Bliss. This one's all about food... ??

Everyone should know what wellness feels like.

It’s great.

I’ve spent 54 years getting to this point, and I’m enjoying it immensely.

On balance, it seems like the biggest factor in the wellness equation is food.

Good food is BLISS, isn’t it?

Sitting down around a table with the ones you love and enjoying something delicious together is one of life’s greatest pleasures, I think. (Thank you to James Sommerin and his daughter Georgia at Home by James Sommerin in Penarth, for an evening of sublime food* on my birthday last week, and to the lovely John Espirian , who made sure I had the best birthday ever. ??)

But food is also medicine.

Hippocrates knew it, thousands of years ago. Mediaeval monks knew it, with their herb gardens. Ordinary folk like you and me knew it, too, but many people have forgotten.

Listening to Professor Tim Spector talking about his latest book, Food for Life on the #FeelBetterLiveMore podcast (all links are below) recently reminded me to remind you.

And food isn’t just medicine; it’s personal.

Because we’re all totally unique, right?

So, what works for one might not necessarily work for A N Other.

I speak as one who grew up understanding that food tasted VERY good (generally speaking, although I have an issue with liver and onions to this day…) and if you wanted pudding, you had to have a clean plate from your main course.

Unsurprisingly, everyone in my family has had issues around weight.

I’ve done most ‘diets’ out there (some of them as a young teenager – WTH???) although, for some reason, I could never quite bring myself to do the cabbage soup diet... ??

And now we understand so much more about nutrition and the amazing way the human body works, so we know for certain that IT’S NOT ABOUT CALORIES.

It never has been. Because not all calories were created equal.

Over the decades, so many things have been vilified and demonised by various ‘scientific studies’; historically, we’ve been prevented from enjoying butter because polyunsaturated oils were better for us – until they weren’t.

Eggs are now recognised as a superfood because of their amazing micronutrient quotients, but back in the day, at the height of the salmonella panic created by ‘Eggwina’ Currie in the 80’s, totally healthy chickens were culled in their millions, and anti-egg panic was rife.

Eggs are featuring A LOT here in Langstone right now, as the Langstone Ladies are in full egg production mode now and there are currently over a dozen beautiful blue and greeny-blue eggs in my kitchen.

My younger son bought me the amazing book, Egg, by@Michael Ruhlman, for my birthday. Part-cookery book, part-love story for the most convenient fast food ever created, it’s beautiful, and truly inspiring. (Watch this space for egg yolk raviolo with brown butter, goat’s cheese, and thyme, coming soon. And buy the book just for the amazing flowchart at the back – it's epic!)

This morning, though, I took delivery of an ice-cream maker. I had one years ago, one of the freeze-the-bowl-the-night-before jobs, which was ok but not fool-proof. This one’s the business, and I’m so excited!

But ice-cream’s bad for you, right?

Let’s be clear: I won’t be eating ice-cream every day. Or even every week. (I don’t think…) But tonight, it's ice-cream for pudding. What else was it going to be???

And if I’m going to eat it, I want to know what’s in it, and I want to know that it’s going to be good for me. Like the raspberry ripple ice-cream I made a few weeks ago, with the first chickie eggs. Ingredients: cream; eggs; raspberries; good quality balsamic vinegar; and honey (a scant teaspoon.)

I recently scrutinised the label of a product from a Highly-Darned-well-known ice-cream brand, marketed as ‘healthy’ because its calorific value was below 150. But when you really looked at the detail, the ‘healthy’ thing was actually an unholy alliance of hyper-processing and grim chemicals which were there purely and simply to make it taste good. Its main ingredient was ‘Sweetened Lactose-Reduced Condensed Skimmed?Milk’, and whilst one of its selling points is that it contains real cream (it does – 9%), the ingredient that’s there in greater volume is actually glucose syrup. Sugar. The food mechanics have tinkered with it to make sure it hits our ‘Bliss Point’, no problem – but at what cost? ??

Sugar’s one of the most addictive substances out there. It’s linked to so many major killers, disease-wise, and the first-ever professor of nutrition in the UK, John Yudkin, wrote an exposé of it called Pure, White, and Deadly back in 1972. (His ideas were first published in The Lancet in 1957, but they didn’t synch with the food industry’s marketing plans, so he wasn’t taken seriously. In fact, he was rubbished and vilified, such was the power of the anti-Yudkinites.)

Getting on for 70 years later, still so many people don’t understand what’s going on. And the food industry’s marketing team is rubbing its hands in glee.

As Tim Spector says, there are now, for the first time in history, 200 million more overweight and obese people on the planet than there are people starving and under-weight. That’s a scary fact. And so many of them are children, which is the truly terrible thing.

We need to be able to make informed choices about what we eat. But there are so many mixed messages out there.

Here’s a good rule of thumb, direct from the Army: Keep It Simple, Stupid. (I’m sorry – no offence is intended here: it’s just that KIS really doesn’t work for me, lexically!)

If you have no idea what sweetened lactose-reduced condensed skimmed milk is, don’t bother with it. It’s hyper-complex, over-processed crud. You don’t need it. It’s a thing designed to give you a dopamine hit and make you want to buy more of it.

If it’s got more than 5 ingredients in it, think twice before eating it.

If its main ingredient is one of these:

???Fructose

??Galactose

??Glucose

??Lactose

??Maltose

??Sucrose

…chances are, you’re better off avoiding it.

Treat sugar as exactly that: a treat. A dangerous one that needs to be handled with care.

Enjoy natural sugars in moderation – think maple syrup and honey, if you're going to do sugar at all. (And your body's clever: if you feed it artificial sweetener, it thinks it's getting the real thing and reacts accordingly. Ain't no foolin' genius.)

Change up your eating habits: enjoy some healthy fats and proteins and watch your energy levels increase; see how much sugar you can dump and revel in some new-found sugar-free sharpness for your brain.?

?Ok, I know that what works for me won’t necessarily work for everyone. There’s no such thing as perfect – it’s all a WIP, right? And nobody’s saying you can’t enjoy a treat ever again.

But all things in moderation seems to be a good sort of plan. (I used to work with someone who ate so many carrots, she turned orange and had to be hospitalised. And carrots are definitely good for you, aren’t they???)

Simple things done well – that’s where it’s at, for me, now.

This goat's cheese soufflé is a perfect example of exactly that. With a plateful of delicious green vegetables from fridge and freezer. (Yes, they had a little butter on them. And some salt.)

Food is my medicine. Preventive and personalised. And the old idea that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down?

Just NO.

Give me some grief and call me out in the comments if you have any beef with anything I’m saying.

Till next time, be well! I have rhubarb ripple ice-cream and keema mattar to create…

Lois ??

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/nov/03/food-for-life-by-tim-spector-review-the-science-of-eating-well

*James’s food was too delicious not to write about more fully, so I’m going to do so in a separate article later this week. With LUSH photographs. ??And if you want any support in your wellness journey, DM me here – I’m happy to help.