environment we live in. We’ve been brainwashed into buying this junk and thinking it’s an acceptable way to feed our bodies. Offers are always for extra junk, not BOGOF on cabbages or steak. They’ve recognised this and I’m glad they’re introducing some controls.

What can you do?

Britain’s health was best between 1950 and 1970. Almost everyone was slim. Almost everyone ate real food.

Real food works with your natural appetite controls. When food satisfies you, there’s no need for will-power and no desire to over-eat.

I so hope you’ve all got used to doing your own cooking during lockdown and that you’ve been soothed by the rhythm of spending time in the kitchen, enjoyed what you ate and noticed how much money you saved.

It’s a missed opportunity but in reality the Government is unlikely ever to tell people to eat real food; they don’t want to damage the processed food industry.

So it’s down to you.

• You can take control. 🙂
  

• You can choose better food. 🙂
  

• You can care for your body and nourish it. 🙂
  

Top tip: To be slim and healthy, forget the calories and learn to eat well.

Engage You Cumbria

This week I appeared as a guest on the weekly show

Engage You Cumbria

a community support YouTube channel which Kathryn Jackson and Claire Bull started to keep us all positive, healthy and entertained during lockdown.

In this week’s episode, Claire talked about kindness (but check out her exercise tips in earlier episodes too) and Kathryn led us through how we can reflect on the last 10 weeks and where we are in different areas of our lives.

My message was #EatRealFood with some ideas for breakfasts to keep your blood-sugar stable so you improve your health and reduce your risk of a serious outcome should you catch the dreaded virus.

Here’s the video. Enjoy!

Soup to cheer your lunchtime

Salads are out and we want a warming soup to cheer our lunchtime.  Luckily it’s easy to make your own with hundreds of recipes on the internet in every flavour you could wish for.

Home made soup is cheap, delicious, nutritious and fresh. It’s good for your health to eat a wide variety of foods and soup is a good way to ‘hide’ those you’re not so keen on and wouldn’t eat on their own. Use your imagination and be a bit free and easy when creating your soup.

My standard recipe goes something like this:

(All ingredients should be cut small before they go in the pan.)

Cook an onion in butter until transparent.

Add a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, a carrot and couple of sticks of celery and cook for a couple more minutes.

Add 1/3 tin of tomatoes, handful each of cabbage stems and cauliflower leaves (for the waste-not-want-not generation you can save these earlier in the year; just wash, chop and pop in the freezer), stock or bouillon to cover, a squirt of tomato puree, salt, pepper, 1 tsp dried oregano, 1 tsp dried parsley (or fresh if you have it in which case you’ll need about 1 tbsp).

I often add saved ‘juices’ from beef stew for a richer flavour. You could even cut up cooked meats to put in. Deli counters often sell cheap mixed offcuts.

Bring to the boil, simmer for 5 minutes, add some green beans and peas. Simmer for another 10 minutes. Tip in a small (300g) tin of mixed pulses. Use a stick blender to whizz it smooth. Freeze in portions for use on other days.

Following my principle of plants, protein and fats, to make a more nutritionally rounded meal from this almost all carb soup, skip the bread and serve with a slice of cheese.

This one’s pumpkin.

Pumpkin Soup

Just chop the flesh of a 2-3lb pumpkin into cubes, put in a large saucepan with 3/4 pint stock, salt, pepper, fresh thyme and parsley.  Bring to the boil then cover and simmer for 30 minutes.  Add a tin of mixed beans and simmer for another 10 minutes.  Whizz with a stick blender then stir in a 1/2 pint tin of coconut milk.  That’s it!

I’ve also looked at what’s available to buy.

As far as possible, try to avoid unhealthy ingredients like sunflower oil, sugar and MSG that are so often used in manufactured food products. Look out too for misleading labels on products containing only tiny amounts of the most appealing bit yet naming it in big letters splashed across the front. (This applies to food, shampoo, you name it.) Always check the ingredients list on the label, they appear in order from most to least.

‘Fresh’ cartons and pouches – found in the cold aisle. The New Covent Garden veg based soups look pretty good but the Smoked Haddock is mostly potato and with only 5% fish has a disappointing nutritional profile for a fish chowder. Similarly, Naked’s Vietnamese Fiery Beef Pho contains no beef, just beef stock (only 5%) plus loads of spices to give it flavour.

