Search results matching tag 'vitamins'

Salad for breakfast

bshubbard — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 16:27:00 GMT

For us there’s nothing more gastronomic, healthier and economic for breakfast than a home-grown vitamin- and antioxidant-rich salad and an egg boiled, fried or as an omelette.

Recently we gave a talk entitled ‘Living well from your garden’ to a Costa Blanca U3A (University of the Third Age) conference. Most speakers focused on achieving better health by gentle exercise, meditation, massage, skin care, and they were followed by a medical doctor who emphasised that there are now pills to not only overcome vitamin and mineral deficiencies, but also to extend life expectancy. He himself took over 100 pills a day, half that of his US mentor, and it was suggested that if 35-year-olds started a course they could reasonably expect to live to a 100 or longer.

Most participants seemed to prefer the idea of eating vitamin-rich vegetables and fruit from their gardens and thought that they would find it very difficult to swallow over 100 pills a day, even if they were drinking three litres of water a day!

During our talk we mentioned the best vegetables to eat, and for breakfast that we included a salad (as do those Spaniards still following any remnants of a Mediterranean diet) and a freshly-laid egg.
There was an immediate audience reaction - ‘Salad for breakfast, ugh!’ and ‘aren’t eggs dangerous?’ We pointed out that the English newspapers had recently reported that the British Nutrition Foundation now admitted that it had been wrong in suggesting for many years that eggs were dangerous and that its views since 2005 were that ‘Going to work – or gardening - on an egg’ was a great idea, except for the small number of people with familial hypercholesterolaemia .

We explained that our salad was not of the lettuce leaf variety, but that it included nasturtium, parsley, rocket, marjoram, red lettuce and young spinach leaves, chopped young garlic stalks and root, sliced spring onions, sprouted radish and broccoli seeds with extra virgin olive oil as a dressing to give us a good dose of vitamins, minerals and, most importantly, natural antioxidants and antibiotics. Home-grown tomatoes, carrots and shitake mushrooms are added when in season.

Anyone can grow this breakfast in a small-raised bed or even in containers on apartment terraces as well as in the open garden. Our book ‘Growing Healthy Vegetables in Spain’ demonstrates how easy it is.

Clodagh and Richard Handscombe are practical holistic and self-sufficient Irish and English gardeners living in Spain, who have written several books to share their ideas and experience.
For more information visit their website www.gardeninginspain.com.

Not even wrong

bshubbard — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:04:00 GMT

You can prove the darnedest things with science. You can demonstrate that dangerous drugs are safe; you can even establish that vitamins and nutritional supplements can shorten your life, a sleight of hand that was performed this week. And the great thing is that, because it’s done in the name of science, everyone believes you!

As you may have read (and because every newspaper in the western spiral arm of the Milky Way had it on their front page, you probably did), the highly-regarded Cochrane Collaboration concluded that not only would the antioxidants A, C and E do next to nothing to improve your health, they might also shorten it.

This had everyone scratching their head. It was a startling conclusion that went against everything we thought we knew, and was contrary to the conclusions reached by almost every other significant research paper written over the past 40 years.

So how did they do it? The Cochrane paper was a meta-analysis, which means it re-analysed all existing papers that passed certain criteria for inclusion. Usually the main criterion is ‘good science’ – the studies are well-controlled and reputable.

But things weren’t quite so straight-forward with the Cochrane meta-study. The research team started out with 16,111 scientific papers, and they immediately discarded 14,910 of them. Why? Well, said the researchers, they included cancer studies, or they were duplicates, or because they were ‘not relevant’, although nobody defined what to the study was relevant. However, the researchers did include studies of precancerous lesions and skin cancer which were. . .cancer studies.

So, the researchers were left with 1,201 papers that covered 815 separate clinical trials. Of these, a further 747 were rejected because nobody died during the course of the study. After throwing out all the positive papers that demonstrated health-giving benefits of vitamins, the researchers were left with a small handful of just 68 that suggested vitamins didn’t extend life, but might even shorten it.

Of course, the discarded 16,043 papers discovered the very reverse.

Some science is so bad that scientists have a disparaging phrase for it. They say it's not even wrong. Sadly, even 'not even wrong' papers get good coverage in the media, and at a time when the EU and others around the globe are deciding on safe upper limits of vitamins, and those we shouldn't be allowed to take at all.

It would be a tragedy if this paper becomes a major influence in their decision-making.

Vitamin wars: Saving us from what exactly?

bshubbard — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 12:45:00 GMT

Just how dangerous are the vitamin supplements we buy at the health shop?

To give you a clue, they're not as dangerous as perfume, which kills two Americans every year, and they're certainly nowhere near as fatal as dishwasher detergent, which wipes three Americans off the face of the globe annually.

And they don't even come close to pharmaceutical drugs, which kill anything from 106,000 to 140,000 Americans every year, and that's according to the most conservative figures possible.

No, the annual fatality rate associated with B-complex, niacin, vitamins A, D and E is - zero.

So why are the European Union and the Codex committee trying to restrict our access to some nutritionals, or reducing the potency levels to an ineffective level - in the name of public safety and wellbeing?

It was the turn of Codex the other week to hold its annual conference. More than any other group, Codex is setting an agenda on standards, safe upper limits and availability of all nutritional products that is likely to be adopted by governing bodies around the globe.

Inspired by Codex's guidance, the EU is likely to set the maximum permitted 'safe' dose of beta-carotene at a level that equates to two carrots, while selenium's is likely to be the equivalent of that found in two brazil nuts.

Codex is also looking to replace the governmental RDA (recommended daily allowance) with the NRV, or Nutrient Reference Value. This one-size-fits-all approach doesn't take into account individuals, their ages and their varying health issues, nor the fact that our nutritional needs are not being met by food that is being grown in depleted and nutrient-poor soil.

One observer at the latest Codex meeting was Dr Rob Verkerk, scientific director to the Alliance for Natural Health, the consumer watchdog group. He describes the Codex/EU activities as "a passport system for big business."

Can he possibly be right, we muse. And why are grown men spending years trying to control an industry that harms nobody, and may well benefit many thousands?

Do you know?