ONLY in America!

We have just returned from a trip taking Mum and Dad over to the States for a 3 week break. As they had never been to the States before, we thought it would be best if we went along with them to help them with the whole travel thing with being in a different country...

It was a great experience that took us to visit family in Utah, Iowa, Las Vegas and my wife and I also took a quick 5 day trip to New York. We certainly enjoyed our time meeting family over there and spending time with them.

However the hardest thing we found throughout the trip was the food! Not that there was a shortage of food by any stretch of the imagination - in fact quite the opposite - there was too much food! It was really difficult to find good REAL foods (REAL as in not something processed that comes in a packet or a box) that we could eat (apart from when we were eating home cooked meals with the family of course).

It's like we were surrounded by all manner of wheat based products, fast foods, processed foods and of course soda. Kind of have a greater appreciation now for what all the other State-side health bloggers discuss in the various internet forums. I think this was no more evident than in the kids we saw while traveling around - when we were out and about we hardly saw a kid that didn't have some kind of soda, fast food, or candy in their hands!

It also has opened my eyes even more as to why these big companies have such huge success promoting these products and the power they have. On one of the flights we saw this on the napkins they give you when they offer you a drink of water or diet coke.... which supports heart health...

Even more unbelievable was that I saw so many people drinking diet coke or something similar - ALL the time - it was constantly having some form of soda drink with them. It was like soda was one of the essential items that go into the handbag when you leave the house!

Anyway, will blog more about the foods and sights and sounds of our trip next time - well the parts of it that have something to do with health and fitness anyway lol...

Toughest thing to do is come off the bread. Well that seems to be the word from most people that I talk to about this stuff. 

Here are a few reasons I hear most often...

"If I don't have any carbs (carbs for them mean bread, pasta, pastries...), then my brain won't get enough glucose to function well."

Hmmm... yes your brain DOES need glucose to work and function well. We do however get PLENTY of glucose from eating foods other than bread. I'm sure you are getting plenty of glucose from drinks, packet stuff (loose term for anything in the middle aisles of the supermarket lol), cereal, and so on. If you are not eating that stuff then surely you will get the glucose your body requires from the other good carbs you DO eat - like vegetables! Yes vegetables are carbohydrates - seems many people think that carbs = only bread, pastries, lollies and so on...

Vegetables are great carbs - you get plenty of fibre and lots of other good stuff from them too! And you don't have to worry about calorie counting or anything - eat as much veges as you want! Go on I dare you. See if you can overeat on veges like people can with bags of chips, donuts, pastries and the like...

But can you can only eat vegetables for dinner right?

"What will we eat for breakfast?"

It's as if the breakfast people - whoever they are - have brainwashed us into thinking that we have to have some cereal and toast for breakfast. 

I remember we were ALWAYS having toast for breakfast. I would ALWAYS be starving by 10am when I was at school which meant getting something to eat for the tuck shop at interval - usually a pie - and then eating whatever lunch I had at lunchtime (sandwiches or fruit or something) and then still being hungry when we had rugby training after school. Good times..

Anyway toast seems to be something you have with every breakfast. Eggs on toast, bacon and eggs on toast, spaghetti on toast, whatever spread on toast, toast on toast...

YES there are other options!

We have found last night's dinner to be a great breakfast. So is avocado and eggs, bacon and eggs, omelets,  spinach, eggs and tomato; there are SO MANY options here using veges in the fridge (yes those ones that usually go from shopping day to shopping day and stay in there until you throw them out when you buy more of the same veges that you throw out after next shopping day!), and left overs from last night's dinner. Overeat on those veges! go on!!

I find this kind of breakfast lasts me a good 4 hours easy. In fact sometimes I don't even feel hungry at all.. I know the kids love a good breakfast too - they have slowly gone off the Weetbix, cornflakes and other cereals and enjoy wholesome full breakfasts before they take off to school! Which leads to the next question...

"What will the kids take to school for lunch?"

Well, they can actually survive quite well on a range of other foods that do not include wheat based products. In fact it did take a while for our own kids to change to having chicken and roast veges (in coconut oil of course!) for lunch in their little lunch boxes. Other kids would tease them about their funny looking lunch that doesn't have white bread wrapped around it. 

However we told our kids to just be happy that they are eating REAL food and that their bodies and minds would do better with this better food. Funny thing was our daughter started telling all those cheeky ones that they would be the ones getting sick when they are older hahaha...

Mind you, it would have been easy for us to just say "OK take your sandwiches to school" cause what parent wants their kids to get teased? In fact ALOT easier cause we wouldn't have to spend so much more time cooking their lunches in the morning or the night before. And it would have been alot cheaper too (at the moment the kids are eating lots of chicken!). 

