The blog revival, and some hard hitting realisations

It has been a long time since I’ve put my thoughts into a blog, but that is not to say that I haven’t thought about blogging. I often start a blog in my head, or take a photo of a meal, and think – this would be a great topic. But when I go to write it down, the thoughts don’t flow.

I have now finished the third year of my Naturopathy degree – the catalyst for beginning this blog, and it has been a wonderful three years of learning, exploring, and deepening my understanding of the interactions between thoughts, emotions, stress, nutrients, and food, on our physiological and psychological make up.

It has brought me to a few realisations.

– Most people are happy being ignorant about what is in food, and what foods they require. And I say that without malice intended. I used to be, I thought that if I didn’t think about it, it didn’t affect me. Until it did. At some point, we all need to take responsibility for our own health.

– There is a large amount of misinformation out there regarding ‘healthy’ eating, some of it from authority figures, and trusted sources. Australia is lagging behind at the moment in regard to new evidence that is coming to light about what actually constitutes a healthy diet, despite other countries drastically changing their food pyramids, and recommendations.

– As a society we rely far too heavily on carbohydrates as our main food source, and it is making us fat, insulin resistant, and unhappy, and leading to the rise in diabetes, cancer and most chronic disease states.

– The majority of items in a supermarket are not in fact food. And i’m talking about things packaged to be eaten. They provide negative nutrients because they use up the ones you do have to process and digest them.

– Most conditions – whether it is acute or chronic, serious or not can be greatly improved through diet. When studying the top conditions that cause hospital admissions, and death recently, the main advice consisted of: Eat more fruit and vegetables of all colours and shapes, eat less or no refined foods, eat less sugar, eat more fish, and healthy oils/fats, drink more water. Seriously. Just eat real food.

– One of the mainstays of naturopathic philosophy is that prevention is better than cure. And there are so many diseases and conditions that could be prevented and treated with nutritional and herbal medicines. Even if they need to be medically managed we can work alongside to manage any symptoms from pharmaceutical medicines, or improve their efficacy.

– Our gut health is so intrinsically linked to almost all other aspects of our wellbeing. It can affect mental, and emotional health, it can lead to an increase in allergies and intolerances, it can affect skin conditions, and is implicated in some of the autoimmune condition severity – not just those linked to the gut like coeliacs, but MS as well. Sometimes healing the gut is not as simple as taking probiotics, but that doesn’t mean its not possible, nor extremely worthwhile.

– Lastly, we really are what we eat. Our cells are a reflection of the ‘ingredients’ they have available to them when being formed. The outer layer of all of our cells are made of essential fats and influence how well the cell functions, and communicates with other, the inner requires different proteins and nutrients to build enzymes and power our mitochondria – where we make energy, and therefore, a diet deficient in any required nutrient will impact somewhere in the chain.

I will endeavour to expand on all of those points over the coming weeks – however if you have any questions please do not hesitate to comment.

It won’t be as long between blogs anymore I promise :)

 

M xx

Navigating the supermarket and avoiding the devil (sugar).

Oh my gosh! Uni, exams and a trip to Fiji have meant this blog has been severely neglected. But I was sent an interesting article today by a reader that spurred me to add some of my own tips.

Heaven!

The article is here and outlines how to navigate the supermarket, some common food myths, what to, and what not to eat, and simple ways to get around this.

I like it because it is what I live by, and is also correct. So many articles and advice provided by nutritionists advocates things like margarine – which I wrote about and explained here, and also advise the use of low fat dairy which is basically sugar.

One of the main discussions lately has been about the detrimental effects of sugar – and that if we had had a low sugar craze rather than low fat the world would be a much better place. A great video that will explain it is Sugar: The Bitter Truth. It is not short but outlines the way sugar is digested, and how easily is turns to fat, and discusses how fructose is metabolised like alcohol and causes issues with the liver. Just the name triglycerides gives away the fact that most stomach fat is sugar – glyceride from glucose. Another great resource if you are looking at giving the No sugar diet a try is Sarah Wilsons, I Quit Sugar – she has multiple books and recipes available, and has a great Facebook page with lots of info. If you do need to buy products with added sugar, be aware that glucose is much better than fructose/sucralose/aspartame etc, and remember that 5gm equals one teaspoon of sugar. If something has 20gm sugar in it, would you be happy eating 4tsp of sugar??

Now getting back to the article, my lovely reader asked if I had any extra tips – and the one I sent back was the 80:20 rule – which I’m sure I’ve spoken about before. Aim to be good at least 80% of the time, and the other 20 will keep you sane, is how I see it. Don’t become so pedantic about what you eat that the stress of it is causing more issues by releasing too much cortisol! (which will lower your immunity and put you in an oxidative state).

