Is a vegetarian diet the answer to diabetes?
We're used to hearing a lot of bad news about diabetes, but here's some good news - research showing that a diet based on vegetables, fruit, grains and pulses, but no animal foods, can improve blood sugar levels in type 2 diabetes to the point where some people have been able to reduce or stop taking medication.
The study, funded by the US National Institutes of Health - the research arm of the US Department of Health and Human Services - went like this. One group of people with diabetes ate a low fat vegetarian diet, while the other ate a diet based on guidelines from the American Diabetes association. After 22 weeks, the researchers found that the vegetarian diet not only controlled blood sugar three times more effectively than the ADA diet, but it also helped reduce weight and cholesterol. So what is it about a plant-only diet that helps? Dr Neal Barnard, Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine at George Washington School of Medicine, and the study's lead researcher, suspects it's because it has so little fat.
more- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 3:34 PM
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Flexifood - one dish, five different ways
There are some dishes that deserve star billing for flexibility as well as good nutrition. By flexibility, I mean you ca cook them ahead of time, eat them hot or cold and eat them in a lot of different ways - great for time poor families, especially when you're eating in relays rather than all at the same time.
Caponata - a kind of Sicilian ratatouille - is a great flexi food. Made with red capsicum, eggplant, tomatoes and onion, you can eat it hot as a pasta sauce or pizza topping, or cold as a salad, a relish or a topping for bruschetta, maybe with a little parmesan or grilled haloumi on top. It's also rich in vitamin C and beta-carotene, and although it's not the fastest dish to prepare, 15 minutes of dedicated vegetable dicing pays off with a healthy, adaptable dish that tastes even better a day or two after it's made.
more- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 3:17 PM
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Why healthy dads mean healthy kids
Cooking healthy food with the kids and creating a backyard fitness circuit are among the homework assignments for fathers taking part in a research program called Healthy Dads, Healthy Kids designed to help 54 men shrink their waistlines - and teach them to be healthier role models for their primary school-aged children.
We might think mothers are the main influence on children's diet and health, but the reality may be different, says Associate Professor Philip Morgan from the University of Newcastle - he's the one setting the homework, and teaching the fathers the basics of weight loss and healthy eating. "The roles of fathers are changing. More families have two parents working. and more fathers are involved with food preparation and food shopping than in the past. It's also much easier to get children to eat healthy food if both parents are on the same page - you can target mothers as much as you you like, but if the father isn't giving the same messages about eating and being active, or is eating junk food in front of the TV, it's much harder to create healthy environments for their children," he says.
more- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 2:30 PM
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Going, going - Australian sheep for sacrifice in the Middle East
The issue of live animal exports is about to hit a raw nerve. In early December, many Australian sheep exported live to the Middle East will be sold for use in private sacrifice to people celebrating the annual festival of Eid-al-Adha. In one corner is Animals Australia, the animal protection organisation whose website carries now familiar images from previous festivals of trussed sheep on roof racks and in car boots being driven away for slaughter. In the other, are organisations like Meat and Livestock Australia and the Australian Livestock Export Animal Welfare Group whose website has pictures of contented animals, along with a statement from Peter Dundon, the Livestock Services Manager for the Middle East for the MLA and LiveCorp, insisting that the Animals Australia images aren't typical of how Australian animals are handled during the rest of the year.
As the festival nears, both sides of the debate are mounting awareness campaigns. Animals Australia has a National Day of Action against live export on November 14, while in Bahrain, one of many Middle Eastern countries to which Australia exports live animals, the MLA will run an awareness campaign for local people buying animals for sacrifice. The campaign, consisting of newspaper ads and brochures, recommends buyers have suitable vehicles for transporting the sheep - meaning vehicles with ramps allowing them to be walked on to a vehicle, rather than trussed and lifted. "I'm not saying we're going to get 100 per cent compliance, but that's our objectve," said Dundon when I spoke to him last week. What about handling practices when the animals are taken home? "I suppose it's like dog owners. My wife breeds dogs and when you sell a dog you can't be sure how that animal will be looked after," he said."It amazes me that people have the expectation that you can guarantee the welfare of every sheep that's sold." more
- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 1:40 PM
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Kitchen confidence - have we lost it?
It might be raining cookbooks and celebrity chefs, but since we've become so dependent on processed food and takeaways, many of us have lost confidence in the kitchen - or never had it to start with. You can point the finger at a range of reasons - too much to do in too little time, the loss of cooking classes in school, and marketing campaigns that have convinced us we're too busy to cook and need manufacturers to do it for us.
