Food as medicine

Food as medicine – the reason for natural additives.

I’m one of those  weird people who really believe we can eat ourselves to health and that we are what we eat! Not just sometimes, but all the time. We definitely can use food as medicine!  I am a Veggie but eating right does not have to exclude meat but it does mean eating clean. Processed food today contains a lot of synthetic additives, both for preservation and taste. The original “clean” additive was not there by chance but for a reason. A simple example:

Jam

Homemade jam is made out of berries or fruit, sugar and possibly pectin (a natural gelling agent found in amongst others citrus peel). The sugar is there to make it sweeter and to preserve the jam. If you remove the sugar and use sweetener instead, you also remove the preserving actions of sugar so you will need to add a synthetic preservative instead. We are now stuck with a concoction of synthetic stuff instead of natural goodness. I can now hear you say “Hey but sugar is no good for our health, it feeds both cancer and inflammation”. Well that is true but the additives may cause cancer and all sorts of other nasties. With sugar I believe you should reduce it rather than replace it. Over time you will not crave as much sugar and will get accustomed to less sweet tastes.

Cordial

Moving on to another example, cordial or syrups. Homemade cordial contains fruit/ berries and sugar, that’s it, nothing else added. The goodness of the fruit is preserved and in some cases has great health benefits. Shop bought (at least a lot of them) do not contain sugar, but what is worse they do not even contain the real fruit! It is a synthetic mishmash and what is really bad is that these drinks are suggested by some pharmacies and doctors for children who need to drink more. I can see no health benefits or in fact reasons to drink this, it does not even taste good (my personal opinion).

Christmas

Coming up to Christmas we take natural additives to the next level! Food as medicine, tradition interacts with health and feelgood, for me this is magic! Many of the foods and tipples we consume over Christmas has herbs, spices and fruit in them that will improve our well-being and we need to fight to keep them natural! Examples are Gingerbread, Sloe Gin, Swedish Nubbe, Glögg/ Gluhwein, Cranberries etc etc. All these contain fruits, spices and herbs aimed at the digestive tract. If we instead use synthetically derived ingredients we loose the health benefits.

Start looking at your recipes, what is in there for a reason and what is the reason? Give the ingredients a purpose, this purpose is to keep YOU healthy!!

Reality

I do realise, possibly better than most, that eating healthy might seem an impossible thing to do. Healthy foods are more expensive than the junk alternatives, on top of that it can also be more time consuming to prepare healthy meals, so we need to get inventive.

Ideas:

• If possible, get a chest freezer, you will be able to savour home made foods all year round.You may ask why a chest freezer?! They are simply more energy efficient.
• Get some good old fashioned cookery books, second hand stores really are a treasure trove for these. Yes you can use the internet, and by all means do BUT the feeling of a real book is unbeatable. A good thing about real books is that you can make notes in them, add more of this or exclude that maybe even this is really good for. What a gift for your grandchildren in the future! Oh how I treasure Grandmas writing, a little more butter…..
• Visit farmers markets – buy not so pretty fruit and preserve as compotes, jams, sauces, freeze with no or little added sugar. Great to do with kids.
• Read up on herbs and spices. Maybe visit a herbalist for a health check and get to know which herbs you would benefit from and how you could include these in your daily diet.
• Remove items from your shopping list that are all synthetic. Opt for natural alternatives and use less if expensive.

  

• If you eat meat, cut the portion sizes, when i was little a normal portion was 100 g today that has nearly doubled. Go for free range and organic if available, explore the possibility of buying straight from farms. There are often offers to buy boxes of assorted cuts to put in your freezer, this may work out at a good price and it will be lots tastier. Stay away from meats that say reformed! Reformed means that smaller pieces of meat are glued together to resemble for instance ham.
• Be content conscious! Read the labels and the contents are reasonable.
• Get to know your E-numbers, these are easy to Google. Some are ok but others are really not.
• Get baking! Homemade bread and cakes are simply divine! This is also a great place to include all those goodie spices.

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Start your journey!

Using food as medicine may seem all daunting but break it up into steps! Don’t make things difficult. Implementing new healthier strategies in your life should be fun and the end result is soo worth it! So for this years run up to Christmas I wish you all a delicious, natural, super-foodie feast!! ENJOY

PS. Look out for recipe ideas and new reasons to use certain herbs and spices.