There’s something about health food shops I find a bit depressing. I think it is the absence of any fresh foods, and the faint aroma of dried cereals that always makes me feel a bit melancholy. There’s more than a whiff of the Puritanicals about them – just the term ‘health food’ is enough to plunge me into despair.

Even more so when that term is applied to products which are anything but. I’m thinking specifically about that ‘alternative to dairy milk’ known as rice milk – also now available in supermarkets in their (groan) ‘healthy options’ aisles.

Rice milk is made with the sugar from cooked rice and the water it’s cooked in. Usually sunflower oil is also added. The sugar in rice, and therefore its ‘milk’, is maltose and glucose and something called maltotriose, which is mainly glucose. So rice milk is basically sugary water, perhaps with some added calcium to make it in some way comparable to dairy milk. Other flavourings may be added. The brands available in the UK have not been tested for their glycaemic index but I do know that the Australian equivalent has a GI of 92. That is not very healthy – anything with such a high GI will play havoc with your blood sugar levels. Not for nothing is rice milk not recommended for diabetics, or anyone watching their teeth. Sugared water with a high GI can only mean one thing – big spikes in insulin levels. Think insulin, think fat storage, diabetes, obesity, heart disease and cancer. Rice milk producers boast that their product is lactose free, cholesterol free and low in fat – of course it is, it’s sugary water. And they’re right – there is no added sugar. There’s no need! There’s plenty already there. It is also natural, and so is tobacco.

I haven’t even mentioned the sunflower oil yet. Sunflower oil is a polyunsaturated oil and to my mind up there with sugar when it comes to the bad food list. I’ve discussed this before but I’m happy to keep repeating myself. These ubiquitous polyunsaturated oils are highly processed. First, the seeds are heated to a very high temperature to facilitate extraction. Then the oil is extracted, most commonly using a solvent derived from petroleum. The oil is degummed, bleached and then deodorised. The process ensures that the oil is thoroughly de-nutritioned too. Deodorisation is necessary to remove the rancid odours created during all this refinement and is performed at temperatures in excess of 200ºC. Worse still, these oils now contain something that wasn’t there to start with and which you won’t find on the label: trans fatty acids, those heinous fats famous for their harmful effects on health.

Rice milk drink is suitable for the dairy intolerant and vegans. Drink it if you like sweetly flavoured water, but don’t drink it because you believe it to be good for you in any way.

Reference

Kemény, K., Recseg, G, Hénon, K. et al (2001) Deodorization of vegetable oils: Prediction of trans polyunsaturated fatty acid content. Journal of the American Oil Chemists’ Society, 78(9).

I can’t abide breakfast cereals, from any perspective – health, taste or aesthetics. As far as taste goes, I think they are wretched, bordering on punitive. In the health department, they have nothing to offer of any value, and most are just sugary mush.

Porridge is an exception to my rule. It is warming, nutritious and quite manly, having been long associated with alpha males, shot-putting in t-shirts and kilts up breezy highlands, or hardened criminals keeping their strength up in prison. Unfortunately it is not much of a looker. It has all the visual appeal of slurry and is redolent of the glue used in primary school craft classes. Other than that, it has much to boast. It is quick to prepare if you uses jumbo oat-flakes, which have been pre-steamed. Unlike other cereals, it has a low glycaemic index (GI), as long as it is made with jumbo oats as opposed to small oats, which can have a fairly high GI. The GI is the rate at which the carbohydrate raises blood sugar and therefore insulin levels, and a low GI is always desirable.

Porridge boasts a soluble fibre called B-glucan which can be partially digested and whose known benefits include its ability to increase levels of the good HDL cholesterol, lower blood pressure, regulate blood sugar levels and reduce the risk of certain diseases such as diabetes and gallstones. One of the more extraordinary features of oats is that they are the only food known to contain a plant chemical called avenanthramide (AV). AV is a polyphenol – a type of antioxidant – which has been found to inhibit inflammation and help prevent heart disease. Chronic inflammation is associated with the formation of plaques on artery walls which can lead to heart disease. These plaques can break off, causing a blockage, either to the heart or brain. AV enhances nitric oxide production, which inhibits the formation of these plaques.Inflammation is also thought to be a risk factor in colon cancer, and AV can significantly inhibit the proliferation of cancer cells in the colon.

Oh porridge! Hot slurry of the highlands, it’s what’s under your skin that matters.

