h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Some of you have mentioned "education". I think that word is a key to understand a bit the problem about nutrition. Education in a broad sense.
If you teach, inform a child about nutritiuous facts, how to cook, what to cook, what to avoid, and at home parents do just the same, and set the example doing it themselves, the chances for that child to be healthy are high.

Recently, I´ve been teaching "Food and Nutrition" to my pupils. I´ve convinced a few of them. Many show me or I ask them to do it, what they have brought for the break they have at 11 in the morning.
Fruit, nuts, a kind of biscuits made of whole rice... and water, they usually forget to drink it. I spend more time that I should be ( I must meet some Programation of the Syllabus) telling them how to behave healthy. They are 10 and 11 years old. I feel ( after having been teaching teenagers in previous years) that THIS is an opportunity for me to make them aware of their need of taking care of themselves. They are responsible of their health. I wish I would have known so much when I was a child. However, as I spent my childhood in a house where the Mediterranean diet was our food, I can´t complain. I love cooking myself.
Some of you have mentioned that there are people, adults that have no idea about nutrition. That´s true, even in a Mediterranean country like mine, where is assumed that Mediterranean Diet is the healhier one.
So, information at the basis, the children.

About money and eating: buy as much vegan as you can and learn to cook it. That´s the cheaper option, for me.

It must be nice to break away from the syllabus and actually teach kids something they need to know.

It was always easy to spot when teachers were going "off-syllabus" when I was at school. Suddenly, there was an enthusiasm and depth of detail from the teacher that was noticeably missing from the regular stuff.

But Vegan? OMG

The vegetarian option I can cope with and often do.

But I don't think my eating life would be worth living if I went vegan.

I enjoy butter, eggs, and cheese

(albeit in sedate and moderate amounts, naturally )

far too much to want to find substitutes, and the substitutes I have tried out of curiosity weren't to my liking. To be honest,I found they were too expensive to buy on a regular basis for me to want to get used to them. How do you explain the vegan option is a cheap alternitive?

I´m not vegan, I haven´t explained myself. I mean that there are a lot of meals based on vegetables and pulses. All this with a bit of protein from eggs, fish or meat makes a good cheap and healthy meal

Mar

The problem is to re-educate our salivary buds

Let´s be practical:
any vegetable, some can be eaten even raw, a bit boiled are delicious if you dress them with any of this:
- smashed fried garlic, olive oil(extra, pressed in cold)salt and vinegar, add pimentón if you know it. Super.
-smashed toasted almonds, hazels, walnuts... any of them or all of them can be a variant of the previous sauce.
Google recipes for vegetables, there´s a lot.
Legumes, pulses( which word?) are a very interesting food. If you mixed them with rice, you got a complete meal, protein included.
I know that because of the New Age fad a lot of organic healthy food is ridiculous expensive. But in street markets you can find cheaper prices.
Mar

If you're including stuff like cheese, fish, etc into a diet, then that's not vegan - vegan, as I understand it precludes ALL animal produce, including animal byproducts such as eggs, milk and so on

I'm given to understand plastic shoes and man made materials are worn instead of leather or wool, but then I'm not sure if that's an Urban Myth or compulsory enjoyment of vegans.

I'm sure someone will come along in a while and put me straight on that.

I think perhaps you may mean "vegetarian" - and yes, it's a cheap and reasenably healthy way to go, just as long as you make sure you get enough protein. Most pure veggies I know take an appropriate vitamin supplement, to ensure they get all of the vitamin B complex, as well. These supplements cost money, and imo, I'd be better off eating a small but excellent chunk of steak a week instead of forking out to Healthspan or Holland and Barrats to get the appropriate nuitrition

Any form of health supplement you could buy in a market here in GB would be about as nutritiously efficient as eating cardboard. And having risked buying a kilo here of chick peas, or dahl or kidney beans from my local farmers market I came to the conclusion that by the time you'd seived out all the organic grit and picked out the really tired tooth shattering ones, it was a complete waste of time, effort and money. I'd be better off prostituting my principals and getting ready cooked, tinned ones.

You have to bear in mind that we;re generally talking about Britain, which seems to end up with every other countries cast offs and over ripe imports. I learned more in 2 weeks in Cyprus as to what "real" fresh food was about than 40 odd years living in Britain with a decade's sojourn in Eire. I found it amazing that the Irish, famed far and wide for their spuds would cheerfully import and eat with apparent enjoyment some inferior type of spud they'd had exported from Poland.

