Beetroot juice, please!

It has been again a long, beautiful summer this year which favours outdoor activity. After work instead of writing posts for my blog I have been trying to go out walking or cycling. With plenty of sunshine I have been trying to accumulate vitamin D before the winter. The natural type is always better than the synthetic one 🙂

With the coming fall it is time to start making jams and preserves. This year besides making fruit (plum and apple) jams and vegetable (sauerkraut and cucumbers in brine) salads, I have discovered beet root. What a great vegetable! Using same recipe as for making sauerkraut I made beet roots in brine. After a couple of days I ended up with beetroot juice to drink, and the rest was used in a beetroot soup.
Beetroots contain many vitamins, minerals, microelements and phyto biologicals. Apparently this vegetable contains many nitrites which help oxygenate muscles better. Drinking a glass of beetroot juice daily helps with blood production. So anybody feeling weak or anemic should switch to drinking beetroot juice!

Healthy juices?

For many years now I have been looking for any good information in health section of the magazines and newspapers regarding health issues.
I have been always reading it because having low count of white blood cells myself I am particularly interested in building strong immune system. Taking vitamins and minerals could be an option but the ones offered in pharmacies for the most part are of synthetic origin.
Taking supplements make only sense if they are of organic origins and even then our bodies don’t absorb these nutrients easily. The best source of vitamins and minerals comes from vegetables and fruits and even better from the juices made of them.
I recently came across a book called Halleluja Diet which I thought was worth reading. After finishing it I decided to invest in good quality juicer/extractor which is recommended in the book.
I started making juices for the whole family and pretty soon I noticed that I started piling kilograms around my waist. Fruits especially oranges and grapes contain a lot of fructose which can be changed in fat in our bodies. If we don’t have time to ‘burn’ these calories then we are in trouble. Instead of feeling healthy we can end up being obese.

What the media says…

After a short break from blogging I started again looking through numerous articles concerning health. These last few weeks there have been a few which I think are worth mentioning here. The first one is about twin brothers who had two different diets: one based on protein, the other on carbohydrates. The story was inconclusive though and it was suggested that it is best to have a mixed and varied diet.

Then I came across an article based on a survey how people perceive their diets. According to scientists who had examined 1300 people it turned out that the vegetarians had a worse opinion (than meat-lovers) about their health, wellbeing and relations with other people. They supposedly suffered more allergies, had more recorded cancers (how about colon cancer which is linked to meat consumption?) and had mental health problems. They were supposed to have lower weight and drank less alcohol than others (!) This sounded like a bunch of BS so I tried to read about sugar tax which was suggested by England’s chief medical officer.

Then I really gave up after reading an article about different food allergy tests. “Could I really be allergic to SIXTY different food types?” – by Alice Smellie from Health Section of Mail Online.
The author of the above mentioned article decided to undertake three different tests which were suggested by food allergy testing firms.The result was contradictory and she was advised to exlude from her diet all sorts of food with the obvious ones like wheat, dairy products and meat (you don’t need to pay a lot of money to know that this in excess is no good for anybody). This article was especially interesting to me because I was recently advised to try Food Detective test to check my daughters for food intolerance. After reading this article I was not so sure anymore if I wanted to spend £60 on a test so inconclusive.

So I was left with one more thought for today: there are too many sponored articles written by many groups of interests and likewise there are so many contradictory opinions by health experts that we cannot trust anybody anymore. Instead I decided to buy a juicer and the whole family (excluding the cat) drinks home made juices. Worth trying!

New Year’s resolution

Hands up who wants to lose weight in the New Year? You’re not alone! The Journal of Clinical Psychology has shown that slimming down ranked no. 1 of peoples’ 2014 New Year resolution plans! The reason we are so obsessed with dieting is that there is currently a huge obesity epidemic.

We are constantly reminded that in order to keep fit we should limit fat intake and eat more carbohydrates. So we eat more bread, cereal products, crisps, chips, potatoes and rice. We buy skim milk and fat- and sugar-free products yet somehow we are not getting any thinner or healthier! Why is it so? According to research published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (from 2010) we’ve got it all wrong – it should actually be the other way around! We should refrain from eating carbohydrates, including products containing flour and starch (ie bread, pasta and cereals, even whole grains) and eat more fat (especially fat which is good source of omega 3 and 6!) One of the reasons is that many vitamins are soluble in fat and not in water.

As in 2013, this year I am also dedicated to finding good, reliable information based on independent research regarding this matter. So give the carbs a rest and try more good fats if you want to get lean and healthy in the New Year 2014!

