April 2019 Thread

[Bean]

It sounds like you've found an eating plan that works for you both health-wise and in terms of enjoying your food too. I'm sure once you get your head around it, the information in all those charts becomes intuitive rather than being a headache when you're deciding what to cook?! Have your family taken some of it on board too, or are they just happy that you're feeling good while enjoying their rice and potatoes?

What I eat never really takes into account weight gain, as it's never been an issue for me (sure, if I ate loads of junk food, I'd get a gut, but that's never been a consistent way of eating for me anyway) but I do agree with much of this. I'd just be more liberal with whole grains.

My diet changed a few years ago, but for health reasons (identifying food intolerances) and part of that process was having to cook everything from scratch. I realised that I'd ended up taking short cuts here and there over the years, and was actually eating more processed gubbins that I thought I was, so there were more preservatives, salt and sugars and low quality fats in my diet than was ideal. I've really enjoyed getting stuck into cooking again (as in finding it inspiring rather than it just being something I needed to do) and am eating more vegetables (in terms of variety and quantity) and a wider range of foods than ever.

You might have seen me mention Dr Chatterjee before. He's a GP who is trying to spread the message that many health problems we experience can be reversed or massively helped by lifestyle changes, whether it's changes to our diet, exercise, managing stress or sleep habits. It's not a one size fits all plan - what works for one person won't be the answer for another. But a lot of it is about rejecting the modern and convenient changes we've made to diet and lifestyle which really just deprive us of nutrients and stop our bodies and minds from being able to regulate themselves.

It does always astound me that many of the diet plans that seem to do well use meal replacement shakes that are really high in sugars. I read the ingredients on a slimfast a friend of mine had recently, and that's not food! The same for diet foods - remove the fat and add sugar and sweeteners.

[3piggles]

Oh, yes, the Glycemic Index. Know it well I also learned that eating foods on the really low end of the scale, with foods that are higher on the scale, helps to level out the impact of the higher food. Obviously no one eats straight sugar, or just a potato, but they do it a piece of toast, or French fries. Having those with something very fibrous(chia seeds, etc.) can create enough dietary fiber to cancel out some of the glycemic impact.

Salads, the love of my dietary life That's why I got on the 'can piggies eat sprouts' question. I don't buy fruits and veggies just for them, but give them some of what we have, as long as it's safe for them. I can eat a salad as a meal, without meat. Love salads, and love all the different greens

I'll check on those two. I learned most of what I've learned from a Canadian site that apparently didn't think being diabetic meant you must be a moron, and bothered to explain how to use, not just check, the Glycemic index. I wish I could find that link. I'd post it for you

[Bean]

So many people just think of plain leaves when you say salad, but it's so much more than that, isn't it? I had a lovely salad with roasted potatoes, avocado and olives yesterday. I think I posted the recipe before but it usually uses bacon. As we're cutting back on meat I thought I'd try olives as a swap for bacon and it was delicious.

This week I'm aiming to watch a series of videos on health. It's a bit frustrating as it's a series of 9 videos but aside from the first one, they're apparently only going available for 24 hours each. As they're all about an hour long, it's no small commitment, but it's all about the microbiome which is my personal hot topic!

The first one was really interesting, lots of information about what it is, how it's created and functions, what helps and hinders it being diverse, and how that can affect our long term health. There's lots of research going on in this area at the moment, and the thinking is that it can help explain a lot of health conditions that are prevalent in some countries/ societies, and absent in others, such as IBS, Crohns, autism, MS, arthritis, depression and anxiety.

This is the first episode if anyone's interested, but I totally appreciate it's long, so unless you're especially interested in the subject or think it might help you, it probably won't make it on to your urgent watch list!

[3piggles]

If I can get the time free of interruption, I'll definitely watch the first episode. I think it's way passed time to be concentrating on the microbiome, and stop thinking everything can be cured or treated by taking expensive meds with horrible side effects. We weren't always this sickly. What happened to us to make us this way, and can it be undone?

I don't care for olives, but hubby does, so I put them in his salad. I would substitute mushrooms for the meat. When we get another hot period, I'll have him get some Portobello mushrooms to use as the meat. He'll be fine, if I make the salad interesting enough.

I do potato salads, pasta salads, Farro salads, Quinoa salads. I add hard boiled eggs, olives, celery, tomatoes, carrot, endive, a variety of lettuces, spinach, black beans, corn, and I could go on for paragraphs. My salads are anything but boring

I sometimes put out a bed of lettuces, and bowls of options, and let people make their own salads. I also serve thing like marinated mushrooms, olives, pickled onions, and other things to eat with the salads. I usually put out those things to eat with most meals, so we can focus less on the basic meat meal, and more on all the things we can add to our plate.

Fruit is always served, even if it's just sliced oranges. We like having that at the end of a meal. Not too much of anything, but a lot of variety

[shades]

May 9, 2019 7:30:04 GMT Bean said:

This week I'm aiming to watch a series of videos on health. It's a bit frustrating as it's a series of 9 videos but aside from the first one, they're apparently only going available for 24 hours each. As they're all about an hour long, it's no small commitment, but it's all about the microbiome which is my personal hot topic!

The first one was really interesting, lots of information about what it is, how it's created and functions, what helps and hinders it being diverse, and how that can affect our long term health. There's lots of research going on in this area at the moment, and the thinking is that it can help explain a lot of health conditions that are prevalent in some countries/ societies, and absent in others, such as IBS, Crohns, autism, MS, arthritis, depression and anxiety.

This is the first episode if anyone's interested, but I totally appreciate it's long, so unless you're especially interested in the subject or think it might help you, it probably won't make it on to your urgent watch list!

There is a youtube playlist with the videos. Might help your Viewing schedule

[Bean]

Thanks, but I'm getting an email notification when a new one pops up so I can line it up to listen when I have time - there's zero chance of me remembering to actually check something without a nudge!

I don't like eating fruit after a meal. It just never sits well. I eat it more as a snack. But nuts? Not you're talking!

[shades]

I've just discovered macadamia nuts.
They're not like nuts but very tasty indeed 😀

[Bean]

Oh I love macadamia nuts (I don't know many other people who like them)!

I usually just get them from the supermarket, but a few months ago I was having trouble getting hold of any from various supermarkets, and asked if they had any in a (lovely but extremely expensive) local health food shop. The chap basically gave me a lecture saying they didn't sell them as they didn't keep that well, so would never be of an acceptable quality once they'd arrived in the country. And had I ever been to Australia and eaten them there because if I had, I'd never touch another one in England ever again.

I said I hadn't been to Australia, but I loved the macadamia nuts I could buy here, so think how ecstatic I'd be if I ever ate them in Australia! But he just looked at me like I was a pleb, so I left, sans nuts.

[3piggles]

Pooh, a snooty store clerk! Reminds me of the show Are You Being Served, lol Was there a macadamia nut shortage, or just a run on them making it hard to keep them on the shelves?

[Bean]

I'm not sure. Every now and then one of the type of nuts we like is hard to get hold of across various supermarkets for a week or two. I try to just eat other things and be happy to see them again when they come back in.

I'm always saying how ridiculous it is that we expect food from every corner of the world to be available to us at all times, so I try to feel the same way, even when it affects me haha!

I've managed to keep up with the health videos and am finding it really interesting. When all the information about all the health problems we have in our countries that just don't occur an anything close to similar rates in certain other places is put alongside the differences in our diets and lifestyles, it really does seem like we're trying to extinguish ourselves with the ways we're living!

The beauty of it is that the answers are really simple and inexpensive, but of course getting that information across to massive populations of people who like to live a different way is no small task.

[3piggles]

Inexpensive stopped being cool hundreds of years ago, or maybe longer ago than that. Not at all sure why, as peasant food is some of the best tasting food available, but no, it's not low in saturated fats, etc.

The First World countries have had different food trends, and different approved foods, for as long as I can remember. Back in the 50s or 60s, lab rats fed huge amounts of peanut butter developed cancer, so there was a huge peanut butter scare. Strangely, no one was allergic to peanuts back then? Wonder what happened? We had butter proven to have way too much saturated fat to be healthy. Now that's been overturned by recognizing that not all saturated fats are bad for our health, and some may actually help. Cholesterol scares went over the top, until it was decided that there is good cholesterol and bad cholesterol.

Within reason, it seems if we just follow the diets of cultures with better health than ours, we should at least be healthier, if not really healthy. I have been a bit miffed that until very recently, food advisories(what's good for us and what's not) never included limiting or regulating carbs for diabetics. Diabetics complained, and things like bread and potatoes were removed from the list of healthy foods to include in a meal.

I just try to serve a whole lot more veggies and fruits than meats, and generally do pretty well. I can't do much with the pastas and potatoes, which hubby loves, but I no longer make them the main meal(pasta or potato salad wit meat), and limit it to a side dish.

[Bean]

In the videos the differences in diets and the increase in intolerance and allergies is explained quite well.

In looking at countries or societies/ groups with decent longevity and low incidence of the diseases that plague us (such as allergies, diabetes, heart disease, obesity etc) it's clear that there is no one ideal diet. The Inuit diet is very high in fats and protein and low in fresh foods, and there are African villages which have a totally vegan diet. There are lots of people doing extremely well on the Mediterranean diet too. All can make for very healthy populations (relative to ours). Yet if you took those groups of people and swapped their diets over, they would almost certainly not do so well at all. What our ideal diet is, is part genetics and part what environment we've born in and the one we live in now.