BTW, Legumes, pulses.. lentils all are the right words to describe very similar things. And yes, for the first few weeks, mix em up with enough veggies, or spices, supplement with rice and a natural yoghurt and its all hunky dory. By the third week I begin to get withdrawal symptoms for something nice and totally trashy. A Cat burger from Macdonalds, for example, whilst I'd usually prefer to eat my own left ear than eat from there as a rule begins to call siren songs of great temptation.

Whilst I;m fortunate enough to be able to buy at a weekly market - generally near the close of day so I can get lots for knock down prices, a lot of Urban areas don't have this option. For example, there's a superbe Organic Food Market at Borough, in the centre of London, where they flock in droves to buy very highly priced designer vegetables and other organic produce. And very nice it is too, as long as you have a deep wallet, and an intimate knowledge of 20 ways of serving celery in an interesting way.

13 miles from the centre of London, where I originally came from, there are absolutely no food markets, merely supermarkets. Nor are there fishmongers, nor butchers nor greengrocers as traders. So the Suberbes of most towns do not offer much choice to the residents apart from Sainsburies or Tesco

The ideas are fine, but there arn't many people who are willing or able to to follow them thru, due wither to lack of time, lack of money, and in a lot of cases, lack of imagination or the desire to attempt new things. Lack of opportunities need also be taken into account

I think to eat vegetarian, wholefood, cooking from scratch, you need quality ingredients. There is a huge difference between the bulk bin supermarket chickpeas and the bulk ones I get from the organic grocer. Firstly, the organic ones are organic, and they are likely to be much fresher than the supermarket ones. And people paying for organic are not going to put up with lots of grit etc.

It does cost more to eat well. Although if you are able to shop around it is possible to get many organic and quality ingredients that are similar in price to supermarkets.

I do think there is more nutrition in beans that you cook yourself than in canned ones though.

*

Marmite... I'm not sure I'd classify that as a healthy food

Healthy or not, Marmite is a food group of the gods.

unbiased source :

http://www.marmite.co.uk/love/nutrition/nutrition.html

Looks healthy to me - salt content high of course, but a diet has to contain some salt somewhere, so it may as well come from here.

vp

, proviso: thats the british version of course... believe NZ marmite also contains sugar???
vp

You don't have sugar in your marmite?

I'd want to know what the 'vegetable extract' was in the Brit version

http://www.marmite.co.uk/love/nutrition/ingredients.html


Without the sugar it's a different product really.

>>>
A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods — dairy, meat, fish and produce — line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.
<<<

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/magazine/22wwlnlede.t.html

NZ marmite http://www.sanitarium.co.nz/default.asp?sectionID=27&categoryID=6

Yeast (80%), Sugar, Salt, Mineral Salt (508), Wheat Maltodextrin, Colour (Caramel III), Herbs, Spices, Vitamins (Niacin, Riboflavin, Thiamin, Folate, B12), Mineral (Iron).

UK marmite:

* Yeast Extract * Salt * Vegetable Extract * Niacin * Thiamin
* Spice Extracts * Riboflavin * Folic Acid * Celery Extract
* Vitamin B12

The UK version has
I prefer it already

You can see why I think marmite is pretty crap healthwise

Stil, there is that mysterious 'vegetable extract' in the UK one. What is that?

I wasn't claiming any miraculous health benefits for marmite. To me it's a condiment, nothing more () I'm a hater you see. A friend of mine is a 'moral' vegetarian and craved the richness of meaty gravy and stews and discovered that some marmite added gives things the richness she was missing, it was a suggestion for those who dont want to shell out on things like gravy granules which can really be omitted from the shopping list with a little no-how. And every penny sometimes DOES count! A jar of marmite will go a long long way in a house like mine!

I think that there was a misunderstood point earlier re: vegan food. I think that what was being suggested is that you base your diet in the non-dairy, non-meat and if you know your basics are reasonably healthy and covering most of your nutritional needs, then you can supplement with fish, meats, dairy, whatever you like and can afford. This is pretty much what I was advocating. Dont build your meals around what meats or so on you can afford, assume that all of your meals will be based around pretty healthy filling stuff (legumes, root veg etc.) and make that interesting then when you can afford meats, eggs, cheese etc, add it in.

When I was a kid, mum used to make us eat smoked mackerel, new potatoes and peas roughly once a week. We were tight on money and she wanted to make absolutely sure we were getting some good, healthy fats inside us, and mackerel is pretty cheap... Of course, I cant stand the stuff now (although I liked it at first) but I was also brought up with 'you dont have to like it to eat it', so there we go...

