This Book Is A Must-Read!

I read Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think by the brilliant Brian Wansink a few years ago and was blown away by some of the creatively-clever and often mischievous experiments he and his colleagues in the Food and Brand Laboratory at Cornell University played on often-unsuspecting 'victims' to prove how mindless we can be when choosing what and how much we eat! Being a soup aficionado the Bottomless Soup Bowl Study was my all-time favourite!

And now he is back with Slim By Design: Mindless Eating Solutions for Everyday Life which reveals a great deal more and is a fascinating read... here are a couple of his observations from the book...

"For 90 percent of us, the solution to mindless eating is not mindful eating - our lives are just too crazy and our willpower’s to wimpy. Instead, the solution is to tweak small things in our homes, favorite restaurants, supermarkets, workplaces and schools so we mindlessly eat less and better instead of more. It’s easier to use a small plate, face away from the buffet and Frisbee-spin the bread basket across the table than to be a martyr on a hunger strike. Willpower is hard and has to last a lifetime. Rearranging your life to be slim by design is easy.... 

This book is about solutions - concrete, actionable solutions that my Lab has developed, tested, analyzed and tweaked in dozens of towns across the United States and abroad. This book shows how you can help your kids eat better, control your eating at restaurants, shop like a slim person and eat less at home without having to think twice. In other words, it specifically shows how you can help yourself and your family become slim by design. But equally important, this book will show you how to get all of these places and people around you to help."

Is October the Best Month to Start a Diet?

Well, as far as one study is concerned, it could be! The world-renowned eating behavior expert and author of the brilliant Mindless Eating, Brian Wansink teamed up with two other respected researchers to record the daily weight change in 2924 participants over a 12 month period from three countries (United States, Germany and Japan) and discovered that the participants' weight rose over the Christmas/New Year period plus in all three countries there was significant weight gain around other major holidays.  Overall, weight increase was between 0.5kg and 0.8kg and whilst around half the weight gained was often lost after all the recorded holidays, the other half tended to remain for many months.

Whilst the researchers concluded that greater self-control during holidays was clearly the route for all, they determined that this was not always easy so best advice is to do everything we can to ensure that we head into ANY holiday period at a healthy weight, which makes October an excellent month to make a few resolutions and get started on a weight loss journey in the lead up to the Christmas and New Year holiday and party season!

click here for 20 diet and lifestyle changes to get you started!

Health at a Planetary Scale

Physicians, Howard Frumkin and Sam Myers have written an extremely informative and very revealing article for POLITICO on climate change and the need to link human health directly to the health of the earth’s natural systems on which we depend and why we should be thinking bigger - way bigger - about public health.... 

Here are just two extracts but I urge you to read the full article and share it as extensively as you can:

"Ultimately, if the insights of planetary health are going to yield their full benefits, it will fall to policymakers to think big – to see the connections among issues such as natural resource management, energy, agriculture and urban development and to place human health and well-being at the center of their decisions."

"Food is yet another example. Agronomists have known for some time that climate change reduces the yield of most major food crops. But climate change has other effects as well: rising carbon dioxide levels erode the nutritional quality of many foods, lowering the levels of critical nutrients including protein, zinc and iron. This research helps anticipate hot spots of potential malnutrition and helps drive the search for more nutritious cultivars."

Why Your Skin Loves the Colour Purple!

There was a time when your local greengrocer's shop was hefty with the colour green (the clue is in the name, I suppose!) but no more... they are now a riot of colour and have you noticed how purple is making a rather large statement?

Berries, plums, black grapes, red cabbage, red onions etc have had a seat at our tables for decades but what about purple potatoes, purple carrots, purple cauliflower, purple-sprouting broccoli, purple asparagus and a number of other fruits and vegetables that appear to have had a bit of a blue rinse?

It's all about a type of plant chemical in the flavonoid group called anthocyanin (an-tho-si-a-nin) being highly-researched in past years and discovered to have hugely-protective properties against those pesky free radicals (unstable molecules that damage cells and contribute to ageing and disease). Blueberries were first to earn themselves the now-perhaps-overused title of superfood but nevertheless, they certainly showed themselves to be a worthy addition to our diet and research continued to focus on more dark red and purple foods.

Blue corn is said to be the richest source of these anthocyanins and if you have been to Mexico you will likely have seen it regularly featured on menus as it is liberally used in traditional Mexican food (the story goes that tribes in the Southwestern United States were using it in cooking as far back as 1540 so it's certainly nothing new and they knew nothing about 'the power of purple'!) However, you have to seek it out in other parts of the world and whilst blue corn tortilla chips are readily available and are certainly a better choice than the plain variety, it can't be said to be a splendid excuse to hoover down a bag or two - rather too many calories and salt!

Why are these plant chemicals good for your skin? Principally, the role they play in the protection of our capillaries, the vast and extremely delicate network of tiny blood vessels that bring oxygen and nutrients to skin tissues and remove waste, allowing them to repair and renew. Anthocyanins also assist in collagen formation and stability and help protect us against the damaging effects of too much sun - particularly on the face.

So while you continue to use purple fruits and berries for snacks, in juices and smoothies, in salads and in your Fresh Fruit with Crunchy Yoghurt (see my recipe), keep an eagle eye out for purple vegetables - the green varieties already provide a fabulous array of vitamins, minerals and plant chemicals but the purple lot have a wee extra something!

You have likely noticed aubergine (eggplant), that beautiful, shiny purple vegetable often features in my recipes (love it!) Try my Aubergine Curry with Meat, Poultry, Fish or Tofu recipe. Instead of using white cauliflower for the 'cauliflower rice', I occasionally opt for the purple variety - and it looks and tastes great!