So whereas previous research has looked at a group of people in rude health and thought if we copied their diet, we'd be healthy too, they now know it's far from that simple.

What's pretty uniform across the diets that seem to make for healthy people is that they're unrefined and unprocessed - only eating plants, animals and animal products that haven't been exposed to a shed-load of chemicals and hormones to make them grow quickly enough to keep up with large populations. And then not putting them through processes to refine and preserve them artificially (preservatives stop bacteria growing, so are like tiny doses of antibiotic to the good bacteria in our gut, and stop them flourishing). Foods are often preserved or fermented, but in simple ways that can actually bring health benefits.

As far as allergies go, they explain that too - and there are loads of countries and groups of people in which allergies and intolerances have not increased, whereas ours are rocketing. A kid over here died recently because he had a cheese allergy and a kid at school (being an complete idiot, but certainly not realising the potential seriousness of the consequences) threw a cheese sandwich at him - just the cheese touching his back momentarily ended his life.

It's bringing it all back to the gut of course, and saying that our microbiome (the mass of bacteria, viruses and organisms that live in and on us, but predominantly in the gut) is our body's defence against anything it sees as an invader or a threat.

There are things that help us have a healthy microbiome (good genes, being born naturally, being breastfed, having a natural and diverse diet, being exposed to soil etc when young etc) and things that hurt it (a diet high in refined foods, sugars & alcohol, exposure to chemicals, hormones & antibiotics, environmental pollution etc).

A healthy microbiome will have no trouble with a bit of pollen, perfume or a peanut. But one that's already out of balance from years of being underfed and overwhelmed can't cope, and starts identifying all sorts of things as threats. And that's when when we get all these long term diseases related to inflammation.

The theory is that if you put in the work to really nourishing it (which may mean massive changes to diet and lifestyle - even people who think they're living pretty healthily are often consuming plenty of stuff which is just poking a stick at an already angry bear) you can massively improve or even reverse a lot of the health conditions we suffer with in our countries.

Anyway, I'd best go before Baz notices I'm posting in the April thread again...

[Bean]

May 10, 2019 4:02:29 GMT shades said:

There is a youtube playlist with the videos. Might help your Viewing schedule

Do you know, when I first looked at the list you posted, I thought it just had all the info on rather than all the videos being there. (I usually post first thing in the morning when my brain is yet to fully awaken - that's my excuse anyway...) Thanks for that.

I'm still trying to watch them each day as if I don't pretend there's time pressure on me, I'll just put a dozen other things to do before watching it, but it's good to know they're there if I don't manage it or want to rewatch anything!

I need to finish today's, all about faecal transplants...

[3piggles]

I'm sorry I was just reading your post, as if nothing were unusual, until I got to the last line, then I totally lost it, and laughed myself silly I needed that. Thank you

I was thinking about the microbiome idea, in general, and thinking that while we might be able to go back to eating a diet that didn't stress out our internal microbiome, it's doubtful we can reduce the external stress, or the external pollution we are currently exposed to constantly.

Original people didn't have cars, so no pollution from them. No factories, contaminated water, contaminated air, contaminated food. Unless we can get those factors under control, I doubt we can do much to help our microbiomes get us back under control.

Perhaps one thing about people who live a really long time is that they aren't regularly exposed to all that pollution. I think it was a NOVA episode that said people who live really long, healthy lives not only eat healthy foods rather than processed foods, but live where the air and water are very clear and clean, where they put a lot of emphasis on routine, family and religion(or some belief system), that carries them through the bad times in life.

[Bean]

The point is that a healthy and balanced microbiome can bat off quite a lot of stress, but when we're attacking it from all angles, it doesn't stand a chance. So while there are things we can't control, diet is one that we absolutely can. And we can definitely put mental health as more of a priority so we handle things better too, and that in turn has positive effects on our body.

So many of the people on the documentary were people who had been diagnosed with heart disease, Hashimoto's, type II diabetes, arthritis, eczema, depression and anxiety. All the medical interventions had failed, but after finding a GP specialising in functional medicine, they'd recovered just through making diet and lifestyle changes to their existing lives.

It is ironic that we have some of the most advanced health care equipment and and treatments available, yet also some of the highest disease rates that stop people enjoying their lives. What we're doing is firefighting, it's not changing our health, and fertility rates are going down all the time too.

I definitely agree the way we organise socially plays a part, and a lot of people in our countries are fairly isolated - we don't come together and organise ways that automatically care for both young and old in a meaningful way. If you're in a tighter knit group, it's easier to understand your purpose or the meaning in your life, even if you're not capable of doing a lot, and that in turns helps you to care about how you treat yourself (and if you don't, you have lots of other people making the right choices for you automatically).

Have you see Shades has started a 'Health matters' thread? I've talked about faecal transplants in there haha!