Growth hormone and protein.

Today I had a cup of white tea with Dr Verburgh. He was talking about how a lot of sugar in our blood causes us to release a type of growth hormone which stimulates tissue growth. Sounds healthy? Well, no actually, because if we eat a lot of sugar, we produce too much growth hormone, and this accelerates ageing. As we know, cancer occur when particular cells grow and multiply quickly. Growth hormone encourages this multiplication so is clearly not something we want to produce in great quantities.

So can we eat lots of protein instead? Well, apparently not. Too much protein is unhealthy too. Many diseases associated with ageing happen because proteins deposit around our cells, causing them to die. Protein places pressure on the liver and kidneys. This, Dr Verburgh tells me, is why people with kidney failure are placed on very low protein diets. People who eat large amounts of meat have a higher risk of cancer and heart problems. Also, any undigested meat protein in the gut can make the body respond as if it were a threat to the immune system. This raises the risk of autoimmune system diseases such as asthma, eczema and inflammatory disease. Should we all become vegetarian? No. That isn't necessary unless it's something we want to do for other reasons. Meat does contain vitamins and minerals that are good for us. It's just that we need far less than we may think. A small piece of meat about the size of the circle made by your thumb and index finger each day. That's a seriously small amount of meat.

So if I am to eat less sugar and less protein what can I eat without encouraging my body to age like Ursula Andress in the film She? Don't tell me I can eat fats Dr Verburgh because I just won't believe you.

Anyway, I made a satay chicken tonight, my own recipe, with only a little chicken, peppers, and a sauce made from chopped tomatoes, peanut butter, soy sauce, chilli flakes and lots of garlic. I ate this with a dollop of boiled roast buckwheat and a large salad made from a freshly pulled lettuce, freshly cut mint, parsley and basil in a rapeseed oil and lemon dressing. It tasted divine.

PS. I got the results back from the blood test. Thankfully it came back fine and I don't have type  2 diabetes after all!

Back home

Hi all, I am back from my hols and had a great time. I managed to eat well much of the time because we were self catering and there was a fantastic supermarket just five minutes walk from our apartment, selling lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and lovely cheese.

 Though it's a little sad to leave such a beautiful island, it is also good to be home. From the state of the garden you would think we had been away for a month so some serous attention needed there. While we have been away the shrub roses have started to bloom. Summer is really here!

Rain and the Greek island of Kos

This morning I'm off on holiday to the beautiful Greek island of Kos. I weighed out oatmeal to take with me (sad) and am hoping for lots of glorious Greek salads and fresh fish. If I can find a place to blog from while away I will, but I think it is more likely that I will sign off for the week and catch up with you when I return next Thursday.

Pablo the cat will be looked after my sister who lives next door. She will practically move in so that she can look after everything, water the rose garden and feed Rob's pigeons. There are few sights more uplifting than seeing the pigeons burst out of the loft when they are let out in the morning. They circle round and round the valley with a singing beat of their wings which makes them sound mechanical.

The grass has been cut between spring showers, the first blooms of my David Austen Munstead Wood are unfurling under the heavy drops of rain. The woodpecker drills across in the wood at the bottom of the field and it seems a shame to go when everything is so green and lovely. But it's not very warm and we have seen so little sun in the past couple of weeks it will be good to dry out and get a top up of vitamin D.  Until next week! :)

Changing the habits of a lifetime...

One of the greatest challenges going forward with this diet I think will be getting used to replacing the potatoes, rice, pasta and bread which I'm used to eating every day with a slower absorbing carbohydrate. The plate just doesn't seem complete without a splodge of mash or rice. But if I am to prevent blood sugar peaks and troughs and those ravening cupboard monster moments I'm going to have to find a way around this.  A simple way is to always have at least two types of vegetable on my plate and eat more beans. