The Food Doctor - Savoury Roasted Soya (@NLi10)

It's trick or treat season, and there is nothing scarier to small children than having gone to all that effort to dress up than being given a healthy snack!

Here is one such thing that we have cracked open today in our office. The Food Doctor do a range of healthy alternatives and this one was one I've had sitting around for ages, but never been brave enough to try.  Here we have savoury roasted soya, savoury as it was a little soy sauce on it, which does make it a lot more appealing.

They are a low carb snack and will help you eat better forever, which sounds like something a vampire might say. These are naturally suitable for vegans and veggies alike.

They look pretty appealing and have the look of beans and the casings are mostly still in place for that much needed fibre for nutrition.  I have no doubt that these are great for us, but what do they taste like?

While one of my office tasting squad suggested they were a bit papery, I found them quite satisfying but very very dry. I'd not recommend sneaking these in to your cinema for snacking without sneaking in a decent drink too. I'm pretty sure some of the whilefood places sell these coated in chocolate which I think would work better, but the flavour is good enough that I did keep eating more and probably exceeded the 7th of a bag portion suggestion. Like pretzels then, but a lot better for you, and probably only likely to cause fear if you are really hungry but only have these to eat and no way to get a drink. And if that shows up in your horror movie you know that the Saw films have run out of ideas...

Presto! by @PennJillette the non diet book about weight loss, food and health (@NLi10)

Presto! 

The phrase itself is well understood by anyone who has seen a magician either live or on TV. It's the word that simply suggests that the magic is over, and the effect is done.  Like magic, this one simple phrase doesn't really convey the baffling amount of work that's gone on behind the scenes.

I guess this is part 4 of the series of these odd health review articles - starting with Fuhrman, finishing with Fuhrman, Exploring Cronise and now, after a year, getting my hands on the Penn Jillette book.

In short, if you are an overweight guy with a fun sense of humour then get this book and apply as much of it's wisdom as you can.  It could save your life.  If you know someone fitting that description then it's a pretty good recommendation or present because you aren't buying a diet book, you are buying some stories - which happen to also coincide with the time Penn saved his life by eating better.

You don't really have to read all my short reviews to appreciate what we have here, but it's worth me taking a second to summarise.  I've never been overweight - ever - but since birth have always been a little underweight.  I always thought I ate healthily (except maybe at uni) but rarely made it over 10 stone.  I'm also 6' 4" so that's a lot of frame for not much weight.  I discovered I had a chronic respiratory condition that predominantly effects obese people and had a look around for diet improvements.  Then I found out Penn lost 100lb and figured that he'd be using cutting edge science with a hint of crazy and that I too could use this to help me.  I discovered a second chronic illness (got to catch em all - right?) which is chronicled in this huge article, and moped about for a few months on painkillers.

I'd tried to keep the knowledge I'd learnt from Fuhrman et al in mind and managed to put on a stone - in fact I'm now the heaviest I've ever been at just over 11st.  I'm officially no longer underweight - but am I healthy.

The Presto! book details Penn's crazy journey from Sick Penn to Well Penn, and the friends he made and shrank along the way.  It's told in his usual style, with great anecdotes and just enough facts to hang the evidence on along the way.  I'd not recommend it to my easily shocked relatives (they will have to stick to the Fuhrman books), but I have recommended it to my large gamer buddies.  Essentially it's about understanding health and exploring the relationship that we as society have with food.

Like the scene in recent Indy film Captain Fantastic where the children raised in the woods are all confused by the fact that seemingly everyone is overweight I find myself on the opposite end of the spectrum.  Not only is it a difficult task to stop my body just shedding weight, but it's also hard for me to gain weight through exercise due to my arthritis.

Penn has a short note which covers this.

If you think about this from an overweight perspective it's a cautionary tale, but from my perspective this is sound advice.  As long as I'm eating my fatty foods off the Fuhrman list - nuts and avocados are a joy - then if I can manage pain free exercise I'll continue to gain weight.