While it is more effort, I do believe the better health outcomes for the kids in the future is worth it. Stuff that is worth it is always more effort - that's just the way it is.

Tune in next week as I blog about our eating adventures in the States - should be interesting...

Wheat book!

SO I REMEMBER saying that I was going to start telling you all about some bits of info I get from reading 'Wheat Belly'.

Been an awesome book to get into - probably a bit geeky with the sciency type stuff and probably why alot of people I know wouldn't read it. Gets a bit too in depth with that stuff - not that it's a bad thing cause I like to know exactly why and how things work in the body and all the biochem and sciency terms are familiar to me..
However for most people that stuff is straight up boring or just frustrating cause they get lost in it - unless they already have some background in it.
So what I have thought about doing is trying to put some of the principles into some more easily understandable terms....

So here a a few things I have learnt so far...

A.
Wheat (the kind of wheat we have today which has been changed from days of old remember) spikes your blood glucose more than table sugar does! All of you current diabetics could try it for yourself by taking your blood glucose before and then 10-15 minutes after eating a couple of slices of bread.
How is that you say? Well wheat is really fast at breaking down into glucose. Wheat is made of lots of glucose bits stuck together like any other carbohydrate but has an amazing ability to break down to the glucose molecule - and so can do it faster than other carbohydrate foods.


B.
The constant high spikes in the blood glucose levels in your blood (from always eating those foods that break down really quickly into glucose), causes all kinds of problems with your arteries and that means heart disease.

You may well think "how can foods that have virtually no triglycerides (fat) in them, make me fat?"

Well, for those of you that really want to know, this is how.

1. Foods that cause high spikes in blood glucose trigger insulin the most.

2. High insulin levels in the blood triggers your liver to convert sugars into triglycerides and then packs heaps of those triglycerides into VLDLs (very low density lipoprotein). By the way that is how things are intended to work because it is how we would store away excess calories to use later (when food was not so abundant as it is now).


3. These big VLDLs start bumping into stuff along the bloodstream journey and can become small LDLs or large LDLs. So the more VLDL in your blood means lots of small LDL particles too since VLDL is like the parent of these large and small LDLs.


4. Lots of small LDL particles cause heart disease because they are what contribute to clogged arteries. These are the main cause of heart disease, NOT cholesterol! In fact cholesterol is what your body is using to try and repair the artery damage being done by these small LDLs.

C.
The 'heart healthy' carbohydrates are actually bad guys undercover. They have been given the healthy heart tick and we might think they are good for us because of the fibre in it or the omega-3/flax oil fats or the vitamin enriched products they make now BUT none of these can erase the adverse effects of the wheat - the main ingredient in these products. It will still trigger the high blood sugar and the rest of the story above through to the increased small LDLs which cause heart disease - not to mention the exorphin release and inflammatory responses our bodies have to wheat and its products. But that is another story - maybe next week...

OK I'm off to eat some real food at Sunday Roast!
PS. and so are the kids lol -I'm sure it will be their favourite place soon too!!

Feelin' so sick right now!!

Man it's been over 6 months since I have eaten any rice, wheat, pasta or anything like that... but....

Tonight we had my son's birthday as he turned 6 years old. This meant he was able to choose where we go for dinner tonight. I even limited his options by saying "we aint goin to any McDs, KFC or BKs". I even tried to suggest this nice place called Sunday Roast down Broadway Ave where they have nice as roast meals. He loves chicken but this time didn't go for it.

Instead he chose Indian and said he wanted chicken and rice with the yellow sauce on the chicken (which we discovered was chicken korma once we got into the plaza). He had been there before with his Nana so knew exactly where he wanted to go.

Anyway after all that we ended up eating there - I had the mango chicken option with rice and even with naan bread. Normally I would forego the rice and naan but thought what the hey let's go with the birthday. Bad mistake. Since eating that my body has been telling me all about how stupid that was in the form of stomach cramps, bloating, headaches for the last 3 hours. And then to top it all off (since it was all over anyway) we had chocolate cake that my wife made. She had made it as healthily as possible of course (with dark chocolate, half almond flour and so on), but that only served to make us feel even worse.

So here we are sitting in the kitchen feeling sorry for ourselves and feeling so sick. I guess it is a lesson learnt again. We already knew the consequences of eating that food yet fell into the trap again. How stupid are we? No, not stupid. Just really wanted to make sure that it WAS that food that was making us feel sick lol. Isn't it funny how even though we know what these foods are doing to us - like the blood glucose spikes and so on and all the stuff about the wheat and the effects that has too - and still we manage to eat those foods we know are just not good for us.

I'm sure that is enough moaning for now - I'm gonna hit the sack and get some sleep and hopefully wake up feeling much better!

Next week I will post some stuff from the Wheat book I have been reading. By the way all these awesome talks (including one from the guy who wrote the Wheat book) are at the following website. There are some cool as pieces of info here so check them out on this paleo summit thing Sean Croxton has going on this week.

OK until next week!

Food or drug? Can you tell the difference??

Was thinking over the past week that food really is like medicine. The more I study about food, the more I see how similar it is to medicines that I used to dispense in the pharmacy. Here are three of those things...


1. 
So many foods these days are almost as synthetic as the medicines we get. We used to eat a lot of REAL food (as in not processed or highly refined) but now food has been processed to the point where food is so synthetic it isn't really food anymore - our body can't recognise most of the ingredients in that packet of 'food' you get off the supermarket shelf so how do you expect it to metabolise it and break it down into something useful or of nutritional value. Half the stuff in the ingredients you don't even know how to pronounce and the other half are numbers cause they don't even have names for what they are!

In the same way in medicine we have moved away from the natural herbs and remedies our ancestors used to treat symptoms. Again it was a move away from natural compounds easily recognised and used by the body. Even as recently as a generation ago there were pharmacists that actually compounded medicines - not like today where all we get to do is put labels on the boxes of fully synthetic, pharma-industry-made medicines.

2.
Food has effects on the body and the body has effects on the food just like medicines affect your body and your body also affects your medicine. To oversimplify, in pharmaceuticals the study of how your body affects the medicine is pharmacokinetics and the study of how the medicine affects the body is pharmacodynamics. Food can change the way your body digests other foods - it can change the pH (how acidic or alkaline) in your body affecting many other processes. Medicines also have an effect on how your body works and the 'side effects' are just that medicine working in different parts of the body other than the area we were 'targeting'.



3.
There are unknown side effects from medicines that we don't know about and cannot or do not test long enough for in clinical studies. In the same way I am finding that 'food' is not always tested for human consumption over as sufficiently long enough period of time and in some cases there are no tests done on foods to assess the effect on the people. There are so many side effects we don't even know about - the crazy thing is that some of those effects that come from food are what we then go to the doctor for to get medicine which we think will make it better?! In many people those side effects we know about can show as food allergies, food intolerances, and food sensitivites. In many others these effects can take form that we just don't expect and so would never relate back to food.

More on this stuff to come....

Medicines in "chronic disease" - what we have been lied to about!

I was catching up with a GP yesterday who has been in general practice for the last 20+ years. He works in one of the practices that I do some work with so we know each other quite well now.

We were discussing medicines and why they have all of a sudden become, by a long way, the most common intervention used by doctors. Is it because we as patients go in expecting to get something and would feel ripped off coming away with nothing, or is it more because doctors are so overrun with patients that they prescribe to match symptom and don't have the chance to actually address the REAL CAUSE of the symptoms - possibly due to the patient wanting it fixed NOW! It is certainly an interesting dynamic. 

How would you feel going into the doctor and getting only advice about what you should and should not be eating and about the increased exercise you should be doing and not taking away with you any medicine to 'fix' the thing you went in for? 

Even more interesting is whether or not the doctors know or keep up to date about what the best lifestyle change advice is (is it still the food pyramid for nutrition? because that is the advice most often given to everyone that comes into contact with the health system). Then again, is it appropriate to try and help someone change their lifestyle completely in a 15 minute consult every 3 months? Do doctors even have the motivational techniques required to help people make changes? It isn't part of the 5 years at med school that's for sure. Do we really expect that the doctor can fix everything after some patients have abused their bodies for the last 30+ years and think they can return to complete health in a couple of weeks?! Some still see health as a guaranteed right but not realising it is a responsibility - and a personal responsibility at that.

For example, if your blood pressure is quite high one time you were visiting the doctor should you immediately be put on a blood pressure lowering tablet? Should other risk factors be taken into account first? Does the doctor have time to spend with you to identify WHY your blood pressure might be high - and do they then have time to explain what you can DO about it yourself?

I'm not trying to say doctors are bad or people are lazy or anything like that. I'm just saying that I find it interesting that we expect an overloaded health system (that is focused on disease) with a flawed model of delivery to keep us healthy?! The sooner we realise health is OUR personal responsibility the better - and the sooner we realise it is more cost effective for the nation to invest in our health from the earliest point possible in preventative techniques the healthier we will all be. 

But what will happen to the drug companies and the billions of dollars they make from finding a 'disease' (really just a set of symptoms they can then call a disease), and then matching that with their most recently developed medicine. Well I guess we will have no more need for them!! Especially not for those "chronic conditions". 

(I don't even like the term "chronic" because it immediately makes us as the patient believe that you have this for life - AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO!! If you make changes you DO NOT have to be on those medicines forever). 

In fact we have been lied to by big pharmaceutical companies trying to scare us into thinking that the risk of something bad happening to us is so much worse if we don't take their medicine. 

What they talk about is relative risk instead of absolute risk. What that means is that say there were 100 people and we put them all on a medicine. 5 of these hundred were going to get heart disease anyway. Of those 5, 2 did not get the heart disease as a result of taking medicine but 3 of them still did EVEN though they were taking medicine. This would be a great result for a drug company because they have reduced the risk of getting a heart attack by 40%!!!! ie 2 people of the 5 that were going to get heart disease were 'saved' and 2/5 is 40%. That is known as the relative risk reduction. Can you see the problem here??

What they don't tell you is that the ABSOLUTE risk reduction is actually only 2% as only 2 of those 100 people that took the medicine did not get heart disease as a result of taking medicine!!

Relative risk is how MANY if not ALL drug studies are written up and for obvious reasons. How much of a medicine could you sell by telling people it gave a 2% reduction in risk. I won't even go into this part yet but there is the whole thing of you won't even see that 2% reduction until after 10 years or more of taking the medicine... cRAzy stuff!!

Well I think I've gone on long enough and it wasn't even about what I initially was going to write so I will have to change the post title so it is relevant lol...

Anyway I would be interested to hear your thoughts, comments or questions about the current health system model and your experiences interacting with it so post/comment/question away lol

I wanna lose wheat!

Everyone wants to lose weight! But not everyone wants to do what is required to lose the weight..

Some research done recently shows that wheat has a HUGE impact on how our bodies store fat - particularly around the belly area which is where most of 'today's people' store fat. In fact they call it wheat belly now.

I've always thought but what about how in the bible it talks about wheat for man - well let's just say that we are not talking about the same wheat.

Wheat has changed significantly since biblical times. 

In fact in the last 50 years wheat has changed so much thanks to the geneticists and others that (with good intentions) have genetically modified the wheat in order to make it produce more - most likely with the good intentions of feeding the world and alleviating hunger throughout the world. And also of course for the money... but that's another story.

I've just bought the book Wheat Belly by Dr William Davis (a preventative cardiologist - check his blog in the link) and will be sharing some knowledge from what I get out of the book and how we as a family have tried to implement it in future posts so keep an eye out for them.

This particular idea to start with of not having breads, has been a bit of a journey for our little family. The first question was "so what will the kids take to school for lunches if they aren't going to have bread?" In truth this issue hasn't been fully solved as they still sometimes take sandwiches to school because it is the easiest thing to make (and they can make it themselves!). But as far as usage in our house overall goes we have reduced bread intake by at least 70%.

We have also stopped all pasta and cereals. Our kids are now having fish, steak, chicken, eggs, spinach or whatever else we as parents end up cooking for our breakfasts. They are loving it - our son will eat as much as we do if he could and he sure isn't missing cereals and grains. Our daughter on the other hand has found it a bit harder and still wants cereals and toast in the morning and is addicted to sandwiches for snacks. However, what I have noticed over the last few weeks is that because everyone else is eating something different, she wants to have what we are having now. Perhaps it has gone past the 'tipping point' for her because her brother now eats what we have been eating whereas before he would have what she was eating otherwise it 'wasn't fair'. And for snacks now instead of sandwiches they have fruit or a vegetable after school. We need to keep working on the lunches (and that just means we need to be better at preparing their lunches instead of doing last minute lunches or letting them do their own).

It really just takes some discipline and commitment to make changes and then slowly the changes will happen. It is certainly tough to get past the initial moaning and complaints and so on for the first few weeks but once you learn to be a little more creative with other foods around, it becomes so much easier!

So what's the difference?? No, our kids have not lost huge amounts of weight or 'lost inches off their waist' like all that other stuff you see on TV and of course we don't want them to (we already get in trouble as it is with grandparents for 'not feeding them enough').

But it's not about that - for our kids it is about teaching them what is the best way to eat so that in the future they are keeping themselves healthy and well and won't get into the problems and chronic illnesses that many adults are facing today.

If you are keen - give it a go and try not eating bread for a day.. or a week. Find some veges you like that you could use to eat instead of bread or different meal options. Let us know how you go!