Complementary medicine is awash with charlatans and shysters peddling more miraculous cures than there are diseases to be cured. The same can be said of orthodox medicine, which makes distinguishing truth from hype so very, very difficult. So when it comes to the astonishing health claims made for the practice of juicing fruits and vegetables, I take the same approach as I would to any purported wonder-cure, which is to wonder what the evidence is.

Peruse any website extolling the virtues of juicing and you will discover that this practice variously detoxifies the body, builds blood cells, energises, cleanses the skin and kidneys, performs ‘cellular cleansing’, helps you lose excessive weight, is ‘highly eliminative’, improves clarity of mind and even leaves you with a natural high. Who needs nirvana, or sex, when you’ve got all that going on simultaneously.

Juicing involves taking a whole fruit, or vegetable, and stripping it of the fibre content so that only the fluid is retained. Drinking juices is often central to a fast, or detox regime. Stripping a whole food of its fibre content is what those much maligned, junk food manufacturers do, creating refined carbohydrates which have come to be associated with a range of diseases, from constipation and bowel cancer to type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Yet when juicing advocates do they same thing they say they say that by eliminating the fibre you are giving the body a rest. Ha ha – that’s cunning spin, if nothing else!

So, to the facts. First, let’s consider fruit juices. Drinking fruit juices gives you a great deal of unbound fructose (fruit sugar) which, like ordinary table sugar, is a significant contributor to dental erosion. Also, once extracted, fructose is much sweeter than either glucose or sucrose. Concentrated fructose has been found to increase blood fat levels and is linked to insulin resistance (one step away from diabetes) and high blood pressure. Fructose is more lipogenic than glucose, which means that it is more readily converted into fat.

So what about vegetable juices? These have less sugar, and one of the reasons they are heavily promoted is their rich carotenoid content. Carotenoids are antioxidant plant chemicals (also known as phytonutrients, or phytochemicals) and this group include beta carotene, as found in carrots. But peeling and juicing have been shown to result in ‘substantial losses of carotenoids, often surpassing those of heat treatment.’ Other plant chemicals are also reduced. A study of the loss of anthocyanins in blueberries found that approximately 20% of these powerful antioxidants were left behind in the pulp after juicing.

Most of the health claims relating to juicing, that trip too readily off the tongue, are based on their high nutrient content, but just a nanosecond of thought will tell you that these nutrients are already present in the whole food – you don’t get more by juicing. Juices contain nothing extra, but a lot less. I contacted a couple of companies whose websites promote juicing, and sell juicing machines, to ask them for evidence of their eye-popping health claims. Neither got back to me.

Juices can be delicious and you can do a lot worse than indulge yourself occasionally at a juice bar. Just don’t expect an orgasmic or life-changing experience.

References

Bray, G.A. (2007) How bad is fructose? American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 86(4):895-896.

Elliot, S.S., Keim, N.L, Stern, J.S. Et al (2002) Fructose, weight gain, and the insulin resistance syndrome. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 76(5):911-922.Committee on Nutrition (2001) The use and misuse of fruit juice in pediatrics. Pediatrics, 107:1210-1213.

Dutta, D., Chaudhuri, U.R. & Chakraborty, R. (2005) Review: Structure, health benefits, antioxidant property and processing and storage of carotenoids. African Journal of Biotechnology, 4(13):1510-1520.

Kalt, W. (2004) Effects of production and processing factors on major fruit and vegetable antioxidants. Journal of Food Science, 70(1).

An ex-boyfriend once commented to me that he always felt sorry for people who took a lunchbox to work. It was the early 90s and I remember laughing because I understood what he meant. Back then it meant you were hard up, or a bit sad, or both. He made the comment because I happened to mention that I always took a lunchbox with me to work.

Anyway, that was then. Nowadays the lunchbox is the office accessory du jour, a style statement that implies nutritional awareness and a fashionable interest in one’s own health. We are well into January now, so resolutions to eat healthily have, hopefully, resulted in spikes in the sales of these workaday essentials. A lunchbox, as you are starting to see, says so many positive things about you. You care about your health, are financially prudent and something of a gourmet when it comes to good food. Grown-ups, unlike children, are not as a rule inclined to pack fizzy drinks, crisps and chocolate bars into their lunchboxes. That sort of dietary tat would be something of a social embarrassment. Instead, adults are more likely to pack something they created the night before, perhaps the excesses of the evening meal. The lunchbox is, in addition to its other fine qualities, an opportunity to showcase your out of-office skills.