This is what lunch looks like now:

Or this, when they don't have the veg:

While I'm not going to go full potato fast like Penn (I really, really don't want to lose any body fat without turning it into useful muscle) I am trying to get back to the core principles of the book of dumping the S.O.S. of salt, oil and sugar.  The science seems to suggest that for overweight people the abundance of these three things mean that the body is always storing energy for that metabolic winter that never comes.  For me, never giving my body food that doesn't carry it's weight in terms of nutrition has had some bonuses.

Firstly - after a year - I came off the pain killers.  It wasn't great at first, but your body naturally readjusts.  I've been swimming for the first time without just painfully sinking today, and while I took some Ibuprofen afterwards just to make sure I can write today and work tomorrow it's a fraction of what I'd have taken previously just to get out of bed.  Like Penn, I'm not saying this is all diet related, but it coincided with going back on the Fuhrman style plan. And I'm still on two tablets a day, but that's not 10 tablets a day, and none of them are painkillers.  

Before reading Penn's book I'd not truly grasped the "rare and appropriate" part of the Cronise diet (whose book by the way is still in production).  I'd assumed that my rare and appropriate was a single thing every two weeks and realising that this wasn't possible when writing two reviews a week had kind of abandoned it heavily.  In the book Penn details Romanesque feats of eating where every meal on a single day was off plan (usually due to a special occasion) and how it wasn't even something that caused his weight to soar.  Turns out eating healthily in general and having a one day feast didn't really do that much to your body, unlike having a little bit of bad food every day which it turns out is killing a lot of people.

I'm going to continue to explore the fringes of this way of eating, while slotting in the reviews, but I do think that maybe having one day a fortnight that I eat all the snacks and write them up would be possible and maybe even make me write more quality reviews.

Eitherway, this book is a good read - I bought it a month ago, read it in a weekend and have been digesting and evangelising it ever since.  While I don't think I'll go into the exercise books and routines on here I'll probably start taking that side a bit more seriously and see where it takes me and update you all when Ray Cronise's book Our Broken Plate is finally released.

Penn's journey is a fascinating and at some times unbelievable one.  Having listened to a lot of the podcasts that happened after Penn came out as a CroNut I knew the story arc, but I'd really not appreciated the emotional details and just how many similarities there were between how bad we were feeling.  My family now own TWO Withings Smart Scales and most of us have some kind of activity tracker to keep an eye on our vital statistics (for us it's more O2 levels than steps!).  It's given my own healthy eating a much needed kick, and I've even started a little secret peer group chat with some friends (some under and some over) heading towards that mythical BMI of 22 that has eluded us all for so long.

Organic Edamame & Mung Bean Fettuccine - Holland & Barrett (@NLi10)

More protein pasta - and this time it's because I've made it back to Holland and Barrett to get the rest of the range.  Here we have a two bean Fettuccine.

Mung and Edamame are great fresh, so let's see what they are like pastafied.

It looks the part, boils quickly and retains texture.

Like rice pastas it doesn't have the same bite as wheat, but is much better for you in terms of nutrients than that. It also has a slight bean taste which adds to your healthy meal - or Herta Fankfurters should you wish to.

Another one for the restock pile, which is a good job as I got two bags due to the penny sale. Loving this direction that H&B are taking and now the smaller stores are getting this in too it's even easier to move towards total nutrition.

Isea Pasta - seaweed that thinks it's pasta! (By @NLi10)

Unboxing Video

A while back we got asked if we'd like to try some new style pastas. First up this week we have seaweed that you treat like pasta. 

Seen here in the blue bag we have the tagliatelle form. I love pasta, I love nutrition and I love the idea of taking a natural sustainable thing like Irish seaweed and turning it into food.

In the recipie book it suggested carbonara so I grabbed some quorn bacon lardons and sun dried tomatoes and mixed up my own sauce.

The quorn seemed to do something odd with the sauce and it didn't really work well.

The seaweed seemed to be heating well - but it smelt a little more strongly than I'd anticipated.

The kitchen smelt decidedly like the seaside which could be great for some people but I'm splitting this meal with a vegetarian so for her it was a little more off putting than we'd have liked.

The sauce really disappeared and the seaweed expanded more than I'd anticipated and dominated the meal.

The flavour was just too off putting for my partner, and I agreed - I'd put too many salty things together and then added in the fishy seaweed. It wasn't great. She piled most of hers on to my plate and I couldn't finish it.  I resolved to try again.

On opening the pack this second time snack kitten Luna was very interested. She does like veggies and decided to take some out of the pan. I soaked some for her but she didn't do more than play with it.

I cooked the seaweed a little colder this time to keep the smell in, which made the texture a little firmer and possibly less to my liking.

I used lovely Herta frankfurters and a strong spicy Lloyd Grosman sauce to fight against the seaside taste...

In fact I put a whole jar on a single portion! (My partner refused to try it again)

I'd still done too much seaweed pasta! It was edible for me, but not enjoyable. It felt too much like an endurance style test. I guess this just isn't for people who don't love shellfish.

With that in mind I mentioned it to some of the healthier people at work and gave the remaining portions to someone I know. By all accounts she absolutely loved it and intends to get more! I think it's very much a personal taste thing - I went into this wanting to love it and fully intending to integrate this into our meals. A top quality product, but one that really doesn't fit into my tastes!

Rainbow Vegetable Salad with couscous & edamame soybeans(by @NLi10) @marksandspencer

Marks and Spencer really have upped their game recently. Opposite the traditional lunches in the a Grand Central Station Birmingham store they have this lovely collection of green things.

This particular occasion I chose this Rainbow Vegetable Salad with couscous & edamame soybeans with Honey and Lime dressing. Worth typing out in full as it shows the variety of nutrition on offer. As ever it's two for £4 so I always take advantage and get two so I can have one for lunch and a snack later.

Look at how amazing that is. I want to eat these for lunch every day. M&S is too far and I'm too poorly organised for that to happen on a regular basis but that would be the ideal.

I accidentally took this picture of my drink but it was very arty so I figured I'd share - hashtag juices of Instagram - we already know these are good.

The textures and sauce of the salad were both fantastic and while I'd probably go for the nut one on some days, on other days this would be first choice. Similar to the cosmonauts lunch from the science museum this has an amazing variety and M&S should be commended.

Marks & Spencer - Nutty grain & vegetable salad with a soy and ginger dressing (@NLi10)

I was sorely disappointed by the initial lunch offerings in M&S - all plain sandwiches and dull salads - then I spotted the real lunch section:

It seems there is a whole lunch section just for the whole grain and nut salads. And they even give you a free fork!

The mix of stuff here was pretty much spot on - lots of quinoa for fuel and texture with a sprinkling of nuts for crunch and taste. The sauce was surprisingly good too and was completely used up. The veggies were finely chopped and suited the flavours here well.

This is the kind of thing we should be encouraging for lunch - the nutrition value is off the charts! Maybe it's beaten by kale, but compared to a box of pasta or rice or a Bread and spread combo this wins hands down.

Now I have to figure out where I can get a supply of these for work. M&S in town and Harborne are possibly closest but that means a special trip.  Hopefully Tesco will try to compete with M&S the same way they have with Waitrose. I have lunch money waiting for the winner.

Our Broken Plate, or Evidence Based Diets [by @NLi10] @RayCronise

As someone who is Public Health trained, but loves snack food I am saddened by the Obesity Epidemic.  Seemingly in a single decade people have increased in size to the point where what is considered normal has shifted. Combined with the (admittedly reduced) number of smokers ours is predicted to be the first generation since the Victorians that has a reduced average life expectancy compared to the one before it.  This seems crazy - we've got a lot more science and technology on our side - what are we doing wrong?!



