The Great Future Challenge With Food.

A great deal if not most of the pleasantness of food has been hijacked by Big Foodie, ( the food version of that manipulating and money making shower Big Pharma ). Using advertising, with a good deal of salt, sugar, refined and processed dairy, carbohydrate, protein and fat they are manipulating our taste for all food.

The real difficulty now is that we have the ‘need’ for the taste and texture and seek it no matter how bad we know it is for us.

Crisps are a prime example and they have become almost de rigeur, at least a small portion, in kid’s lunches in the UK - sliced potato burned in much used fat till it is crisped and flavoured with familiar items like cheese, sausage and mash, onion in packet where the retained fat in the potato can become rancid.

The popularity of such rubbish foods will persist till there is something to take their place.

That is the challenge!

What could be nicer for a sweet that apple pie and cream. The cream is probably the healthiest bit but the apple usually has refined cornflour as a carrier with added sugar. The pastry is fat and refined flour, the latter being probably the most unhealthy of the two with almost certainly some sugar as well.

Imagine the pastry being of a high fibre flour and butter, the apples being tart Bramleys, no sugar but a dash of lemon juice and cloves  in a carrier of gluten free flour and some psylium to make the carrier a little gelatinous and to make the apple pulp a continuum.

The cream stays as it is, whipped into peaks, and then the contrast comes between the relatively sweet cream and the sharp apple and lemon. Textually and taste wise all contrasting and fabulously healthier than the usual sweet mix.

Note that I said healthier not healthy! It's just a step on the way to getting the taste buds in a new frame of mind.   

My recipe for bread using hay (with a warning)

I am proposing the use of oat hay because it is roughage, very high in fibre and offers a light and interesting texture to the bread I make. I bought a bale of hay from a horse supplier and it was extra-ordinarily cheap. I understand the hay I bought has been cleaned of dust and dirt and is for the use of horses .
The internet shows that hay can contain aspergillas - a fungus, and mites and an assortment of bacteria
I take the view that I am cooking my bread and that should deal with that - also I examine the hay before I put it in the coffee grinder to make it into a mixable fluff to see that it looks clean.
I understand that storing of hay under some conditions can cause it to ignite spontaneously and cause a fire. I do not know the allergy issues which relate to hay.

Like many I can afford bread from any shop, boutique or bog standard white gunge. However both have the problem of high gluten and starch, and low and most insoluble fibre with the added worry that many have a burnt crust rich in cancer promoting acrylamides. For these reasons I propose you try the following:-

This is a modestly leavened bread using two modes for this - a small amount of yeast to react with its low rye flour content and bicarbonate to assist in aiding a raise in the psyllium in the mix.The rye is the only gluten containing  component and represents about 0.7% by weight of the finished product

The bread tastes good in it’s own right but is just super if very lightly toasted. The texture is chewy and invites the keeping of it in the mouth for some time with the attendant benefit of saliva for digestion. It slices really well..

The following is one of many attempts to solve these problems from a home made bread with the minimum of effort and cost.

Using a microwave with safe glass moulds produces a pleasant crust which is not burnt and therefore eliminated the acrylamides issue. A pyrex mould is good for this, tough as old boots and cheap to buy. I think silicone rubber bread moulds are pretty safe but I’m not dead sure on this, silicon derivatives usually being very stable and un-reactive - they certainly work well!

There is no kneading involved and the recipe makes three really hefty loaves.

After decanting the mix into the moulds they are put in a warm oven or place to rise.

I cook one in the microwave then and there and put the other two ‘gently’ into the freezer for later  when they can be thawed and microwaved straight off.

I carefully slice the cooked loaf as soon as it is cooled and freeze most of it. This frees up fridge space and ensures that it doesn’t dry out. Popping a frozen slice or two in the toaster defrosts it and then I can give it a light toasting if that’s what I want.

I am unable physically to handle or stir a large mix so I use a machine mixer  friends lent me for this - a fit person perhaps will find this unnecessary but you will need a really big bowl. I repeat - there is no need to knead.

The mixer they lent me is an ancient  Kenwood Chef Food Mixer which I think is a typical household mixer.

I checked on the internet and these second hand can be bought for a fraction of the new cost.

I make three loaves but naturally just divide quantities to suit the mixer you have.

1.

Thoroughly mix the following dry in the bowl of your miixer do this very slowly at first so it doesn’t spiral into the air and cause a mess.

