Eggs and Breakfast On the Go!

Another favourite quick breakfast is leftover rissoles, boiled eggs and avocado.  I simply make some extra rissoles when having these for dinner, boil up a few days' supply of free range eggs and make sure I have some avocado on hand.  I pack everything into an insulated bag with an ice pack to take to work where I can heat the meat in a microwave, add the boiled eggs, a little sea salt and cracked pepper, avocado and enjoy!

Fee range eggs are pretty awesome!  According to "The Happiness Diet - A Nutritional Prescription for a Sharp Brian, Balanced Mood, and Lean Energized Body" by Tyler Graham & Drew Ramsey MD, when a hen lives a normal life foraging around a farm her eggs contain the following:

B6 - crucial for most all your cognitive functions.
B12 - crucial for avoiding agitation and loss of focus.

These two vitamins together go a long way towards boosting memory and treating nervousness and depression.

B9, also known as folate - helps to protect your brain and lowers homocysteine levels in the blood - high levels are one of the best predictors of cognitive decline.

Iodine - central to your metabolism's master switch, the thyroid.

Magnesium - will loosen up your muscles and relax your circulatory systems, helping you focus on tasks of daily life.

Zinc - a mineral that improves brain function and helps B9 regulate our gene expression so that we stay healthy.

Iron - this trace metal boosts your body's ability to transport oxygen around your bloodstream and further increases energy and focus.

Tryptophan - a complete protein for mood-regulating neurotransmitters like serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine.

Vitamin D - needed to help your body to absorb calcium.  This is a fat-soluable vitamin, so we actually need fat in our diet to absorb it.  Low levels of vitamin D is linked to depression.

Cholesterol - what your body uses to manufacture vitamin D from the sun.  Also the main component of bile, which is what your gut will use to absorb nutrients.

Omega 3 Fatty Acids - makes us smarter and protects us from heart disease.

~ take every opportunity to put the good stuff in ~

This blog is about me, what I'm doing, what's working for me, and what's not. It includes my experiences and opinions. It is for general information only and is in no way intended to replace the advice of a health care professional.

Flavour, Toxins and Nutritional Wisdom

In this post, Food for Thought on Food Choices, I wrote about learning to listen to my body.  In the past couple of years since I have purged processed foods from my diet there have been times when I have craved a particular food and I felt like my body was telling me that I needed something that's in that particular food.

I'm talking about cravings for real foods like scrambled eggs and fresh parsley, or a big salad or a juicy steak, not fake foods like chips and ice cream.   I've heard this referred to as "intuitive eating", a concept I initially considered a bit "airy fairy" and "new age" or something, but I really do feel like I've experienced it.

After listening to this podcast which is an interview with Mark Schatzker, author of the book "The Dorito Effect" it made sense. 

This was a really interesting interview.  The "Dorito Effect" is about flavour and nutritional wisdom.  It's about how we can know what our body needs to meet our changing nutritional requirements and how toxins, chemicals naturally occurring in foods, talk to our body to tell us when to stop eating - an inbuilt dieting mechanism you might say.  Most of all it's about how artificial flavours in processed foods, even those labelled "natural flavours" which incidentally are not natural at all, trick our brains, confusing our innate nutritional wisdom.

It's also about how modern commercial production of meats and produce, which focuses on higher, faster yields, is occurring at the expense of flavour and nutritional content, also affecting our nutritional wisdom.

Mark says:

"The good stuff is getting blander and the wrong stuff is getting more flavourful."

"The food crisis we're spending so much time and money on might better be thought of as a large-scale flavour disorder.  Our problem isn't calories and what our bodies do with them.  Our problem is that we want to eat the wrong food.  The longer we ignore flavour, the longer we are bound to be victims of it"

In his show notes the interviewer, Sean Croxton, says:

"Fruits and vegetables, once bursting with flavour, are now plump with water and bred with yield in mind, to the detriment of taste and nutrition.  And it's making us fat (and hungry).  Flavour dilution is the new normal.  Meanwhile, the food flavouring industry has made a science out of covering it all up while engineering addiction at the same time."

The interview discusses some very interesting research done in this area.  To me it highlights yet more incentive to avoid processed foods and seek out real whole foods, but it is also evidence of God's great engineering!

Im definitely putting this book on my reading list.

Source:  www.undergroundwellness.com
"The Dorito Effect" is available as a ebook from Amazon and ITunes.

~ take every opportunity to put the good stuff in ~

This blog is about me, what I'm doing, what's working for me, and what's not. It includes my experiences and opinions. It is for general information only and is in no way intended to replace the advice of a health care professional.

The Importance of Blood Sugar Balance

Homeostasis - the tendency to maintain, or the maintenance of, normal, internal stability in an organism by coordinated responses of the organ systems that automatically compensate for environmental changes. 

Our blood sugar is one of the areas in which our body works hard to achieve homeostasis.  However, our dietary choices can overwhelm our body's ability to do this.

In a previous post "Heart Surgeon Speaks Out on What Really Causes Heart Disease"  the author, Dr Dwight Lundell, highlighted that keeping blood sugar levels in check is one way to reduce inflammation in the body and therefore one of the most important things you can do for your for health.

"Blood sugar is controlled in a very narrow range. Extra sugar molecules attach to a variety of proteins that in turn injure the blood vessel wall. This repeated injury to the blood vessel wall sets off inflammation. When you spike your blood sugar level several times a day, every day, it is exactly like taking sandpaper to the inside of your delicate blood vessels."

In a lecture given by Dr Lundell in 2013 he explains this concept in a lot more detail.  In fact he gets very technical and I admit that the fist time I listened to this lecture I was a bit like "....yawn . . . where's he going with all this...", but I recommend that you listen and hang in there as he brings all the information together and paints a very clear picture (even if you don't understand some of the big words he uses) of how and why keeping your blood sugar levels in check is so important.

WARNING:  This will change the way you look at a burger and fries!  Listen, or watch (includes slides), the presentation here.


Source:  Livinlavidalowcarb.com - 2013 Low-Carb Cruise Lecture - Dr Dwight Lundell (Episode 754)
Definition of homeostasis from www.yourdictionary.com

~ take every opportunity to put the good stuff in ~

This blog is about me, what I'm doing, what's working for me, and what's not. It includes my experiences and opinions. It is for general information only and is in no way intended to replace the advice of a health care professional.

10 Good Reasons to Cook Your Own Food at Home

Struggling to give up fast food?  Watch this video "10 Disgusting Fast Food Secrets".

Source: YouTube.com

~ take every opportunity to put the good stuff in ~

This blog is about me, what I'm doing, what's working for me, and what's not. It includes my experiences and opinions. It is for general information only and is in no way intended to replace the advice of a health care professional.