That study by Drewnowski sounds highly flawed. Of course cans of soda have more calories than cartons of fresh orange juice, your not comparing like with like, and the notion that someone woudl actually purchase food on the basis of how many calories each item has in it is rediculus, what the poverty link to poor diet/overweight is must surely just be upbringing/conditioning and education. If someone is brought up in a low income household by parents who themselves may not have recieved a half decent education and all the kids see is preprocessed packaged food coming out of the freezer and fridge and cupbaords and being served up to them, and this is backed up by an education system where little empthesis (in the UK at least) is spent on home ecanomics/food/cookery then, its ain't much a supprize to find out that once that kids left home its going to continue eating the same crap processed junk it was in its early years, of course by this time the person will be nicely conditioned to enjoy high fat, high salt, calory dense foods helping ensure they don't go astray and experiment themselves with any real food which involves making anythign from scratch. I don't use any processed ready made foods with the exception of a very ocasional jar of pre made sauce, the cost is less than if I bought packet after packet of junk processed food to fill the freezer, and for the vast majority of the meals I cook theyre done in the same time a pizza and chips would take to cook in the oven... However, even eating a diet rich in vegetables and vertually abscent in processed junk food I still manage to be overweight But its all relative really. A diet consisting of entirely junk processed ready meals ain't necessarily going to be vastly bad for someone, true its gona be boring as all heck (I'd have thought) after a while, and probably difficult to keep the calory content down (though plenty low fat/lor calory 'ready meals' now exist). The key is to have a balanced diet, a diet which contans all nutrients, minerals and trace elements etc., in teh right quantities. At the end of the day I really can't see what differnce it makes if the source of those nutrients is organic fresh food or frozen ready made non organic crap, basically if you made each of those two oppositing diets contain exactly the right amount of each nutrient they'd be the same.

I think that's partly the stcking point though, they wont be the same, you cannot match them up. Even if you take a supplement you cannot get the same nutrients from over-processed pre-packaged diet that you can from fresh foods. And you will also be taking in all sorts of ingredients you wouldnt get from a fresh (just reasonably fresh, not talking 'within two miles, organic, watered with blessed font water' stuff) diet. MSG, flavourings, stabilisers, all these things added to mask, change, enhance flavours and colours to make them more attractive, or to make sure that each batch of sauce is the same consistency... Which isnt necessary if you arent mass-producing something!

I, for one, prefer not to put too much chemical rubbish into my body on a daily basis. I'm pretty aware when I'm eating rubbish, I know I'm doing it and I think that makes a HUGE difference. Last night I made a lovely spag bol... B/f's housemate came in and made super noodles... I nearly gagged it smelled so plastic compared to he real smells of cooking food. But so many people are programmed to think that's how food SHOULD taste and smell!

Just as an example:

Cheese Vs. Pre-grated cheese. Just check an ingredients label or two.

Thing about calories isn't that poor people are reading the labels of food and adding up how much energy is in each. It's that a woman with 4 kids at home will be in the supermarket thinking she has to get enough sweet drinks for the kids to last a week, and she's looking at the cost of a lire of juice compared to a litre of coke and it's not bloody hard to do the maths.

Personally, I think coke, and white bread, are false economy because you pay in the long term in terms of health and wellbeing. There are more calories in coke than OJ, but OJ has more nutrients in it. But when you are dirt poor there is no long term, there is only the week to week struggle to get enough food in the bellies of your family.

Like I said before, I don't deny that there are education issues too. But it is incredibly patronising to deny that poverty forces people to buy crap food because crap food is what is cheap. If you insist that it is an education issue only, you are basically saying that a whole class of people are ignorant about nutrition. I just don't see any evidence of that. The working class poor I know are pretty smart, or more accurately there are as many smart poor as there smart well off.

I do think that there is generational loss now on how to cook meals. I know people that can't make a soup from scratch, which is incredibly bizaar to me. But that applies to the middle classes as well as the poor, it's just that the middle classes can afford to eat out at restaurants instead of M*cD*n*alds.

Other things to remember about poverty is that it creates health problems across the board, people are often really tired and run down, depressed etc. All those things make it much harder to just survive, so this idea that if they just had better knowledge in their heads then they would eat better is just a way of blaming the poor for their situation.


>>At the end of the day I really can't see what differnce it makes if the source of those nutrients is organic fresh food or frozen ready made non organic crap, basically if you made each of those two oppositing diets contain exactly the right amount of each nutrient they'd be the same.<<

There's some research now which shows that organic food is higher in certain nutrients than conventional. Also there is some loss of nutrients with long storage or freezing.

When I was in Ireland I spent less money and ate much better than my flatmates.

I used to go to the market and small shops of the town, sometimes i visited a super market to buy mackerel, yes, very cheap and healthy. I bought cabbage, chicken, peas, pulses.... I didn´t buy frozen ready made food.
I´m at work now.