1 kg of jumbo oats

200 gm of Rye flour

100 gm of oat bran

30 gm of oat hay ( this is optional but needs to be refined somewhat using a coffee grinder or such till it becomes fluff like ie no stalks to choke on! - the point of using it is to offer the loaf lightness and roughage)

3 heaped dessertspoons of psyllium

A sachet of dry yeast granules (around 60gm)

3 heaped teaspoons of salt ( I use 2 of lo salt and one of common salt - lo salt is very high in potassium)

3 heaped teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda

Any herbs or spice of your choice - rosemary is good, dried basil is good too and very inexpensive.

2.

Add 1400 ml of warm water bit by biggish bit and mix .

3.

Decant into  greased glass or silicone rubber fmoulds leave to rise for half and hour

4.

Cook at full power in the microwave

for 10 mins where the oven is rated 1000 watts

for 12 mins where the oven is rated  850 watts

--- if you choose to use a conventional oven I'd reckon about half an hour in a preheated oven at 200 or 160 fan assisted.

Protein And Your Immune System

The basic building blocks of food are proteins, fats and carbohydrates. The last two have considerable  notoriety in our present food culture. Protein and its building blocks less so and I suspect that this is because much less is known or maybe not that less is known but less to what remains to be known.

Although a generalisation I think it is fair to say that proteins and amino acids are the only things that our immune system can react to. And react can be an understatement when one considers the anaphylactic reactions we can have to peanuts, certain fish and shell fish and stings from insects especially bees. When you think about the latter it is hard to believe that the poison the bee deposits when it stings is only a tenth of a milligram.

Such responses are mediated through one of our immune mechanisms.

Food tolerances or intolerances are in the same kettle of fish and as best I can make out form the strategy of certain diets and food advice books -  Eat right for your type.

The drift of that publication is that you can protect your immune system by eating the right proteins based on your blood group.

So while we strive to avoid sugar and refined carbohydrates and a small number of damaging or worrying fats and oils,  the spectrum of proteins that we are able to purchase, or are exposed to, raises a much more difficult problem simply because there are so many.

Since it is our immune system that is responsible for us fighting inflammation and cancer it is important that we watch what protein we eat.

Is there such a thing as a truly healthy biscuit?

If there is I don’t know about it. The problem lies in the makeup of the biscuit. Wheat flour: refined, and high in carbohydrate and gluten is the backbone, with sugar and fat in various quantities cooked at high heat to produce an essentially water free and crunchy product. It might surround a sugar or chocolate paste or be coated in the same or contain dried fruit .

To be healthy or rather healthier it should be of flour that is gluten free, high in fibre, barely sweet and cooked slowly so its oil or fat content is left as a residual but also so it is not burned and producing acrylamides at the surface.

As regards sweetening I would like to see the concept of ‘barely sweet’ become commonplace - a sweetness that declares itself as such but only just.

Such a sweetness can be achieved in cooking if one soaks dried fruit in as much water by volume and uses both in the making of the biscuits. This is not good sweetness in the health sense but the fruit ( I like to use sultanas and some shops sell them ungraded in size very cheaplyl ) itself is less sweet from being soaked - say for 24-48 hrs and that soaking water has been correspondingly sweetened.

The fruit, dried somewhat from the slow cooking, also offers a pleasant chewiness so use lots of it.

As regards fat I would be inclined to use butter but only if the cooking temperature is lowish and the duration long. This should produce a texture and colour somewhat like a pale shortbread. If one wants to bake quickly I would use rice bran oil as this has a high smoke point and will not be too damaged by the extra heat.

Being high in fibre, let’s say 15-20%, it will be less likely when in the mouth to become gooey and adhere to the teeth - biscuits incidentally are one of the worst foods ever to destroy teeth - due to this clinginess I have mentioned.

One of the pleasures of eating a biscuit with tea or coffee is to dunk it and not have it fall off. The shortbread texture should allow rapid ingress of the liquid but the fibre, fat and the lesser carbohydrate should offer resistance to the dunked section falling off.

As for shelf life this should be good as the fat content acts as a not too toxic preservative.

As for amounts just experiment - you will not go to jail if it goes wrong and you will always be able to eat the result whatever happens - but importantly always note down the amounts you use and oven time etc so you know where you are next time.

Are we swamping ourselve with nutrients?

I wonder if we allow ourselves to be swamped with nutrients.

Nutrients essentially are those substances required in micro amounts to facilitate the bulk of the chemical reactions that keep us alive. There are two areas where we might indeed over do the intake of these.