So what to pack? You will need a protein component, a vegetable component and a piece of fruit. Suggestions for the protein component include: smoked mackerel fillet, cold omelette, boiled egg, cold sliced meat, piece of cheese, tofu pieces, tinned salmon, wild smoked salmon (keep an eye on the communal fridge if you opt for this one). With that you could have green salad, mixed bean salad (my favourite), carrot and celery sticks, lentils with peppers and tomatoes, coleslaw or whatever leftovers still taste good the next day. Make a point of cooking more veg than you need, for this very purpose. An avocado is an excellent portable accompaniment if you have the facilities to prepare it. The possibilities are endless – and remember, comparing lunchboxes is a common activity amongst work colleagues so make sure yours is one to be proud of.

Which? Magazine has just published a report on nutritional therapy, in which the profession comes out rather badly. In fact it tears strips off us.

In brief: five undercover investigators visited three different therapists. According to the report, some of the advice they received was shocking. It appears that none of the therapists behaved in a responsible manner, with at least one advising against seeing the patient’s GP and others making rather unusual, unconventional diagnoses, such as ‘leathery bowel’. Commenting on this report, someone from the British Dietetic Association pointed out that anyone can set up shop as a nutritional therapist, with no training, no qualifications and no regulatory body to keep an eye on what they get up to.

It’s all true. Anyone can indeed call themselves a nutritional therapist, or nutritionist, or nutrition anything. There’s nothing to stop you. You can fabricate any old bunkum and take someone’s money in exchange for it. It’s the oldest trick in the medical book. And being in the profession myself, I’ve heard of some at best bewildering and at worst disturbing advice being disseminated. Nutrition, I came to realise some time into my career, is a business which attracts all sorts – from food extremists, to control freaks, from predatory opportunists to the simply misguided.

Just like many a health profession, then. And like many other health professions it also attracts people who go on to become superb, skilled and intelligent practitioners with a genuine talent for helping people achieve optimum health. With that aim in mind, the University of Westminster launched, in 1999, the first nutritional therapy degree course in the UK, setting the standard for the profession overall. These days, any nutritional therapist who doesn’t hold a proper qualification is a fool.

Contrary to the impression given by this report, nutritional therapy does have a (voluntary) regulatory body and all training schools must meet standards set down in the National Occupational Standards produced by the Skills for Business Network. The professional body to which accredited practitioners belong is the British Association of Applied Nutrition and Nutritional Therapy (BANT). Nutritional therapy is a profession undergoing rapid transformation, currently aiming for statutory rather than just voluntary regulation. It’s what we want.

But none of that makes for a juicy, scandalous report. It is not clear how the therapists concerned were selected, what their level of training was and whether or not they were all members of BANT. BANT was not given the opportunity to respond, which is why there are no quotes from this side of the debate. We were not given the chance to defend ourselves. It is a biased, fudged piece of reporting. How very unscientific.

I’m all for frozen vegetables as a stand-by for those times when there’s nothing fresh to be had in the kitchen. They are also great for those of us who work from home and like to eat a proper meal at lunch-time rather than a bought sandwich, but can’t be bothered with peeling and chopping. So imagine my delight when I happened upon frozen broad beans. These beauties cook up easily, like frozen peas, and unlike other produce which do not lend themselves so well to the freezing process, manage to retain their flavour and texture. They are also quite dense and satisfying. As well as being a good source of protein and fibre, broad beans are exceptionally high in potassium and also boast good levels of calcium. I think a little squirt of lemon juice, a sprinkle of mint, a grind of black pepper and perhaps a knob of butter make this a delicious vegetable too.

Nothing could be more heinous than the concept of a breakfast ‘on the go’, so I have to admit that I’d got it in for breakfast bars before I even examined the ingredients list. However, having done so, I can confirm that they are an abomination on two counts. Firstly, they suggest that you should be doing something more useful with your life than taking the time to eat properly. Secondly, they are full of ingredients that are not going to get your day off to a good start.