Tins – most supermarkets sell a huge array of tinned soups including own-brand and many manufacturers. Usually these have a dozen ingredients (excluding water and any added vitamins/minerals). The best I found was Crosse and Blackwell’s Roast Chicken and Vegetable which has all real food ingredients in respectable amounts, as has Baxter’s Super Good Pea, Broccoli and Pesto soup.

Free and Easy soups – are useful if you have food allergies/intolerances.

Packet soups – can be useful at the office or if out and about but you don’t want your flask tainted with last week’s lunch.  They usually have about 17 ingredients but this varies widely. Surprisingly, Batchelor’s Minestrone Slim a Soup, at a whopping 27, contains 10 more than their Minestrone Cup a Soup. Batchelor’s Chicken and Leek is another misleading name with only 1% chicken. The Morrisons Golden Vegetable with Croutons is one I used to have sometimes but nowadays, for the sake of my health, I prefer to cook than buy.

Top tip: Get soup making.

Quote of the month – top books

Britain’s biggest seller is cookbooks. The second is diet books. How not to eat what you’ve just learned to cook!

Brian Turner, chef

In Britain we sell more cooking books per capita than any other country – but we cook less.  Have we made it all too complicated?  As a friend of mine said “Cooking is common sense and the application of heat.”

This is the scrummy one-pot chicken from my recipe booklet Eat Well and Save.

Eat to Save the Planet

Climate change is in the news again and saving the planet looks like a challenge the human race is not taking seriously. Surely it’s a good idea to reduce consumption of energy and resources and not be wasteful.

Sir David Attenborough said about saving global eco systems,

“The enemy is waste; when you see what’s thrown away, it’s shameful.”

The most environmentally damaging industry is air and sea travel, next comes fast fashion but food is right up there in importance. The ways we farm, process, eat and waste food are unsustainable. The UN has estimated that we waste 1/3 of the food produced – that’s 1.3 billion tonnes a year. Other estimates are as high as 50%. It’s been shown that the third most effective way to tackle climate change is to reduce food waste. So when I was putting the bin out I started thinking about how we can do our bit for the planet.

Our council collects rubbish once a fortnight. Perhaps your wheelie bin is nearly empty, like mine, but I see overflowing bins all over town.  Recycling is also collected once a fortnight. Again, I noticed boxes overflowing with bottles and mountains of cardboard boxes.

What’s going on? Could it be partly down to the type of food we buy and the way it’s packaged?

The more processed a food is, the more of its sale price goes to on advertising – including making the products’ packages look appealing even if the tempting images bear little relation to what’s inside.

A great way to reduce waste (food and packaging) and save lots of money is to do a little planning, buy real food and do your own cooking. Last August I ran a series of costed recipes and these plus others and some tips on healthy eating and weight loss are in my Eat Well and Save recipe booklet, now available £3.95 or £5 with postage.

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Leftover salmon with kale, sun-dried tomatoes and blue cheese

Cooking your meals from scratch gives you control over portion sizes too which could be good for your waistline. If you make too much, save any leftovers to eat another day rather than bin them.  Also see this blog Love Leftovers.

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To help you get organised try this useful weekly plan sheets from Wilko – with thanks to Elsa one of the Eat Well Gang who told me about them.

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and my shopping list prompt to help you think about the week ahead rather than walking round the shops buying whatever takes your fancy or what they promote the hardest, then ending up with too much or something missing that you need.

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As well as reducing waste, we can support regenerative agriculture (small scale, mixed, grass fed animals and arable farming) which has negative carbon emissions (ie reduces global warming), supports rich ecosystems with plants, insects and mammals and enriches the soil. Intensive (factory) agriculture (indoor livestock fed on grains and large scale arable using chemical fertilisers with pesticides and herbicides) causes greater emissions, loss of wildlife and biodiversity plus soil damage.

See Feedback Global.

When you buy meat from a supermarket, you get a plastic box. You can buy meat from a butcher and come away with a small, flimsy plastic bag. Yes it’s still plastic but a tiny fraction of the amount.