  The longest in existence has been Big Pharma and one has only to look at chemist and health shop shelves to be gob-smacked by the plethora of them on sale. If I take the case of vitamin C, the daily need is probably in the region of 50 milligrams. A massive range of vitamin C will be on show including fizzy versions of 1000mg. Big Pharma hopes you will take the view that  the ‘more the better’ and fails to let you know that having taken such a dose most of it will be discharged when next you go to pass water and of course charges you a pretty penny for the privilege. I would venture 200 mg of a slow release vit C preparation would be many times better for you and your pocket. Many other vitamin preparations are there to confuse but generally are expensive and unnecessary in the amounts on offer. Information on daily recommended doses is all one needs.

  The other source is that obtained from graunching vegetables and fruit in machinery like the bullet. What it can produce, is certainly shown to produce, is a nutritional hit of vitamins and minerals. However the ingested slurry, no matter how much fibre its constituents have, will never have the same effect on the gut as eating the constituents. The fibre will be downgraded by virtue of its mechanical liquidising and offer no beneficial bulk or irritant effect to the gut musculature. As for the nutrients therein, the ‘hit’ is not what the body was made to cope with, let alone absorb and use economically.

As I’ve said before liquidising is easily seen as unnatural.

The one place I have to admit it is good is its brief use in graunching or cracking seeds such as those in pomegranate kernels or linseed where access to their nutrition centres by grinding them in ones’ teeth would take ages.

How Nice of a Food to Lose Weight for You

We have been down the road of explaining the advantages of warm and raw vegetable salads (warves)  However something I have found something else that should be discussed.

Since they have increasingly become the backbone of my daily intake I have been losing weight. It strikes me that here is a food, virtually devoid of refined carbohydrate, except occasionally when I add a little cooked rice or blackeye beans, on which my weight has slowly lost six and  half kilos. I  think therefore the digestion of the meal itself is using lots of calories.

  It makes sense that the gut is stimulated to work harder by the tough and rough of the food, ie its sheer physical presence and that uses up the calories.

  If I was into the physics of food metabolism I might even postulate that the energy I am using up on my basically raw meal is the energy ones' stove would supply in turning it into the standard cooked vegetable meal.

  What is nice also to know that the nutrients are kept pretty much intact, something that won’t be likely if the food is cooked.

It is worth considering that the Nutribullet does one no favours in the manner above
- that 20,000 rpm motor they advertise has done it all for you. The slurry it produces requires little if any energy to move it along the gut.

More Thoughts on the Nutribullet

   At the outset consider a liquid diet as unnatural - impossible to find in nature as such and denies the need for our teeth, and much of the digestive mechanisms orientated around the mouth. The makers or proponent push the fact that so much fibre can be digested this way - I say the fibre in fruit or vegetables one uses is almost certainly damaged so much as to have little mechanical effect on intestinal motility and therefore intestinal health.
   Undoubtedly some fibre remnants persist to enable some sort pre-biotic function but the liquefaction to the degree they show occurs by pouring the result through a filter without obstruction is really worrying.
   Enzymes, vitamins and other nutrients are bound to fragment of the fruit or vegetable used and are released in a manner controlled by mastication and the normal peristalsis and rhythms of the gut.
   When a smoothie or whatever from a Nutribullet is swallowed it exposes the gut to unprecedented level of nutrients, some intact possibly, certainly some knocked about, and not just physically.
   We all like fruit salad but even this might be worrying as the mixed fruits have different acidity levels and particular nutrients in any one item may be damaged by another. Where in nature does one find any animal mixing food in this manner and how much more is that situation.
If this is the case with fruit salad think how much more damage occurs when they are blitzed in a Nutribullet?
The one case where the Nutribullet is useful is liquidising nuts and seeds but it is an expensive way of doing it as blender a quarter to a third of the price will do this nicely. In fact the Nutribullet probably goes overboard reducing any natural irritant effect of a ground nut or seed to zero.
 Something I have mentioned before is the immediacy of the effect of a problem ingredient - this could be allergy or a vegetable or fruit product that should be cooked.
The high speed of the mechanism, said to be 20,000 revs per minute, could easy create enough heat to cook the mix it is making.
Another well advertised and more expensive blender seen in department stores on demonstrations shows by extending the blitz time the mix heats up and renders itself as a soup.
I think, all in all, one has to be wary about the use of the Nutribullet as an aid to health living.

When Fixing The House It's DIY But For Health It Should Be MIY.

Supermarkets are making a fortune out of you from foods you can make yourself (MIY) and polluting the world for the privilege.
This is just a short note on how we have become dependent on supermarkets and stores for the most
ordinary things usually at high price in money and certainly a high price in the environment as these
items are packaged attractively almost seductively in protective surrounds of shaped clear plastic, under protection of expanded polystyrene and paper labelling and clear film to view the contents.
Yet the contents can easily be made at home so that they are fresher, the items used of equal or better quality and done so without the use of preservatives and fancy packaging which will pollute the environment.
Things one never bought before like made up custard, creme caramel ( often sold in glass dishes complete with  a raw sugar sachet to glaze on under the grill at home )  and even sandwiches at costs each of which would buy a loaf of bread and a chunk of cheese to make a dozen sandwiches.
This whole thing of dependence for such things is just a failure to get across to the public how easily it is to do as good - of course there is the convenience thing but there is the confidence thing and the lure of the packaging, most of which will become land fill.
This brings me to the business of MIY which is Make It Yourself.
There has to be intelligent and focused teaching and even by television on really simple, everyday stuff.
Most programs on meals that can be made in 15 or 30 mins simply lie about the reality as even the presenters struggle to make the grade and they have the backing and preparation all ready at hand.
The preparation of a meal means having a menu in the head - not a specific one but a rough outline.
Then all one has to do is to fall back on a little experience, have a look whats in the fridge, vegetable basket and cupboard and then make up as one goes using common sense to pick the best way to deal with what one has.
I'll elaborate on MIY soon.

Worrying Aspects of Raw Vegetables.

In my enthusiasm for warm raw vegetable salads I haven't said much about those vegetables that one should avoid or be cautious about.
Much is written but three easy to read links are:
http://bit.ly/1kfcK1r
http://bit.ly/2chPlNl
http://bit.ly/2cnL8cw

I apologise for this and except for potatoes and aubergines I've gone ahead and used them seemingly with little bad effect but perhaps I shall take a little more notice now.

A Healthy Jam or Pickle.

The nice thing about traditional jam is that it is sweet, a mix of about 50% each of sugar and an almost infinite variety of fruit and fruit mixes.

Jam goes so well with toast, muffins and crumpets as well as cakes and biscuits.

The other good thing about jam is that it is a preserve and thus will be good for years. Now we have refrigerators we can do with out the sugar to make the jam keep.

The bad things about jam are the sugar content and the manner of its preparation wherein the fruit is cooked at great heat in the sugar and thus this annihilates any nutrition the undamaged fruit might offer.

What I propose is a washed fruit pulp mixed or gently blended with pectin and/or psyllium with lemon pulp and juice.

The pectin and the psyllium produces the set and the lemon juice and pulp a hefty compliment of tart.

I recently bought about half a kilogram of tamarind from our local Indian shop,  soaked it in about half as much water again to free up the pulp from the seeds and skin. Having removed the skin and seeds I gently blended it with the psyllium and lemon.

I decanted all of it into large size ice cube trays and popped it in the freezer.

I take a cube or so before I need it, let it defreeze and it's good for two or three days at least in a smallish lidded container.

I must say the tart of this tamarind version  is enough for it to be called a pickle and spread over cheese it’s just great.

Not the most convenient having to remember to defreeze some but no sugar and whatever fruit pulp you use it has not been irreparably damaged by heat.

The principle of this jam is choose your fruit, blend it’s pulp with lemon and psyllium and or pectin, freeze and use as necessary. You will find your own amounts but go easy on the psyllium in the beginning - dissolve it in the lemon juice or  a litte very hot water before adding to mix.

Play around using finely chopped onion, swedes, anything in fact to bulk out the volume if you want to make more of a chutney.

Make better bread

                 

Most of the bread in the supermarkets of the world is sadly high in gluten and starch and very low in fibre, effectively  making ‘the staff of life’ a very refined carbohydrate, much of it having a glycemic index close to that of sugar, and of course potentially diabetogenic and responsible for gut stasis, and gastrointestinal disease, including cancer.

If you make your own bread, not the lolly, loot or lucre kind for which you mustn’t get caught, but the kind which you can eat, and if you would like to bump up its fibre content, please make a comment below, I shall tell you what I have done and hopefully we shall get some dialogue going. Your involvement could contribute one day  to new standards for bread. I hope to hear from you.