Way back in April this year I found out about the research that Ray Cronise and his team had done, purely through the weight loss of Magician Penn Jillette. Essentially they are looking at a lot of the myths and theories we hold about food and could potentially revolutionise how we eat - using information that we kind of already know. The book from this research - Our Broken Plate (well one of two books if you count Penn's 'Presto') is now in it's final stages and is up on Kickstarter here - which is why I'm putting this up now.  It's already fully backed so don't worry about that unless you want the rewards - once a KS hits target it's much less riskier to wait until the project is complete, although it's bound to be a pain to find the book in the UK initially.  It's worth taking a look at for the video and updates of where the research is at (indeed a lot of that is on Ray's blog in the links at the bottom of this post).

The diet side, which I've discussed on here before , is based on the work of Dr Fuhrman who advocates that if you make up 90% of your diet from unprocessed fresh foods then you will become more 'healthful'.  And it works - I lost almost too much weight (from just over 1st to just below 1st and I'm 6'4") by following the diet and have had to work hard to put it back on without just resorting to the typical western diet. and just putting it back as belly fat again.

I'm looking forwards to looking the research behind some of the other aspects such as mild cold stress (not freezing, just less constant heat) increasing our calorie consumption, and how Ray's body reacted during his recent 21 day water-only fast, amongst other tales.

Now the food angle (which is admittedly what we mostly care about here) is more refined they have begun to use the term Evidence Based Diet.  This means that instead of looking at what worked for the one example model on the weight loss poster we are treating each aspect of the diet as a separate health experiment and tracking how this made a difference.  This also means looking at what it is about eating a lot more cruciferous vegetables compared to pizzas makes the most difference.  Indeed the main take home message for me was that it's about the amount of nutrients per calorie and not about the amount of calories per gram.  Switching from stodgy sandwiches to salad & nut lunches was a pleasure and probably the biggest change for me.  Breakfast removed all the sugar so I no longer went to work hyper, and with the almond milk (that I loved?!) I was consuming so much less that I had to increase the size of all my portions just to keep up.

I've not managed to keep all that up though.  I got taken down by some underlying virus that made me move quickly back to the milk and sugar breakfast just to try to put some comfort food back in the routine (even though I love my blueberry porridge!) and when work is busy I don't always get time to pop to buy the weeks supply of premade salads.  The new blender has helped to use up the fruit that was starting to get a bit squishy and I think really kick started the recovery.  Switching to 4 meals a day and being less picky about what I ate when out was the final push towards putting the weight back on and I like to think I'm doing it right - but there aren't really any guidelines for the 'underweight' version of the healthy diet other than eat a lot more nuts and larger portions.

Also a problem on the diet was finding things to review that didn't cause massive sugar spikes or get me back on the caffeine (another easy slip for me), I'm sure that not everyone wants to read about the latest trends in Kale or what I put in the Blend Active this week!



Anyway - I figured that it was interesting enough to talk about the book becoming a reality, and the next time I talk about it will probably be me trying the techniques out.  Heck I may even do some actual exercise!  Now that will require me to take on more calories...

From here on out I suspect that the massive piles of christmas things in the food aisle will occupy my time... and if you too want an early signed copy of Our Broken Plate then check out the Kickstarter.


Our Broken Plate
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/595953230/our-broken-plate/description

Ray Cronise's Blog - Thermogenex
http://hypothermics.com

Potential Declining Life Expectancy In American Adults
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsr043743

Our Fuhrman reviews
http://www.foodstufffinds.co.uk/search/label/Fuhrman

Wilson Grange Apple Balsamic Vinegar [by @NLi10]

As part of the expanded lunch time routine I picked up a few luxury items to jazz up the salads.

On one of our farm shop visits I got this Wildon Grange Apple Balsamic vinegar and it's pretty special. It says on the bottle that it was hand bottled by Adam which suggests it's a fairly small company, or one that names its machines.

I'm not sure that I really knew what to expect going in, but the apple flavour is there as a kind of sweetness over the strong vinegar taste. Going for a large portion of walnuts in the salad was a good move as they naturally complemented the flavour.

