Six real shortcuts to health.

In Which magazine this month are listed five real shortcuts to health, along with general healthy eating advice.  Some of the ideas are very good: swap wheatgrass for broccoli and save money – jolly good idea.  Swap goji berries for spinach – right on the money.  Vegetables beat fruit everytime.  Swap fresh salmon for fresh sardines – most excellent idea.  Unless the salmon is wild, it is not a good source of omega 3, which fresh sardines are.

They also recommend cutting your sugar intake.  Hurrah – and even suggest eating whole fruits instead of fruit juice and avoiding fizzy drinks altogether.

Get your five a day – and they do point out that frozen veg can be better than fresh because it is frozen soon after picking, so will have more nutrients than fresh veg that has taken a week to get to the shelves.

Probiotics as in Actimel and Yakult get the thumbs down.  Oh, hurrah.  They may contain a piffling amount of probiotics, but they also contain a huge amount of sugar – and a vast profit for the company.

Food specific for diabetics gets the thumbs down saying, absolutely rightly, that diabetics should just follow a healthy balanced diet, stressing low sugar, but then they spoil it by stressing low fat too.  Well, that’s really going to work: steamed fish and cabbage anybody?

Salt gets the usual kicking.  It is true that eating a diet based on convenience food and take aways will lead to an extraordinarily high salt intake.  But if we mostly cook our own food, we can add salt.  Especially the coloured salts like Himalayan salt or the unrefined sea salts.  We do need sodium in the diet – and even more so when the weather is hot and sweaty.

They recommend eating more fibre.  This is a hotly discussed topic.  If we eat plenty of vegetables and some fruit, then there will be fibre in the diet.  If more is needed, then be careful to vary what fibres are added.  Because of the close proximity to the gut wall, we get very intolerant to fibres – faster than to anything else.  It really isn’t as easy as eating All Bran for breakfast or choosing whole grain cereals over refined ones – and it is in these very grain fibres that the dreaded nutrient sucking phytates lurk.  (( I’m always banging on about phytates.  For those who haven’t heard of them, they are antioxidants in the bran of grains – wheat, rice, oats – and they do have an antioxidant property by clasping onto cancers and taking them out of the digestive system.  However, they also clasp on to vital nutrients such as zinc, iron, calcium and niacin.  Shortage of zinc in particular has dire long term consequences.  Ancient traditions always soak their grains before eating – any authentic Indian recipe says to wash and soak the rice first, wheat would either be soaked or given long fermentation before cooking.  It is these modern days of convenience and speed that has us rushing the grain from field to mouth in the shortest possible time.  Pre-preparing grains neutralises those phytates.))

Here are my 6 shortcuts to health:

1. Cook it yourself.
2. Eat plenty of high quality protein, including, and vitally, for breakfast.
3. Cut back on sugars, including fruits, and replace them with vegetables.
4. Don’t eat foods that your Great Grandmother wouldn’t recognise.  And she would recognise neither modern wheats nor modern bread.
5. Don’t eat what doesn’t suit you.  Normally this is the stuff you can’t imagine going without.  After its gone, your tummy will be flatter and your brain more focussed and alert.
6. Get enough good quality sleep.

There is always more.