The Trouble With Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Cooking chicken can be an art, keeping it tender and moist. The use of batter is a brilliant idea and it does this splendidly; and it this that has made it the winning recipe for KFC being so enticing and thus successful. It is the encasing completely of  every bit of surface in batter, and then deep frying it, sealing it so the juices don't escape into the cooking oil and which offers what will be that marvellous crunch as the diners break through that golden casing into hot moist chicken  that can't fail to please. The batter also offers a perfect way of flavouring the chicken underneath in any manner wished for so that variations in local taste can be made by just adding spices, herbs and smoky sauces and extra salt to get Cajun, Texan,New York etc.
   The deep frying and the batter tends to act a visual gloss over of the perhaps not so glamorous irregularities of chopped up chicken impossible to achieve easily in a fry pan.
The problem is this. The batter is burned flour laden with fat of from an undefined or indeterminate standard.
Repeated use of the oil has to be part of the economics of KFC to make it profitable.
So it is well to think on this as the default scenario. The fat is old, it has turned the batter, itself in its uncooked state being a slurry of refined carbohydrate, into what is probably an acrylamide spiked,and heat damaged product offering that so desired crunch..
Sadly much the same issues can be directed to fish and chips, bought from a fish shop, that is. In the old days beef dripping was used and I can remember seeing those big cookers at the back of the shop white first thing in the morning having gone solid being turned off overnight.
Now fish and chips are cooked in vegetable oil which I suspect is healthier than animal fat in the beginning but might deteriorate more quickly with prolonged and repeated heating.
If you need to have your chicken ( the pieces should be flattish or at least not too irregular ) or your fish battered do it at home not in your deep oil frier but in a fry pan with a minimal of fat and watch it carefully so it doesn't stick.
Sorry to be a spoil sport but one is just better without batter!

A simple and really safe way to sample food

While we are in the business of talking about safe food might I suggest keeping the following in mind when sampling food in the kitchen or anywhere for that matter.

Patently if there is a utensil at hand and one you don’t need to share, such as a spoon or fork, and which you can wash or discard afterwards, this is the answer.

But if you have one spoon and want many to taste think of the following: The back of the hand - this is of course washed as a matter of hygiene in many situations but as it's not prehensile it seldom has contact with the unsanitary or toxic situation - also this fact makes it easy to remember if that has not been the case.

Even at lavatory visit, unless one washes the basin  tap handle before turning it off, or wipes the handles of the toilet doors etc fomite connection to the fingertips is certain - whether infection will occur is another matter.

If you wash your hands properly, soaping at least to the wrist crease, the back of your hand is as a clean plate and perfectly nice to eat off.

Now in the kitchen, where tasting is often de rigueur, or in any  other tasting scenario,  a teaspoon or fraction thereof of the warm or cool food in question in the centre of the back of your hand is just fine and of course it can be carefully  licked clean in a second, without any slobbering, and be ready for as many tastings as you like. With care even runny food can be sampled. You must know that the sample is not hot as the skin on the back of the hand is very thin and sensitive, and burns there can be serious!

Mentioning  tasting while cooking, I see chefs sampling from teaspoons etc over or near food and so even this may not be as safe as careful application of what I have described.

As for accepting samples to try in other situations where there is limited or no utensils I think this is pretty foolproof.
Not having to use dirty fingers and worrying about having to clean them afterwards is something to think about!

The disgrace of the breadmakers

What I mean here is the continuance of a philosophy of bread making that is based on selling water and depleting the nation(s) of fibre. The capacity of the protein complex gluten to hold water works for the bread industry like water has for the pork industry. I can't speak exactly for the meat side of things but putting water into meat must mean making it heavier, or bigger or both., but with bread it changes the whole game of making money from bread. It does this by way of enabling the product to weigh heavier, the degree of rise  using less grain, the keeping and the shelf life being extended. The amount of fibre in the ordinary loaf is laughable and varies from 1.5 to 3.0% max.
Patently at the upper end of this will be boutique and specialist loaves where a range of grain, seed and even herb particulates are added and rarely this will push the fibre up to 5 or 6%.
   The spectrum of the effect of gluten is wide, from overt illness like coeliac disease to just being bloated. There is a mile on gluten on the web but to one aspect of it short it's a protein complex which challenges the immune system - this is something we all can do without - exhaustion of this system makes us vulnerable to infection and cancer. I am uncertain whether there is a straight line relationship between the amount we are exposed to and the body response but it would seem reasonable to think so, as absolute and immediate calamitous reactions are rare.
In the making of bread it is the gluten that gives the elasticity of the dough and which stabilises the fabric of the dough when cooked along with gelatinisation of the starch component.

Roast or Fried Food and the Wastefulness of Oven Cooking

There are many of reasons for using an oven and principally they centre around cooking food. Keeping food warm and warming plates and offering a warm place for yeast to act on bread and buns are others.

An oven is  a massive and mostly metal box with adjustable shelves which may or may not be open wired or closed.

The whole shebang requires a great deal of heat to raise to an appropriate temperature at which recipes provide a base-line.This heat and the heat that remains after the cooking is done is, most of the time, wasted and this is a serious drawback of ovens especially for heating prepared dishes which have been bought. The packaging almost 100% insists on the over being brought up to a certain high temperature and the waste here is even more marked because the heating up (and cooling down)  time occupies a large percentage of the total paid for. Obviously the cost of heating up is the real loss but in moderate and warm climates the cooling down cost is one involving the air conditioner.

