WE ARE WHAT WE EAT

[Stanley]

Liz, many of the 'E Numbers' refer to common natural ingredients. My problem is that I have to look them up so I don't bother, just refuse to buy anything that needs a formula! Worse thing to my mind about bread is most is not yeast based and simple ingredients. I make my own and know exactly what is in it and how it was cooked. Funnily enough mine doesn't go mouldy.....

[plaques]

Following Liz and Stanley’s theme of watching what you eat. A good friend of mine told me what had happened to him. Gradually he had started to develop a creeping form of paralysis very much like motor neurone disease. This had the medics totally baffled. He had deteriorated to a point where he had put his house up for sale to buy a bungalow to take a wheel chair. Being originally from India he thought he would follow the local custom for most illnesses and go on a fast. After a full week of total fasting he felt much better. Trying just one item of food he improved again. Six months later, his total diet was only three different foods but considered himself completely cured. His suspicions lay in the muesli that he had always had for breakfast but was too frightened to try it out. I’m not advocating this approach as a cure for all illnesses but it makes you think!

[Stanley]

Your friend listened to their body, took note and did the sensible thing. I used to work with a lad who lived exclusively off pot noodles. Last I heard he was ill with stomach trouble..... I asked him once why he lived like that and he told me he had the archetypical Jewish Mother who was always telling him to eat! So he rebelled as soon as he left home. (He was Jewish by the way)

[Stanley]

See this LINK

For the latest word from NICE on obesity. They are recommending that doctors should focus on changing diets as part of the attack on increasing levels of disease associated with being overweight. This is not a major reduction but at least it's a start!

[Stanley]

See THIS for a timely warning about the danger of infection from raw chicken. Don't wash it, just cook it thoroughly to kill campylobacter organisms. They say that 280,000 cases a year of food poisoning from this source are most likely caused by the fact that 44% of respondents to a recent survey wash chicken. Funnily enough my mother had never heard of it but always said that chickens didn't need washing.
Food poisoning is a miserable complaint. The worst experience I ever had of 'being poorly' was when I got a bad bout in 1955 in Berlin, a bad meat pie from the NAAFI. I ended up spending over three weeks in hospital in Hanover and they told me I was very lucky, it was botulism. Thankfully my immune system dealt with what was often a fatal infection. The doctor told me after that he wished he had my antibodies.....

[David Whipp]

Liddell's Bakery donated some interesting bread for our Barlick in Bloom cafe on Saturday; baked in flower pots, it looked good and tasted delicious.

Between the cafe and a plant stall, we raised £180 for Bloom funds (and avoided poisoning anyone with the food...).

[Tizer]

See THIS for a timely warning about the danger of infection from raw chicken.

A quote from that link: "Most people are only ill for a few days, but it can lead to long-term health problems, including irritable bowel syndrome and Guillain-Barre syndrome, a serious condition of the nervous system." I caught Campylobacter in Indonesia in the 1980s and was very, very ill for weeks and now I have gut problems which I believe were at least partly due to the infection. Thank goodness I didn't get Guillain-Barre syndrome because I know someone who did and fortunately survived - it starts with paralysis from your feet upwards and within hours can reach your chest where it paralyses your lungs and suffocates you. If that isn't a good reason for observing food hygiene then I don't know what is. Yet a lot of people still think all food poisoning is just a brief dose of the trots.

[Stanley]

They added an interesting rider in a report yesterday. Washing the packaging of the chicken before putting it in the recycling is equally dangerous.
See THIS for news about new regulations forbidding meat inspectors from cutting pig carcasses open to inspect them. Said to be to prevent the spread of infection. More than 37,000 pig's heads were rejected last year because of hidden faults and pig's heads are cut up for sausage meat. The Hygiene Inspectors themselves say that unless they can cut, these could go undetected and enter the food chain. Sounds a bit barmy to me!

[Tizer]

I wash chicken (and other meat and fish) packaging in the very hot soapy water left over after washing the dishes. All the bacteria will be killed by the hot detergent and I need to do it because our waste collection is fortnightly and it smells awful if it's not washed, especially in hot weather. I think they really mean that we shouldn't just rinse it in cold water; that would splash the live bugs about. The drip pads used in meat and fish packages can go straight into the food waste bin unwashed, they should be biodegradable. But I wash them with the rest of the packaging for the same reason - bad smell! A useful trick is when you've just boiled water and poured it into the teapot or coffee mugs, immediately pour the remaining water over any meat/fish packaging in the sink. It does a great job of sterilising the packaging, which can then go straight into the bin - and no smell!

[Stanley]

I'm lucky Tiz because if I have anything that might go off in the rubbish I tie it in a bag and drop it in one of the litter bins in the town which, under normal circumstances, are emptied every day by Mark our wonderful street cleaner!

[Tizer]

17 June 2014, BBC web site and TV programme
'Diseased meat could go undetected' due to rule change
More diseased meat could end up in sausages and pies because of changes to safety checks in slaughterhouses, hygiene inspectors have warned. Inspectors in abattoirs used to be able to cut open pig carcasses to check for signs of disease. But under new European regulations, supported by Britain's Food Standards Agency (FSA), they will have to rely on visual checks alone. The FSA says the new system avoids the risk of harmful bacteria being spread. Around eight million pigs a year are slaughtered for meat in the UK.