We are busy. But what's often missing isn't only time. It's also basic cooking skills - and, just as importantly, the persistence to practice them until you can make simple meals fast. Knowing how to steam rice or make pesto without having to hunt down a recipe and follow it is what gets fresh, healthy food on the table quickly. Dependence on too many packets and jars, on the other hand, not only adds too much sodium and other questionable ingredients to your food, but it can stunt your growth in the kitchen too. So what does give you confidence in the kitchen?
more- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 4:15 PM
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It's a slaw thing - reinventing the BBQ salad
I love cabbage, but my heart sinks whenever I see a bowl (or supermarket pack) of coleslaw where the ratio of mayo to vegetable looks like two to one. Commercial mayonnaise is one of those condiments that seems to obliterate the real flavour of food - no bad thing, of course, if the food is really grim but if you're masking, rather than complementing good flavours, what's the point?
Besides, if you're going to the trouble of chopping and grating vegetables for a salad, why not make it as healthy as possible rather than adding a whole lot of additives and the unnamed vegetable oils that make up some commercial dressings? That's why coleslaw from my kitchen is more likely to be a lighter Asian version, held together with a mix of olive oil (ok, so not exactly Asian), rice vinegar, fish sauce and lime. It's also an excuse to be heavy handed with the fresh mint - a good source of iron and folate that's also been found (at least in animals) to have anti-cancer effects.
more- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 2:35 PM
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Slashing supermarket waste - BYO shopping bags is just the start ...
The small vine ripened tomatoes in the supermarket were so ripe and tempting and so reasonably priced that I picked them up, intending to buy them. But somewhere in mid air, halfway between shelf and trolley I put them back - they were packaged in plastic. There's a lot of boxes to tick when we food shop - like is the product fresh, is it free of trans fats, low in sodium and was it produced outside a cage? I think I'm on top of most of this, but now I'm trying to get better at avoiding excess packaging. It's a move prompted by the Watch Your Waste campaign running in North London where I was earlier this month, which challenged residents to see how close they could get to a waste-free week.
Because I cook mostly from scratch, most of the waste generated in my kitchen is compostable. I use water from taps, not bottles and when I shop I toss most fruit and vegetables in the trolley without putting them in plastic bags first. But often I'll get home and curse myself for not thinking twice about packaging. Most of the time it's because I've seized on food that's being sold off cheaper - think ripe bananas for baking or wrinkly old parsnips for roasting - and grabbed it. It's as if my mind registers the low price and, but not the styrofoam tray and cling wrap it comes with. It's all very well to remember to take reusable bags along when you shop - but it's also important not to bring a lot of excess plastic back home too, so here's what I'm trying to do.
more- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 2:04 PM
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How do you help someone you love to lose weight?
What if there's someone close to you whose weight has reached an unhealthy level - is there anything you can do to help them slim down? Or what if you've already suggested they lose some weight and you've hit a brick wall - like Ella, the Chew on This reader, who wrote in recently wondering how to help her aunt lose weight? "Every time I mention losing weight, she becomes defensive. What should I do?" Ella wanted know.
To be honest, it's not easy - unless a person has already decided to lose weight and has asked for your support, that is. No matter how badly you want someone to change their behaviour (and this applies to other things like smoking, or overdoing alcohol and other drugs), or how important this change might be for their health, the motivation has to come from them - not you. That doesn't mean you can't be a positive influence, but it usually means you need to tread lightly.
more- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 12:16 PM
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Why French women still don't get as fat
Like other westernised countries, France has an obesity problem, but here in southern France where I've just spent the last week, it's not exactly obvious. In this part of the world, outsized waistlines - like fast food restaurants - are in the minority. In fact in places like Montpellier and Nimes, a more common sight is a slim woman in skinny jeans striding across a city square at lunchtime, munching on 30cm of baguette stuffed with cheese - no fear of carbs here.
This is my third visit to this end of France in five years and my impression is still the same as it was on my first - adults and children are generally much leaner than in cities in the UK or Australia and I'm still trying to figure out why. Maybe this part of France is more affluent than other more industrialised areas. Or maybe the clothes available here - which make me salivate as much as the food does - are motivation enough not to let the kilos creep on
more- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 5:52 AM
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Breakfast in Wales - anyone for seaweed?
Think about eating seaweed in Sydney or Melbourne and you probably think of sushi.But if you happen to be in Wales where I am at the moment, it's likely to be laver - a dense dark green puree of simmered nori, the same seaweed that wraps a California roll.
Traditionally, laver, harvested at low tide from the Pembrokeshire coast in South West Wales, was mixed with oatmeal, formed into cakes and fried in fat to become part of a 19th century coalminer's breakfast, along with bacon. But I ate mine warmed on wholegrain toast and loved its intense briney flavour.
more- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 12:00 AM
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Reading labels - traffic lights make it easy
If you're choosing a supermarket ready-meal, how do you`decide between the Thai chicken curry with wild rice and pak choy or the chicken and king prawn paella with spinach and black rice? If you're shopping in a UK supermarket - as I was last week - and are keen to keep your salt intake`down, for some products you've got the traffic light system as your guide. This means a row of unmissable boldly coloured circles on the front of the pack, each representing sugar, salt, fat and saturated fat content. A quick glance at the curry meal shows four green circles, telling me straight away that the product is low in sodium, salt and saturated fat. The paella has mostly green circles too - the one exception is an orange circle telling me the sodium level is medium rather than low.
