Quotes of the Month – Meat

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People that promote one diet for everyone are mistaken. Humans are a varied species. We have to answer to our ancestry. I have to eat red meat 4-5 times a week. I am on the carnivore side. I’ve tried vegetarian diets on an experimental basis. I last about 3 days. I get so depressed I just want to stop living so I eat red meat. I can see the difference in myself after 2 days.

Dr Nicholas Gonzalez

Some say that one cannot be an environmentalist or love and respect nature if one is not #vegan. On the contrary, I think that those who truly love nature, and understand it, cannot be vegan.

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@AndreaBertaglio

Plant or Plant? – Healthy Vegetarian Diet

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The number 1 principle I tell my vegetarian clients is the same one I tell everyone, whatever their diet – Eat Real Food.

The big companies wanting to make money out of you don’t care what effect their products will have on your health. Meat-free fake food is the current band-wagon to jump on and marketing departments are going wild to sell you ultra-processed rubbish.

Ignore the pretty pictures and cook from fresh ingredients. To be a healthy vegetarian you need to eat vegetables.

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Last year at the Public Health Collaboration Ambassadors’ Conference, I heard a talk by Viv Hamilton titled How to be a Healthy Vegetarian.

Here are her main points:

– Eat Real Food

– Eat low carb with healthy fats (ie not seed oils like sunflower oil)

– Eat more protein as plant sources are inferior.

– Increase bioavailability by including complete proteins with incomplete ones eg mushrooms, yeast and eggs.

– Get plenty of magnesium from eg microgreens and seeds to balance the calcium in dairy.

– Eat more eg flax seed and chia seed instead of grains.

– Look after your microbiome – it will make some nutrients for you and deal with some of the anti-nutrients. That means eating a wide variety of vegetables.

– Cut out ‘predigested’ ultra-processed foods eg refined carbs, fruit juices and smoothies.

Many thanks Viv for letting me share your wisdom.

Viv is one of the contributors to the Freshwell Vegetarian meal guide – it’s a great resource for vegetarians giving information on protein content of different foods and lots of recipes.

They do other versions too.

You can read Viv’s story as part of this Daily Mail article.

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We are all different

The key feature of my nutrition coaching is biochemical individuality – the premise that we are not all the same. The peoples of the north evolved to eat only meat and fat for most of the year – and they are healthy. The peoples near the equator evolved eating lots of the lush plant growth (none ate only plants) – and they are healthy. Looking at one healthy group of people in one part of the world and trying to expect similar results by imposing their eating habits on a different group of people somewhere else is always going to fail.

As an international sportswoman I suffered greatly following the nutrition advice on the national squad. I ate lots of plants but little meat or fat and spent 10 years overweight, tired all the time, hungry all the time, moody and miserable, with bad skin, athlete’s foot and dizzy spells. 20 years ago I found out what I really need to eat to feel great. Any time I drift towards the current culture, I feel terrible again.

People at the carb end of the spectrum should fare OK on a vegetarian diet. Anyone at the meat/fat end of the metabolic spectrum where I am, will struggle without meat. In Britain we’ve been invaded by everyone which is why I always offer to test for the mix of food that will suit each client. It’s life changing.

Top tip: If your food grows as a plant, eat it. If it’s manufactured in a plant, don’t eat it.

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Welcome to my website.

If it’s your first visit, head over to the Welcome page to find out what I’m about and for links to my top articles.

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Eat Well News

To get my full Eat Well News, sign up here. It’s so much more than the blog posts I write. I’ll be in touch with you about nutrition and health, and to provide articles, and updates (eg research and campaigns relating to nutrition and health), and marketing (eg events, products, services, talks and courses), and recipes, and things to bring a smile.

Eat for Your Bones

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Half of all women over the age of 50 will break something. And here I am, typing this slowly with my left hand – having broken my right wrist 😦

The mortality rates from breaking a hip or femur over the age of 65 are startling. 30% will die within a year; half the others will need a walking stick, frame or wheelchair.

Osteoporosis results in a broken bone every 3 seconds worldwide. Reduced bone density (osteopenia) plus slips, trips and falls are the usual reasons for a broken bone, as I now know too well. I had a stern talking to from an osteopath recently when I went to get my hip looked at (it’s fine – a little wear and tear and some tight muscles). He was horrified as I described my catalogue of falls and said, “THE number 1 priority is to stay on two feet.”

He said this to me just before I slipped on an icy pavement. I’m still in plaster and haven’t told him yet….

So I’m doing extra work on my balance. But I’m afraid my 2D vision is a condition life dealt me and there’s nothing can be done to make me see in 3D and I expect I will continue to fall periodically (I hope with less painful consequences), so it’s vital I do what I can to keep my bones strong.

Nutrients

Key nutrients for your bones are: vitamin D, vitamin K, magnesium, calcium and collagen.

The vitamins are fat soluble – that means you need fat. Actually you absorb calcium much better in the presence of fat too. Skimmed milk contains plenty but you’ll only absorb ~6% of it.