Gluten free diet

Everywhere we turn we are constantly bombarded by information about dieting (or is it only me receiving “get thin for the holidays” emails?!)
There are so many fad ‘miracle’ diets going around (grapefruit diet, cabbage soup diet, cotton wool diet!). It’s all a load of nonsense! To be fair I cannot judge how effective they are as I have never used one. But as your doctor would say – the best approach is to permanently implement a general all-round-well-balanced healthy diet – yes, I know you’ve heard this one before!
On to the point I wanted to make. As well as eating healthy, my family and I have also noticed that ever since we started eliminating gluten from our diet we generally feel less sluggy after meals and more energised, with fewer colds and less sinus problems. But it is difficult to eliminate wheat altogether from our diet. Wheat is everywhere – it is a key ingredient of bread, cookies, pastas, breakfast cereals – it’s even used in the fermentation of alcoholic beverages! Perhaps this is the reason behind the food allergies epidemic these days. It seems quite daunting at first to eliminate gluten but actually it’s pretty easy! What if I told you that you probably already have most of the ingredients in your cupboards? So this week replace corn tortillas for bread, polenta or grated steamed cauliflower for couscous, naughty brownies with black bean flour-less brownies (so, so good! My family couldn’t tell the difference) and breadcrumbs with almond meal or ground flax seed. Gluten free diet – worth giving a try?

Hectic life…

Nowadays we all lead hectic lives. So many activities have been packed into every hour that we feel that those 24 hours are simply not enough. Yet it can’t be denied that life is even more hectic when one starts a new job. For me, this can be felt the most in the morning. Simple activities like dressing up, putting on makeup or having a quick breakfast have to be squashed into minimum time slots.

For those who have full time jobs, I’m sure you can feel this pressure – the looking at your watches in horror, the wonderment of how time has passed so quickly (?), the stress of whether you will make it on time or not.

I can’t tell you how handy my aloe vera gel has become. I simply pull out a bottle of aloe vera gel from the fridge, mix it with warm water, add spoon of honey and one tablet of Forever Royal Jelly and voila! A perfect energy drink to give a good start to a rather hectic day. I decided that now even more than before eating healthy food is essential. So I’m thinking about starting new section with healthy recipies. When I find a bit of free time 🙂

About summer time and the benefits of hydration

“Summer time and the living is easy…” – how I love this song! Summer holiday, summer laziness…hence no activity on the blog.
But I have read all the comments on the blog and the post about Vit B12 deficiency is the absolute winner. I just wonder is it aloe vera’s amazing ingredient B12 or the alcohol mentioned that made it such a hot topic? 🙂
This summer hot weather got me the idea to write about dehydration. I am not good at convincing other people to drink a lot of fluids since I don’t like to drink water myself. But since I discovered aloe vera gel I can stomach the water more easily. Aloe vera makes an amazing ingredient in fresh fruit smoothies! Take some fresh raspberries, a banana, some honey or agave, ice cold water and of course aloe vera gel and voila! You have a perfect, fruity summer drink!
So briefly why should we drink more and why dehydration is not good for us? Well, the news is bad folks! But more on that in a minute..
As most of you probably remember from school – we are made up from around 55-75% water (depending on our age, sex, diet, activeness and surrounding temperature). This water is crucial for our bodies to function well:
1) First off – water acts as a carrier! It ships around water soluble vitamins, minerals, glucose – all that yummy stuff our cells need to work. It plays a big hand in various cell reactions.
2) Number two – water helps control our internal temperature! So important in the summer of course, when we all just want to feel cool and breezy.
3) And finally – the great H2O helps remove toxins and waste from our bodies.
Obviously those are just a few functions, but you get the idea. On to this bad news I was going to share (sorry!) – studies have shown that chronic dehydration increases the risk of bladder and large intestine cancer, stroke, hypertension, venous thrombo-embolic disease, periodontal disease, galls stones, cataracts – to mention a few…
Water keeps our skin looking good, BM regular and muscles functioning well – so drink up! 🙂

Gut bacteria and Aloe Vera

This is good news for those who would like to lose weight. According to experiments by scientists from Harvard University altering the bacteria in one’s gut may help with reducing weight. This sounds like common sense!
Having healthy gut bacteria means having a healthy digestive system. Taking active probiotic containing live cultures of bacteria is beneficial but drinking aloe vera is even better, because good bacteria needs prebiotics like aloe vera to grow.
(Prebiotics after Wikipedia: Prebiotics are non-digestible food ingredients that stimulate the growth and/or activity of bacteria in the digestive system in ways claimed to be beneficial to health. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prebiotic_(nutrition)).
Do we really need to wait for scientists to give us the green light to drink aloe vera?

Aloe vera and pets…

A few days ago we got a cat. I have read in various books that aloe vera can be used for treating animals as well as humans. But it is one thing to read and another to see it for yourself. Our 12 week kitten is very thin at the moment – he was neglected and probably starving when he made it to the animal shelter. Although we haven’t tried it yet, he looks like he could do with some aloe vera treatment and the results will be posted here.

We are what we do…

This post should serve as an addition to the previous one entitled ‘We are what we eat’. This statistic will not make a good front page headline. We can read about mortgages, celebrity gossip or unemployment – the more dramatic the better (for the newsmedia to catch attention of the readers!).
The following information won’t be as catchy or interesting to many but will serve as a good illustration of the many issues mentioned here on this blog. According to The Independent on Sunday (quoted later by The Week, 11 May 2013): ‘a quarter of British adults walk less than nine minutes a day’. Are we surprised that we are in such poor shape? And now, no more – I’d better go for my routine walk around the block.