Ron Spellman, a British meat inspector with 30 years' experience, says the new regulations, which took effect from 1 June, risk diseased parts of animals going undetected. Mr Spellman, who is director general of the European Working community for Food inspectors and Consumer protection (EWFC), which represents meat inspectors across the EU, said: "Last year we know that there were at least 37,000 pigs' heads with abscesses or tuberculosis lesions in lymph nodes in the head. They won't be cut now. "There's no way to see those little abscesses, little tuberculosis lesions without cutting those lymph nodes."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27866293

[What I think isn't mentioned in the BBC report is that the FSA has admitted that the big slaughterhouses will benefit from the change in regime but the small ones won't.]

[Stanley]

A meat inspector put it more directly when he said that he would stop buying sausage and pies as he didn't want to eat pus and diseased tissue. I suppose the only defence is a trustworthy local butcher who is making the pies and sausage. Another argument for only buying meat from someone you know. I'm lucky, I trust Stewart, my butcher.

[Tizer]

This BBC article gives advice on how much protein should be in our diets.
Are we obsessed with protein?
Once confined to sports fanatics and bodybuilders, high-protein diets are now commonplace among non-athletes too – with diets like Paleo, Atkins, Zone and Dukan advocating that people eat large quantities of fish, meat, eggs, nuts and cheese in order to lose weight. In the UK alone, 37% of people believe protein helps with weight loss, and 43% of women eat more to prevent weight gain. However some scientists suggest that high protein intake is linked to increased cancer, diabetes, and overall mortality in middle age. And restricting other foods, such as high-fibre fruit and vegetables, may cause other health problems from constipation to vitamin deficiency. So should we worry about how much protein we eat?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z8899j6

[Stanley]

If you take the trouble to read up on nutrition, particularly the wonderful job that scientists like Sir Jack Drummond did during WW2 advising the government on getting the best diet out of limited food under rationing, and in the process vastly improving public health two things strike one. The whole emphasis of the diet which produced what was later called 'the last healthy generation' was on natural home produced food and a good balance in the diet. The influence of the food industry has skewed this diet in the pursuit of increased sales and shelf life with obvious results. Instead of encouraging a reversion to natural foods, the food industry supports research and lobbying to push fad diets which will rectify any problems instead of the obvious back to nature and balance. There is no profit in this!
A well balanced nutritious diet free from additives and modification is the answer but we do not see this cheap solution being advertised.

[Tizer]

There's a push to get parents to give their children water to drink with meals instead of fizzy pop or fruit juice to cut their intake of sugar:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-28022948
I got a surprise recently when I decided to try blueberry juice which contains a high level of healthy anthocyanins. I bought one of those TetraPak cartons and enjoyed the taste of the juice but then I read the pack label details. The juice has added sugar and consists of 10% sugar. A `serving portion' was given as 200ml which means that you drink 20 grams of sugar in each glass of juice. That 20g is equivalent to four teaspoons of sugar! Would you put 4 teaspoons of sugar in your mug of tea or coffee? No (I hope not!), so why should it be in the juice? The answer is that fruit juice is very acidic and people wouldn't drink much of it without the sugar being added to mask the acidity. When sugar is added to a food it tastes less acid; the more sugar the less the acidity. And conversely, acid balances the sweetness, so an acid drink can hide a lot of sugar - fizzy drinks such as `coke' are a good example, they are very acidic but it's hidden by sugar (or other sweeteners such as aspartame etc). If the sugar and acid are in balance the drink or food can contain a lot of each and you end up taking in a massive dose of calories and risking corrosion of your tooth enamel.

If you want to do your own conversions of units such as teaspoons to grams etc, this website converter is simple and clear:
http://www.convertunits.com

[Stanley]

I saw the reports. Seems common sense to me but then I never drink canned drinks. We have lovely water in Barlick, mainly from a sandstone aquifer and very soft, our kettles never fur up. I love the clean fresh taste of cold water but then that was what I was reared on. It constantly amazes me when someone does a calculation of how much sugar is ingested from say two cans of Coke a day....

[David Whipp]

Our family dentist accepts that it's unrealistic to expect youngsters to abstain completely from sweets and fizzy drinks; he suggested to Tom and Lucy that they limited themselves to such things on just one occasion each week...

The best water I've ever tasted was spring water at a farm near Horton; mind you, I think it was because I was working for a builder handballing tons of earth out of a building at the height of summer.

[Stanley]

There must have been plenty of body in the water from the well in Thornton in Craven churchyard.....

[David Whipp]

Yes, I've always thought that...

[Tizer]

Professor Rod Bilton tells me that there should be an article based on his book (`Know What To Eat') published in the Daily Mail this Saturday. Apparently the paper asked a professional writer to put the article together, so Rod's keeping his fingers crossed that the information doesn't get garbled. I've been pressing him to get more publicity for his book but Rod (in his 70s) told me "I've been too busy walking Munroe's in Scotland with my mates".

[Stanley]

Like the advice he gives, a sensible way to approach things!

[Tizer]

We couldn't find anything about Rod's book in today's Daily Mail and I guess he's a bit disappointed this morning. Knowing what the newspapers are like I'm not really surprised that it isn't there - they change at the drop of a hat. Probably some celebrity scandal knocked him out of the paper.

[Stanley]

It would be something far more important......

[Stanley]

See THIS for a Guardian report on the latest study on the benefits of Organic food. On Farming Today this morning on R4 the author was interviewed and quizzed about the fact the research was financed by the Soil Association and could be biased.

[Tizer]

BBC News. 25 July 2014
Jeremy Hunt demands urgent inspections of chicken factories
Health secretary intervenes after Guardian investigation reveals strict hygiene standards can be disregarded in practice
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/j ... n-industry