Nutrients usually work synergistically together in the body rather than individually. Calcium needs Vit D, Vit K2 and magnesium to work properly.

Supplementing with vitamin D (which most people need) or calcium (which most people do not need) without also taking magnesium and K2 can result in the deposition of calcium in your arteries instead of your bones.

The best food sources of the key nutrients are:

Calcium: Full fat dairy, small oily fish with bones like sardines, cruciferous vegetables, figs, spirulina.

Too much calcium increases bone density but does not reduce chance of fracture.

Vitamin D: Fish liver oil, dairy & eggs. Food alone will not supply all you need.

In the summer, the best way to get your vitamin D is by exposing skin eg arms and legs, to the sun. That means shorts and T-shirt for ~20 minutes on a good day, without sun cream. Remember not to let yourself burn – you know your own skin.

You’ll need D3 supplements from October to March when the shallow angle of the sun in the UK means the UVB is absorbed in the atmosphere so we can’t make it.

Vitamin K: Liver, dark green leafy vegetables, pomegranate, fermented foods, animal fats, egg yolks and hard cheeses.

Magnesium: Mackerel, avocado, pumpkin seeds, seaweed, nuts and spirulina. And you can put Epsom salts in your bath and absorb it through your skin. Note that alcohol causes you to lose magnesium.

Be aware that the anti nutrients phytic acid in grains, legumes, soya and seeds, and oxalic acid in buckwheat, spinach, rhubarb, parsley, beets, cocoa, most nuts, berries and beans, block the absorption of minerals including calcium and magnesium.

Collagen: Fish, meat, eggs. Bone broth is particularly good as is chicken with the skin on and pork scratchings.

Exercise

You can build and protect bone density with weight-bearing exercise. Starting young is helpful but it’s never too late to start.

Here’s my blog on muscle, exercise and protein.

Women

Sorry girls but the dreaded menopause affects our bone density as well as so many other things. Another reason to prioritise good diet and exercise as early as possible.

Risk Factors

The incidence of hip fractures varies enormously between countries, suggesting that decline is not inevitable. The UK is worse than 2/3 of the world so our diet and lifestyle are not doing us any favours. We can’t control all the risks – especially our age, but you might see some on this list that you can improve:

  • age
  • smoking
  • drinking (alcohol)
  • drinking (Coca-Cola – it contains phosphoric acid and your body leaches calcium out of your bones to buffer the acid)
  • protein-deficient diet
  • sedentary lifestyle
  • meat-free diet (vegetarians have double the rate of hip fractures compared to meat eaters)
  • low body weight
  • short sleep duration (eg <7h)
  • certain medications

Top tip: Take care of your bones

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Welcome to my website.

If it’s your first visit, head over to the Welcome page to find out what I’m about and for links to my top articles.

.

Eat Well News

To get my full Eat Well News, sign up here. It’s so much more than the blog posts I write. I’ll be in touch with you about nutrition and health, and to provide articles, and updates (eg research and campaigns relating to nutrition and health), and marketing (eg events, products, services, talks and courses), and recipes, and things to bring a smile.

Take Time for Health

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New Year is a traditional time for reflecting on the year that’s gone and looking ahead with hope and aspiration.

This January, why not take a moment to review how you use your time.

Housework and family/pet commitments might dominate your week. Or caring. Or volunteering.

Sport can really take over if you let it (says the woman who had no social life for 30 years).

Work can take up 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

— Many jobs involve a lot of sitting which shortens your life

—- and much artificial light that damages your eyesight

—— looking at screens with static, poor posture

——– sometimes with stress which is miserable.

Then there’s a commute which could take another hour or two out of your day and might include more sitting and more stress (unless you’re lucky enough to walk/cycle).

Leisure has never been more sedentary – hours of TV, computers, mobile ‘phones, gaming. More sitting, poor posture, screens.

To counter all of this you might invest some time doing sport or going to exercise classes or the gym. That takes time to travel, time to do, time to change and shower.

Underpinning Health is Food

Very little you do has a greater impact on your health than your eating habits. What you eat can give you energy or leave you lethargic, make you fat or make you slim, give you diabetes, heart disease and early death or keep you young and vibrantly healthy.

You might have spent time going to diet clubs. If it worked and you only needed to go once, well and good. Most dieters’ reality is going year after year and still not having the body they wanted (spoiler alert – the diet causes the weight regain, it is not the fault of the dieter.)

Of course lots of people just eat rubbish – sadly, they’ll pay dearly.

But you want better, so choose to ignore all the subliminal messages about you not having time to take care of yourself properly.

20 minutes to cook a meal from fresh ingredients is a very small percentage of your life for very big benefits. Make it a priority. Make it a habit. Make it an investment in you. And enjoy reaping the rewards of a more vibrantly healthy life.

Pea chorizo risotto sea bass

Not sure how? Book a consultation with me for only £49 and start your 2024 with real food.

Top tip: Spend a little time cooking your own food.