 A breakfast bar is a compressed bowl of sugary cereal, minus the bowl, and the milk, but with the addition of vegetable oil to glue the cereal and sugar together. Ok, some might contain some dried fruit, but that is all I can find to commend them. They also frequently contain various forms of sugar, including glucose-fructose syrup (see a previous rant, below), which in terms of damage to health I put on a par with hydrogenated fat. Then there is the refined vegetable oil. I mentioned these in my earlier discussion of margarines and spreads, but just to recap: these refined oils have been heated to very high temperatures, de-gummed, bleached and deodorised to such an extent that they have virtually no nutritional value but plenty of potential harmful effects – heating these polyunsaturated oils to a very high temperature generates free radicals, those damaging chemicals linked to cancer, heart disease and premature ageing.

Knowledge of successful weight loss has come a long way since the days when we thought calorie counting, food weighing and pain and suffering were the only options. It is now (thankfully) fairly well known that cutting out starchy carbohydrates – bread, potatoes, rice, pasta and pastry – is one of the best ways to burn fat, not to mention reduce the risk of various chronic diseases such as type two diabetes and heart disease.

Less well known is the interesting fact that when you eat is as important as what you eat. Timing is everything, and the basic rule is that you should eat more earlier in the day, and less in the evening. Researchers of one particular study of 6,764 adults aged 40-75 and living in Norfolk (of all places) made an interesting discovery. They found that the more total daily calories subjects consumed at breakfast, compared to any other meal, the more likely they were to have a lower body mass index, compared to people who consumed more of their total calories in the evening. Weirdly, it has also been found that although people who eat breakfast generally consume more calories over the period of a day, they are still less likely to be overweight than their breakfast-skipping peers.

Similarly, you need to avoid snacking late in the evening. And if you do find yourself eating shortly before bedtime make sure you don’t eat carbs because they will probably be stored as fat – you burn carbs faster when you are awake. Normally, blood glucose levels are low during the later stage of sleep – which is ideal, because you switch to burning fat stores when you sleep to keep metabolic activity ticking over. Sleeping and burning fat – two marvellous activities that are carried out simultaneously! Eating at night is a no-no for other reasons too. Research has found that shift workers are more prone to obesity, because their leptin levels are decreased and glucose increased. Leptin is a hormone which suppresses appetite, and which peaks at night when you should be sleeping. So the first rules of healthy weight loss are: don’t eat for at least two hours before bed, get a good night’s sleep, and eat a hearty breakfast and light evening meal.

References

 Hucklebridge, F.H., Clow, A., Abeyguneratne, T. et al (1999) The awakening cortisol response and blood glucose levels. Life Sciences, 64(11):931-937(7).Rampersaud, G.C., Pereira, M.A., Girard, B.L. et al (2005) Breakfast habits, nutritional status, body weight, and academic performance in children and adolescents. Journal of the American Dietetic Association 105(5):743-760Szajewska, H. & Ruszezynski, M. (2010) Systematic review demonstrating that breakfast consumption influences body weight outcomes in children and adolescents in Europe. Critical Reviews in Food Science, 50(2):113-119.Purslow, L.R., Sandhu, M.S., Forouhi, N. et al (2008) Energy intake at breakfast and weight change: prospective study of 6,764 middle-aged men and women. American Journal of Epidemiology, 167(2):188-192.

So-called spreads, masquerading as healthy alternatives to butter. Olive oil spreads, in particular, get my goat. We associate olive oil with good health, and the adverts portray elderly Italians, frolicking and flirting al fresco (as a result of consuming olive oil, presumably) which leads us to conclude that the margarine must be better than butter. A spread is a low-fat margarine bulked out with water. The oils (including the olive oil) used in these spreads are highly refined –  heated to high temperatures, de-gummed, bleached and deodorised (because by now the rancid smell is a bit nauseating). The process also leaves the oil nutritionally bereft – I would definitely give these ’healthy’ spreads a wide berth.

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). This is corn syrup which has undergone a process to convert some of its glucose into fructose. The result is an exceptionally and intensely sweet product. In the US, HFCS has come to replace ordinary sugar in processed food, mainly because it is much cheaper. It is everywhere: in drinks, bread, cereals, breakfast bars, soft drinks and just about anything where ordinary table sugar might once have been incorporated. A high fructose-intense diet has been found amongst other things, to increase blood fat levels and is linked to high blood pressure and obesity. In the UK and Ireland, HFCS goes by the name of glucose-fructose syrup. Watch out for it – it is now commonly used as a sweetener is a huge array of foods, especially biscuits and cakes. I thought ordinary sugar was bad enough until I read about the harmful effect of HFCS/glucose-fructose syrup. I’d really give this one a wide berth.