We buy and make all of our food from scratch (apart from some basics of course), and a lot of people are baffled at how we do that. Once you start you will see how easy and often cost effective it can be.

Some other easy supermarket tips to help avoid sugar and processed foods include:

Cooking your own simple pasta sauce. I don’t mean slaving away in the kitchen for hours, nor making a bolognese. I mean cooking a tomato based sauce in a few minutes like the ones you would buy in a jar with an essay worth of ingredients.

Just grab some tinned tomatoes or pureed tomato passata, put it in a pan with some sauteed onion and garlic, add some chilli if you like spice, and some basil – viola! Its probably cheaper than a ready made sauce! And to that I would normally add some veg like zucchini, mushroom, kale etc. You could add ricotta and spinach, oregano, parsley,  bacon (part of the 20% sorry), mince of course, or chicken. A dash of cream if you like it a bit richer and you have a meal in under 30 minutes.

Ready made stir-fry sauces in foil made by Maggi etc are another thing I refuse to buy – of course some of the basics are already processed like soy, oyster, fish sauce, and hoisin, but find one that is the least offensive/organic, or just use chilli, garlic, ginger, and five spice like I do. Simple, cheap, fresh and delicious. If you store ginger in the freezer it is really easy to grate and adds such a great flavour.

Another one that frustrates me is pancake mix. It is so so simple to make pancakes from scratch and has 1/10th the ingredients. One egg. One cup of flour. One cup of milk. That is it. If you want to feed more people, double/triple it. Will make about 6-8 depending on how big you like them. Just mix it all up, let it rest a few minutes and ladle into the pan. If you like them fluffy rather than thin, use self raising.

That goes for cake/muffin/cupcake mixes too – they drive me crazy and taste so artificial. Recipes with butter, eggs, flour and milk are everywhere, and we have most of these things in our cupboards. I am not vegetarian as you can see, but these can be substituted for olive oil, flax ‘eggs’, spelt flour, and soy/rice/almond milk etc.

One question my reader found hard to comprehend in the article was how bad breakfast cereals are. They are so processed that the grain portion, whether it is wheat or corn or rice, breaks down in the body so quickly and converts to sugar as there is no fibre or protein left to sustain it. And when eaten with low fat milk that has had the fat removed (but would  slows the absorption of sugar/carbs and lowers the GI) it is going to make you hungry by 10am. I always have protein for breakfast, after a nights ‘fasting’ you need to eat it or your body will start taking it from muscles. And the heart is a muscle so this is important. I have eggs, or sardines on toast, or quinoa porridge. I try and make sure I get my 20gm of protein at breakfast time. Milk and yoghurt provide some, but not normally enough. If you like oats have then with milk and nuts.

To be honest I’m finding it hard to write this post as this is just what I do, and have done for many years, so to think about what people buy processed and don’t know how to make from scratch is tough! I would love you to add comments and ask questions so I can add more tips and recipes!

I will expand on these topics in upcoming posts as well :)

Mxx

I can’t believe its not sugar!

Well it is technically..

Steer clear of anything that claims to be 99% sugar free. Its not really food. If its ‘sugar free’, ask yourself – why is it still sweet?

As a quick lesson into what sugar actually is we find it classified under the carbohydrate family as they are made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Carbohydrates as we already discussed can be complex – such as your starches and fibres, or can be simple – your sugars. There are 6 natural sugars – glucose, fructose, galactose, maltose, sucrose and lactose.. simple right? excuse the pun. Now glucose is the most abundant in our body and provides nearly all the energy to power our brain..

In Australia to classify something as ‘sugar free’ they only measure the glucose content. There are plenty of other sugars as we’ve seen, and glucose is  up with the best of them. Glucose makes up every cell in our body so rather than eating the alternatives, we are better off eating the real thing right?! (in moderation of course :) )

One of the main alternatives is fructose, which does occur naturally is small amounts in fruit – but rather – high fructose corn syrup. This was discovered in the 70’s and manufactured because fructose is 1000 times sweeter than glucose. So if you need 1000 times less and can make it into a synthetic liquid for the manufacturing industry, how great? Not. If you look at when the obesity epidemic started it was a couple of years after this horrible liquid made it into our foods. It has been shown to have a direct link to Gout and can be difficult to digest sometimes leading to Fructose Malabsorption problems.

The other cool/scary point about fructose is that it is the only substance that never tells our body we are full. Eaten in fruit, this isn’t a bad thing, the amount is minimal, however eaten in processed or diet food – you will actually put on more weight as your brain will never get that trigger saying stop eating. No matter how much you eat you will always be ‘hungry’.

We’ll get into the artificial sugar debate another day – it’s too nice a day to voluntarily put myself in a bad mood :)

So, have a look in your pantry at what items contain this fructose corn syrup – and let me know if any surprise you..

M xx