 

Self-Image

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2023 is almost over and we turn our thoughts to the coming New Year, what it might hold and what we hope to do. Gym membership will soar (briefly) and diet clubs will swell (briefly) but for most people by mid February, everything will be back as it was with us no further forwards.

I gave up on resolutions long ago; instead I set goals. Achieving goals is about building better habits and to change your habits, it helps greatly to first change your self-image.

How to Change Your Self-Image

To start, vividly imagine yourself the way you want to be:

  • how you want to look
  • how you want to feel
  • what you want to be able to do
  • the taste of the healthy foods you want to eat
  • the sound of the crunch you get from salads
  • the things people will say to you

Next get specific and create affirmation statements, written in the first person, and the present tense – as if they were already true:

  • I have lots of energy to play …. with the grandchildren…. my sport….
  • I eat healthy, nutritious, natural food
  • I move my body every day
  • I weigh XX stone XX pounds (your desired end weight)

Then to get your subconscious on board, embed your statements repeatedly.

Look at your affirmations every day. Read them. Write them out like doing lines. (Very few people write down goals yet research shows that people with written goals achieve much more than those without.) Speak them aloud to yourself so they go into your subconscious via your ears. Say them while looking in the mirror and smiling!!

At first, it might feel like lying, but even then part of your brain will believe it. The mismatch between your new, created self-image and your old reality will set up subconscious tension – and to relieve the tension your subconscious will cause you to change your habits.

Finally, to keep it up reinforce only positive thought pictures.

Sometimes you’ll eat good things and sometimes bad things. How you react is really important.

The classic diet mentality is on it or off it. You eat one bad thing and the day is ruined so you may as well binge. You eat one chocolate so you may as well finish the box etc. When I speak to clients, they’re quick to tell me their slip-ups even when they’ve actually done lots of good things. Beating yourself up about failures reinforces the negative and makes it more likely you’ll fail in future.

You can free yourself from these flawed thinking patterns with this helpful tip from Lanny Bassham.

In any situation, start with a good intention eg “I’m going to eat good things.”

If you eat good things, reinforce it by saying (in your head!), “Well done, that’s like me.”

If you eat bad things, replace the bad memory by putting a positive picture in your mind of yourself eating good things by thinking, “What I need to do is eat good things”.

The pictures you make inside will make it more likely that you’ll succeed in eating good things in future.

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My coaching on your image, goals and habits, combined with sound nutritional advice could be just what you need. Drop me an email to get started.

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Quote of the Month – Sugar

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“Sugar is a ‘deep, ancient craving’ that probably evolved to help us survive.”

Professor Daniel Lieberman

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“Gorging on sweet fruit during summer enabled us to store fat for periods of food scarcity in winter. For millions of years though, this worked because sugar was rare. Now it’s everywhere – but our biology hasn’t caught up.”

Dr Rangan Chattergee

Buffets and Parties

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Buffets and Parties

The party season is upon us, with lots of opportunities for gatherings with food and drink to enjoy. Having recently arranged a party, I discovered how tricky it is to get a caterer that will do real food and it got me thinking about how wildly variable the quality of party food can be.

I was also musing on some business events I went to this year. Some were dire – classic corporate carb fests (and in anticipation I had taken some food with me) but I won’t name and shame.  Tables full of processed padding to push you towards weight gain and T2diabetes. I wonder how many of those that ate them were still sharp (or even awake) in the afternoon.

A shining contrast was at the Torpenhow Organic Cheese Farm. Delicious, nutritious, colourful.

Here are a few pics – from the truly terrible ultra-processed offerings in the supermarkets’ party sections, through buffets I’ve seen at business events and finally a fabulous social event.

On sale now:

-some better of course, like cheeses and cold meats

– others ultra-processed and loaded with seed oil; best left in the shop.

Monochromatic beige feast:

Sandwiches and chips.

Has potential:

There’s some protein in the sausage rolls, sandwich fillings and quiche. Other than the pickled onions, almost no plants in evidence – even the salad is mostly pasta. Everything on the table came with carbs.

Better but nutritionally lacking:

Salad and chips with veg soup – 100% carbs with no protein or fats – luckily I had some cheese in my bag 🙂

Key survival tips for buffets like these – eat the fillings from the sandwiches and any salad garnish, go easy on bread, chips and crisps, and skip any cakes – especially doughnuts. Or, knowing what these dos are usually like, take some emergency supplies with you. Unfortunate but necessary unless you’re happy to suffer the after effects.

And the best which I will name and celebrate:

Torpenhow Organic Cheese Farm

Finally, a gathering of retired colleagues.

Caterer – Lizzie from Seascale bakery; a lady who understands real food – I’ll use her again!!!!

Top tip: Even at parties, eat real food

Special Christmas Treat

What you really want for Christmas might not be something you wrap up under the tree. You might want to feel better, have more oomph, enjoy better health.

This Christmas, treat yourself to a personal consultation with me. You’ll love it when you learn how to eat well for a more vibrantly healthy life.

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