So much would be oven cooking can be done in a fry pan with a lid or in a pot with a lid as in pot roast and can be done on a flicker of flame.

In the case of a pot roast the lid is usually a good fit and this means the heat is intense and will tend to quickly cook the meat shrinking it somewhat as the flesh contract and expresses the juices. If however the lid can be just raised a bit throughout the cooking the escaping moisture will dry the skin off a little and allow it to seal the meat and keep the juices in the flesh.

The same applies to using a pan and here I use a couple of chopsticks to raise the lid from the rim again allowing a drying effect rather than a wet stewing effect on the surface of the meat.

In a way we are trying to reduce the amount of energy used in an oven and I must admit it sometime difficult to get a really small flicker of flame from a gas ring and then I use a diffuser -  a perforated metal plate that sits under the pot or pan.

Quite often cooks will dust meat in a mixture of flour, herbs and spices and this in hot fat will quickly caramelise and produce a skin and then the heat can be really cut down. Also after dipping in flour like this the meat can be dipped in a batter again with salt and spices. Then the meat is put into a deep fryer where fat instantly seals the batter around the meat and the meat cooks through quickly and without losing its juices. This is the basis of Kentucky Fried Chicken and of course you can do this at home.  But I hope you won’t - because the batter hold a mass of fat even when the meat is cooked and sat to drain and this fat is typically bad for you having been heated many times and possibly in the first instance not being an upmarket or healthy fat - Repeatedly heated fat is really bad for you usually as it contains a lot of trans fats. Also it requires a lot of energy heating up the volume of fat needed for deep frying and that is what we are trying to avoid.

An overview of the way we find food in the world today

Almost certainly there is the world today enough food to feed every person healthily but as we know issues of distribution intrudes on this ideal. Perceptions of what is healthy from one country to another cloud this too and, within any country, notions of what is an acceptable standard affects the impression of the standard of life in that country.

In the UK there are food banks where poor people can supplement their food stocks. Even here people with wealth enough to not need these food banks abuse the system. Yet there are no standards which the outside observer can relate as to  what the poor get and what they need for good health.                    Tesco, a large supermarket here in the UK, periodically encourage their customers to donate from a list of items to a basket at the front door as they leave. Reasonably these are items that won’t rot, are easily opened and don’t necessarily need much in the way of heating or cooking - biscuits, tinned and packaged soups etc. Perhaps this in itself reflects the dire state that the recipients are in - maybe unable to cook or heat their food, or only have the strength to open a packet but maybe also the inadequate way we are brought up to understand how to fend for healthy survival.

This is the beginning of a discourse on what we ultimately want to achieve for the world in healthy nutrition.

The problem with crisps

Is is amazing that there seems to be little rebuttal from health experts about  the widespread, no, almost universal use of crisps as a snack or accompaniment to a meal especially kids’ lunches.

They have little in the way of healthy features and some serious drawback. Thinking about how they are made is a way to appreciate the health problem they pose. Classically a crisp is shaving of a potato, already an essentially rich source of refined carbohydrate,  that is fried in oil till it is crisp. It is vital that all the moisture in crisp is removed to achieve ‘crispness’ and also to ensure ‘shelf or package’ life. The potato shaving is saturated with the oil in which is cooked right through.

The oil used has to be very hot to achieve what is required, ie to brown, to crisp and at the same time dehydrate the potato. The provenance of the oil is at the behest of the maker and the frequency of its use is never stated and is probably a trade secret as it indeed must be one of the major costs in production.

Heating any oil or fat changes it and alway for the worst. The change in colour of the crisp to a light or golden brown means there has been caramelisation, not just of the surface as in the case of a baked potato but all the way through. Caramelisation means a worrying change to the carbohydrate, the essential substance of the potato but also to the little bit of protein in it as well. This change produces range of acrylamide - like products and these are known to be carcinogenic or cancer producing.

The manufacturers now, on top of common salt and the problems that causes, use a spectrum of spices and flavourings the provenance of which is not revealed. Spices, especially hot ones like chilli are also cancer producing..

On top of all these issues is the mechanical one. Crisps are mostly crunched a little after being put in the mouth but then tend to be swallowed before they are softened. That is they present to the eater’s gullet a mass of fined sharp edged shards - a very definite mechanical irritant to the lining of the gullet. Cancer of the gullet or oesophagus is on the increase and almost certainly one can see that crispness of crisps could be a contributing factor. Any salt  on them aggravates the problem.