In Australia the traffic light system is still under consideration and has its critics. But having just seen it in operation, I think it's great. What's so good is that anyone shopping in a hurry -and that's most of us - can see at a glance, and without having to check the fine print on the nutrition panel, whether a product has high, medium or low levels of saturated fat, sugar or salt. Presumably it will also encourage food manufacturers to reduce the levels of these ingredients in their products too - a lot of red circles on the front of a pack isn't a great selling point. more
- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 12:00 AM
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Food for thought - eating to save your mind
Ever noticed how we plan more for our future financial security than we do for the future functional security of our bodies and minds? Yet often the seeds of health problems that develop with age are planted while we're younger. Take Alzheimer's disease - the most common form of dementia - having high cholesterol levels and high blood pressure in your 40s is now linked to having dementia later on. That may explain why regular exercise - which helps lower both blood pressure and bad LDL cholesterol - shows up as being protective against Alzheimer's disease.
US neurologist Dr Vincent Fortanasce says that the insults to the brain associated with Alzheimer's begin decades before the disease shows up and that it's never to early to try to prevent the disease - especially as there's still no cure. In his new book The Anti- Alzheimer's Prescription (Random House) published this month, Fortanasce says that what we eat is one of the factors playing a role in Alzheimer's, and lists his 'Golden Dozen' - 12 foods that help protect the brain against dementia. As you'd expect, blueberries and oily fish op the list - both are thought to help protect the brain against inflammation which has been linked to dementia. The antioxidants in blueberries and other berries also help protect against another possible culprit - free radical damage. But what's also on the list is advice is to eat low Gl (low glycaemic Index) wholegrains like oats and barley rather than highly refined carbs. With some studies now linking diabetes to memory impairment, keeping blood sugar levels healthy may also be good for the brain, he says. According to Fortanasce, the high insulin levels that come with the insulin resistance that can precede diabetes, hamper the effect of a key enzyme that removes beta-amalyoid, the toxic protein that causes Alzheimer's.
more- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 12:00 AM
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Tied in ethical knots at the supermarket? This new shopping guide may help
It was good to see a loaf of bread with a biodegradable wrapping in the supermarket on Saturday - until I saw that its sodium content was 600mg per 100g (and anything over 500 mg per 100g of food is high). Deciding in favour of my health, not the planet's, I bought a plastic-wrapped loaf with only 200mg of sodium per 100g - that's pretty low for bread these days. I could, of course, have hopped in the car and gone to a bakery selling unwrapped bread, but that would have used more petrol. Besides, without a wrapping, how could I tell the sodium content?
Shopping in the 21st century is full of moments like this. We might have swapped plastic bags for calico, but the supermarket dilemmas keep on coming. We know our hearts and brains need omega-3 fats, but what about overfishing? If I'm buying canned legumes in the supermarket do I opt for the organic product from Europe or do I save food miles by buying the non-organic Australian version? Is corked or screw top wine better for the planet? And then there's the labels - you know what an organic chicken is, but what's a chemical free chicken? What's the difference between pork that's labelled 'free range' and one that's 'bred free range'? A trip down the supermarket aisle now needs a road map to help us make the best decisions for the environment and, if you're concerned about their welfare, for animals and poultry too. This is where Ethical Eating by Angela Crocombe comes in - it's a new Australian guide to shopping with the planet's health in mind.
more- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 2:07 PM
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Spicing up meat for a healthier barbecue
If spring is here, outdoor eating isn't far behind - so if you're buying for a barbecue put some rosemary and mint on the shopping list too. New research published in the latest issue of The Journal of Food Science has found that marinating meat in spice blends containing the antioxidants rosmarinic acid (found in mint) and carnasol and carnosic acid (both found in rosemary) reduced the formation of potentially harmful chemicals by up to 80 per cent. The chemicals are HCAs, short for heterocyclic amines, which are suspect carcinogens created when muscle foods - from meat, poultry or fish - are cooked at high temperatures.Barbecueing seems to produce the most HCAs, followed by pan-frying and grilling. 'Suspect' means there's evidence from animal studies that HCAs are carcinogenic and have been linked to cancer of the colon, but the evidence in human studies isn't clear, according to the Cancer Council NSW.
The idea that pre-barbecue marinating can reduce HCAs isn't new - but what's reassuring is that this new study is building the evidence that how we cook and prepare meat might reduce any risks of HCA - and do so in a way that makes the food more enjoyable, not less. An earlier study from Lawrence Livermore University in the US found that marinating chicken in a mix of olive oil, cider vinegar, garlic, mustard, lemon juice and salt reduced HCAs too, while research from the University of Hawaii gave the thumbs up to two marinades - one with teriyaki sauce and another with turmeric and garlic.
more- Posted by Paula Goodyer at 1:24 PM
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