Really Healthy
We want to keep it real, real food and real advice to stay really healthy.
We can access advice about our food which is based on genuine research, on which we can base our decisions.
We no longer want to be influenced by passing food fads and the latest miracle diet. We have followed enough of those over the years and have they worked?
Food Shopping
When
The minute we enter the car park we start being manipulated into wasting our money and health on edible foodlike substances.
These are specially designed to be easy and cheap to make, have a long shelf life and good profit margins. No mention of nutritional value.
Real food is more difficult for huge supermarket chains to manage.
Michael Pollan who invented the phrase edible foodlike substances shows how to safely navigate our way around the supermarket.
Store Cupboard
Some real food, such as, rice and flour and beans and pulses do store well. These are some of our traditional store cupboard ingredients which our mothers and grandmothers depended one and we still depend on today.
Transport and Storage
Real fresh food is not so easy. It is difficult to transport and difficult to store.
It doesn’t last, it goes stale. It doesn’t have a long shelf-life. All this annoyingly affects the profit margin.
Fake food is much more reliable. It can be safely transported from the other side of the world in its packet or plastic bottle and sit on the shelf without any decay until it sneakily tempts someone to part with their hard-earned cash.
Good Choices
Unfortunately, having taken our cash these food-type substances fail to deliver any nutrition. Fortunately, we don’t have to follow the herd and allow ourselves to be manipulated like this.
We have many years of experience of making rational choices in all areas of our lives. We can choose to educate ourselves about nutrition and use this knowledge to make good choices.
Based on Research
Let’s get back to basics and decide what we know to be true already, what we need to find out.
It’s hard to accept now, but much of the information that we have been depending on since the seventies is not based on genuine research and is now being proved wrong.
There is plenty of good research being done and this is what we need to have access to now.
Our Cells Renew
It is true that we are what we eat. The cells in our bodies renew throughout our lives. It only makes sense that if we fill our tanks with food-type substances we will not have the necessary materials to build healthy new cells.
If we want the right cells we must provide the right building blocks. Our basic body building blocks that we eat every day are our macronutrients; protein, carbohydrates and fat.
Macros
For healthy nutrition we don’t need to cut out any of these. Protein is good. Carbs are good. Fat is good.
Most people would agree.
Where the discussions, and perhaps differences appear is, in what proportions should we eat these macronutrients?
This is when we need our accurate, up-to-date properly researched information which we can collect and share.
Sugar, Can We Give it Up?
One thing we are all agreed on is that we need to cut down seriously on added sugar.
Fiona Phillips has a really interesting film which gives us plenty of information on the effects of sugar and useful ideas about how to reduce our added sugar intake.
She also gives us good advice about preparing fresh food from scratch instead of using ready-meals and bottled sauces.
It’s interesting to hear Audrey calling her evening meal tea.
The habit in England of calling the evening meal tea instead of dinner comes from the time when so many of the working class girls worked for the upper classes in the big stately homes.
The servants had to have their evening meal earlier so that they could spend their evening preparing and serving an elaborate dinner for their ‘betters’, so the servants evening meal was called tea.
When some of these girls left their lives of ‘service’ to get married and have families of their own they took this habit with them of calling their evening meal tea.
We all know that tea is a drink with jam and bread.
Who knew that sucralose is an artificial sweetener?
Gordon Ramsay tells us that we don’t need to break the bank to make great food. Here, Gordon explains the core essentials of what you need in the kitchen, and what to look out for when making purchases such as kitchen knives, frying pans and many more.
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