So in crisps we have a food which is nutritionally, chemically and even mechanically unhealthy and with some factors having elements that could be contributing to cancer.

Roast or Fried Food and the Wastefulness of Oven Cooking

The definition of fried food is the cooking of food in oil. There is patently an overlap here with oven cooked roasts of fatty meat and pan 'frying' where no fat or virtually no fat is used all offering a spectrum of healthiness.
There are many of reasons for using an oven and principally they center around cooking food. Keeping food warm and warming plates and offering a warm place for yeast to act on bread and buns are others.

An oven is  a massive and mostly metal box with adjustable shelves which may or may not be open wired or flat metal plates.

The whole shebang requires a great deal of heat to raise it to an appropriate temperature at which recipes provide a base-line.This heat and the heat that remains after the cooking is done is, most of the time, wasted and this is a serious drawback of ovens especially for heating prepared dishes which have been bought. The packaging almost 100% insists on the oven being brought up to a certain high temperature and the waste here is even more marked because the heating up (and cooling down)  time occupies a large percentage of the total heat paid for. Obviously the cost of heating up and for the duration of the cooking is the real loss but in moderate and warm climates the cooling down cost is one involving the air conditioner.or opening doors and windows to let the heat out.

So much of 'would be oven cooking' can be done in a fry pan with a lid or in a pot with a lid as in pot roast and can be done on a flicker of flame.

In the case of a pot roast the lid is usually a good fit and this means the heat is intense and will tend to quickly cook the meat shrinking it somewhat as the flesh contracts and expresses the juices. If however the lid can be just raised a bit throughout the cooking the escaping moisture will dry the skin off a little and allow it to seal the meat and keep the juices in the flesh.

The same applies to using a pan and here I use a couple of chopsticks lengthwise to raise the lid from the rim again allowing a drying effect rather than a wet stewing effect on the surface of the meat.

In a way we are trying to reduce the amount of energy used in an oven and I must admit it sometime difficult to get a really small flicker of flame from a gas ring and then I use a diffuser -  a perforated metal plate that sits under the pot or pan.

Quite often cooks will dust meat in a mixture of flour, herbs and spices and this in hot fat will quickly caramelise and produce a skin and then the heat can be really cut down. Also after dipping in flour like this the meat can be dipped in a batter again with salt and spices. Then the meat is put into a deep fryer where fat instantly seals the batter around the meat and the meat cooks through quickly and without losing its juices. This is the basis of Kentucky Fried Chicken and of course you can do this at home.  But I hope you won’t - because the batter hold a mass of fat even when the meat is cooked and sat to drain and this fat is typically bad for you having been heated many times and possibly in the first instance not being an upmarket or healthy fat - Repeatedly heated fat is really bad for you usually as it contains a lot of trans fats. Also it requires a lot of energy heating up the volume of fat needed for deep frying and that is what we are trying to avoid. Considering this I hope the reader will then appreciate how bad crisps are for one - the fat I've just mentioned, the burnt surface of the potato ( or composite batter) they are using which will be now a coating of acrylamide and then on top of all that there is the fact that they are crisp, sharp and if gulped quickly will be highly abrasive of the surface of the throat, the oesophagus (gullet) and the upper stomach. To add insult to injury the crisps have a coating of salt, often spices and what must burnt cheese mixtures - all carcinogenic. Cancer of the oesophagus is on the increase and it is a very difficult disease to treat so good to avoid crisps however nice and crunchy.
I hope you find that you are able to give the oven a miss at least sometimes after this chat.

Some tips for a really healthy breakfast.

I mention this in another blog. I make most of this in a typical Chinese rice bowl and do most of the preparation the night before. I use two types of frozen 'juice' made into  iceblocks and these are they. No 1. I blend beetroot, carrots, pomegranate kernels, sour or Bramley apples, lemon seed, Kiwi fruit, pineapple including the deep skin and core and dish about 2litres of this into ice block trays.
No 2. This ice block is just frozen organic pomegranate juice which I get from a Russian outlet in Nth London.
Doing this at night means the ice blocks have melted by the morning.
I add some 11 large frozen cranberries - absolutely no sugar and all thinly sliced, a soup spoon each of lingon berries, black currant, and sea buckthorn berries all thoroughly washed, To this I add three heaped teaspoons of my mix of ground almond, linseed and sunflower kernels.
Pour some full cream goats' milk over it, pop it in the fridge until breakfast time.
At breakfast all I have to do it top it with a good handful of jumbo oats and dust with psyllium.
Mix together and add more goats' milk to keep it soft. Don't delay in eating for too long as the psyllium will 'jellify' and spoil the texture. I make a point of crushing any seeds in the berries with my teeth - most of sea buckthorn berries have a pronounced and hard seed so beware jamming it between your teeth.
I have a slice of my rough oat bread with raw sardine fillet and sheep cheese and after I've downed this I have a mug of coffee with xylotol and goats' milk.

