Mushrooms are quite magical. Long revered for their nutritional value, they may actually hold the key to a longer life.Usually considered the fruiting part of the fungi family, mushrooms are neither plant nor animal. But their health benefits have been enjoyed by ancient cultures worldwide for centuries.While touted to be one of the only food sources of vitamin D (when exposed to sunlight) and to...
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My cat Oscar died last weekend. He was diagnosed with a heart condition just two weeks earlier at not quite six years old, barely middle aged. However, this is not a story about a cat but a very human story about how we accept the status quo, the marketing messages and what everyone else seems to be doing, rather than thinking critically and doing our...
Read MoreI was recently interviewed by the Nutrition Therapy Institute about the career opportunities in corporate wellness for their students and others with a background in nutrition.It was an engaging conversation and got me thinking about the typical corporate wellness professional who tends to have an HR background or perhaps a qualification in public health. Useful skills but not necessarily well suited to addressing the myriad...
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The ark of my life story seems to have bread as a main character.There were the peanut butter sandwiches I lived on at college; the time I got physically addicted to hamantasch (a doughy pastry filled with poppy seed paste available around the Jewish festival of Purim); the egg salad sandwiches (and assorted pastries) I consumed every day at work in Leeds, the bagels and...
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It seems like a simple question. It’s what I eat three times a day. It stops me from feeling hungry. The Oxford English dictionary comes a little closer – notice the reference to “nutritious” and “nourishment”. Food (noun): Any nutritious substance that people or animals eat or drink in order to maintain life and growth; nourishment, provisions. [Oxford English Dictionary] With the wide array of food-like substances...
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Last week I was dropping off my older son to start his freshman year at college and got to spend a couple of days on the beautiful campus getting him settled in. His unlimited meal plan includes some guest passes so we ate together at one of the dining halls. I have to say I was fairly horrified at the poor food options with the...
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I’ve been talking about bugs a lot lately. Not the kind with wings or that you might find crawling under a rock but the teeny tiny kind that we can’t see without a microscope. Maybe because they are so small we don’t think of them very often but it turns out these microscopic organisms may hold the key to health or sickness in all of...
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Breakfast cereals were a terrible invention! Convenient? Yes. Marketing achievement? Sure. “Whole grains” tends to sell well. But dig a little further and you can see why this one meal can derail your attempts to improve your health right out of the gate. The vast majority of breakfast cereals are over 50 per cent sugar. The rest includes highly processed grains and chemical additives. Many of...
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Every woman of a certain age goes through it and every man who loves a woman of a certain age suffers nearly as much! While much maligned and feared in countries like the US and UK, and addressed as if it’s a condition that needs to be treated, elsewhere menopause is celebrated as a normal part of aging and appreciated as a sign of maturity....
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