Buying local and in season saves food miles. It will be British asparagus season soon. Buy some to eat and some to freeze then you won’t need asparagus all the way from Peru later.

Grow a bit of salad or some soft fruit in the garden.

And even if you don’t have a garden you could grow some herbs in a pot on your kitchen window-sill.

Top tips – Include environmental impact when choosing the food you buy.

– Buy what you need, in minimal packaging and eat all of it.

More ideas at Love Food Hate Waste.

A Little of What You Fancy

The closer we get to Christmas, the more unhealthy stuff is shoved in front of our eyes and under our noses. There are office parties, family gatherings and all sorts of social occasions where people will pressure us to indulge more than we want to (often to make themselves feel better)

 “Go on, have another…”

Thankfully we don’t have to eat and drink everything on offer and suffer for it, or refuse it all and feel left out; we can take a middle road, use the 80/20 rule, join in without excess and enjoy a little of what you fancy.

There’s a saying:

Don’t worry what you eat between Christmas and New Year, it’s what you eat between New Year and Christmas that really matters.

If you’ve been taking care of yourself, your amazing body will cope with a bit of unhealthy stuff especially if you keep putting mostly good things inside you. Great breakfasts, super lunches, healthy snacks, fabulous dinners, all home-made mixtures of plants and proteins and fats. You’ll take it all in your stride.

Here’s a Jon Gabriel breakfast that seems light but is nutritious enough to last for several hours – fruit, full-fat natural yoghurt, ground flax, hemp, chia seeds, protein powder and I like to add some nuts – just stir it all together.

Of course, some people will dive in with gay abandon, intending to fix the damage in the New Year. If that’s you, going on a diet is unlikely to be helpful so resolve to build in some better eating habits or have some nutrition coaching and learn to eat well.

There will be presents as well as food and I leave you a quote I just saw from Bernard Manning:

I once bought my kids a set of batteries for Christmas

with a note on it saying

“Toys not included”

Merry Christmas!

Jackie

What Time to Eat?

I usually write about what to eat, but timing is important too.

Your body doesn’t just gear up to sleep when it’s dark and wake when it’s light; every part of it has control clocks.

Artificial light means we can eat from pre-dawn until midnight nowadays. Unfortunately, this disrupts our circadian rhythm and is bad for our health.

It’s best to eat during the day when levels of digestive enzymes are high and your liver and gut are ready to deal with food. In the evening, saliva production slows down.  Also, if anything enters the stomach, there’s more acid produced. Your gut slows down for nightly repairs – but repair is difficult if food is still passing through – it’s like trying to re-tarmac a road with traffic still flowing. It’s better to stop eating 2 or 3 hours before bed.

I’m in favour of working with your body, so Prof Satchin Panda’s research on Time Restricted Eating struck a chord. (Listen to Dr Rangan Chatterjee interviewing Prof Panda here.)  An 8-10 hour window has been found in the lab to protect against (and to improve existing) obesity, heart disease, diabetes, fatty liver disease, cholesterol and high blood sugar. Prof Panda recognises that we don’t have a choice when we get up; we have jobs to go to and children to take to school. But we can choose when we eat.

I like to try things out.  Initially it felt weird starting work early then having breakfast at 9:30am but months into my self-experiment, I feel great. After 7:30pm I don’t eat – that’s a 10h window. Even a 12h window gives benefits, say 7am to 7pm.  Give it a try and find out how you feel working with your body’s rhythms. (Check with your doctor about effects on medication.) There’s also a global study you can take part in via an app (mycircadianclock.org).

Top tip – Give Time Restricted Eating a try

Quote of the Month – Avoid the Snack Trap

Unless you are a cow or want to be the size of one – stop grazing!

Zoe Harcombe

Nigella Lawson is well known for her love of food and eating – but she says, ‘I’m not really a grazer. I like proper meals.’ She

Snack Trap

gets pleasure from being absorbed in the experience. This is the opposite of the mindless grazing we see so much at work, on the street, in front of screens.

Don’t fall into The Snack Trap – eat well at meal times.

 

October is Cholesterol Awareness month – what better way to deal with your cholesterol than to cut out sugary/floury snacks?