Why raw vegetables help you lose weight.

It is unadulterated fibre which is the matrix of raw vegetable and it is that which makes your intestines work to break it down.
Apart from exercising the muscle layers of which the bowel is made, from tongue to tail, it uses a great deal of energy doing this. It means it will keep you lean.
Of course the antithesis of this is cooked vegetable which is, as I have previously mentioned, is identical to rotting and from a health point of view probably worse. This is because the heat of cooking destroys nutrients much more effectively than aerobic oxidation at room temperatures.
I mention, somewhere, thinking about a liquidizer or blender making a selection of raw vegetables such as you would make for a meal to end up like the soft putty you excrete. This really does take some energy. These machines vary from 350  to 1250 watts with a mean somewhere in the region of 680. This is nigh on one horsepower and kept on for five minutes is five  horsepower. Of course you're deploying this energy over 5 to 8  hours.
Never the less this is real energy you are deploying in your gut and it uses up the calories you so want to lose. Remember your bowels were designed for roughage and not refined food, be it cooked vegetables, or other refined carbohydrate,  so all you are doing is what nature intended.

The C word but its not about cancer

The connotation I want to engender when you hear the C word is the dark side of 'convenience'.
So many of the ills in this world occur because convenience rules. Whole philosophies by which food is packaged relates to this word and no where more so than breakfast cereals. I am particularly affected by this as it takes me some 10 minutes last thing at night to prepare my cereal breakfast -  fuzzy headed in the morning it would take 20 minutes at least plus the fact I use one or two certain ice cube preparation which need an  hour to melt - this can happily occur in the fridge overnight. I am not left off the hook in the morning either as the addition of raw jumbo oats and psyllium has to be carefully sequenced to make the whole thing palatable.

I shall discuss this breakfast later but it is on the convenience of the commercial breakfast cereals that is worth focussing.

Cornflakes, crispies of any sort, puffed cereals, bubbled rice - they all have the crunch which patently is really liked. But what does this crunch really mean. To get that experience the manufacturers have to heat the cereal to a really high temperature, not just to drive the natural water content off but to make brittle the cellulose fibre. Such treatment makes the cereal fracture and gives the crunch but the fibre content now is seriously altered to become starch or even actually sugar like. Naturally the nutrients like vitamins are affected and usually are replaced by addition later. In effect the best that can be said for such cereals is, that when they have had them added, their vitamin content. Along with the rush to get cereal down in the morning is the addition to them of milk and sugar - in fact as a kid the thing I liked best at the end of such bowl of cereal was the sweet milk that I captured lifting the bowl to one side!

How Asia is Picking up the Ill Health Tab from the West.

Many tens of thousands of students from Asia go each year to Europe, North America and Australia to be educated for their chosen professions and over decades this will be many millions. The years they spend being educated are years eating the Western Diet rich in meat, wheat and dairy and what will they chose when they return to their  home country? - of course those very things. They will abandon the vegetable, fish, minimal meat and poutlry and rice diets that have kept the masses of t there forebears sustained for centuries.
It is a fact that the young and very young in China are suffering from obesity, something never seen before and diabetes is on the increase too. No doubt the increased affluence of the average Asian is much improved and with it the spectrum of choice. Without doubt the big names like Coca Cola, McDonnell's and Heinz etc. are at hand to offer their wares and with media advertising the way it is, it will all seems so inviting especially to the young - the takeaways and the junk food.
Wheat, meat and dairy pretty much summarises the problem.
This means an imposition of new protein on Asians by way of meat, new protein by way of wheat and the same goes for dairy.
Though certain evolutionary thinking considers the increase in protein in the diet to be one of the major promoters of brain size there is no doubt that the protein nowadays is quite different both in volume, type and in quality to that which helped homo sapiens so much that way.
The volume consumed of animal protein in the West is massive from meat and dairy, reinforced at every opportunity by that in wheat as breakfast cereals, bread, cakes and biscuits most of which contain un-needed amounts of sugar.
That the millions in Asia have flourished on the impoverished volumes that past conditions allowed speaks wonders for that diet ie vegetables, rice, fish and some poultry.
We can even improve on that by 'not cooking' the vegetables.
It's general features are those we should adopt in the West and suggest that Asia returns to them.