 As there was no nozzle to control the pour I think my portion was a little conservative and with the nuts and big salad that I could have maybe been a bit heavier handed. I have the other half of the salad tomorrow though so I can gradually tweak it. 

It's probably a bit more expensive than I'd have liked at £6 a bottle, but like fine wines I think that it's nice to have a quality blend to perk up lunchtimes at work and encourage me to keep eating salads as the winter gets going.

Halloween Blender Fun!! - #BlendActive [by @NLi10]

I recently acquired a blender - and halloween is the season for witches brews and odd concoctions so I decided to have some fun and make highly nutritious blended drinks that don't look at all appetising!

As you may have spotted - the theme is green

And as usual the star of the show is kale - super kale!

Here we have realised that the light stuff needs to go BELOW the heavy stuff to actually go near the blades.  I've been used to the old school drop-stuff-in blenders with the proxy pole so this is all backwards.  The apple goes in!

  

It looks like compost! The raspberries were supposed to add a ghoulish touch but they blended so much easier than the kale did so its a bit gardeny at this stage.

some vigorous shaking to put things in the right order and it starts to look smoother

it is however brown

the apple has decided to oxidise and without lemon-juice to prevent this the drink gradually got browner as time went on

I put this picture on Face Book and people were horrified.  It tasted great - kind of like a more liquid pudding and was like a really odd apple sauce.  It was drinkable but only just so I decided it was a Chooie (a chewy smoothie) 

Attempt two saw me put the grapes in first.  THEN the much lighter kale.

The Breville Blend-Active with gravity on it's side this time made a pleasing light green mush.  This tasted awesome and looked quite nice too. The brief was to make it Halloweeny though so 

in go the severed fingers (frozen raspberries)

This one has a lot more texture to it too, and does the wonderful odd clumping that blended fruit drinks do.  I took this to work and while no one offered to help drink it it was smooth enough and tasty enough to drink through the hole at the top.

A great result although not as scary as I'd hoped - I should have gone for beetroots,  pumpkin and other things to make a bright red and orange one! Maybe next time...

Breville Smoothie Maker - #BlendActive [by @NLi10]

This week has been a great one for parcels and things in the post - we also got a blender!  Long time readers will remember that during the Fuhrman weeks that I couldn't do some of the recipies as they called for a lot of blending - well now I can thanks to the nice people at Breville and their promotins for #BlendActive.  This changes nothing if it's a load of rubbish though - so lets get it out!

The box is well set up and everything is in its place.

..and it all looks quite professional in the kitchen.  The foot print is tiny too - it all stacks up out of the way.

So here we go - lets make a (reasonably) healthy smoothie!

So first we throw a load of Blueberries in the tub

Add some left over cream - and a bit of milk for good measure

Whack it on the blender and brace yourself for the loud noise ... that never comes! Back in my days blenders were a massive racket - but isn't much louder than a can opener.  That's progress!

It looked a bit like creamy blueberries so I decided to wack in  a banana - perfectly ripe and ready to spin.

The blade got a bit dirty and here we see the banana ready to go

And here we see the finished smoothie - ready to enjoy

and it's not bad! Its possibly a bit on the creamy side but I like that it's basically a fresh fruit milkshake.

The blade rinsed straight off - another worry of mine was just how much time I'd spend cleaning this.  Effortless cleaning means I can use this before work and take the cup with me.

Experiemnt number two was to just use fruit and see how it goes.

Note the red Clarkes sauce as a secret ingredient!  The plan here is two bananas and the rest of a box of raspberries.

its all looks quite healthy - but will it work?

Of course it does - this time its a very pleasing red colour after one banana and turns pink after the second is added.

I tried to add a little decorative touch with the sauce on top - I'm not sure it looked amazing, but it added a sweetness to the flavour at the top which was a nice touch.  I'd probably just save a few of the raspberries to make it look more presentable.

This one was a bit thick really - but a spoon helped get to the bottom.  The flavour was fantastic, but I think I may need to add some juicier fruit like grapes to make it into a drink.

Join us agin Thursday when I try something a bit more extreme...

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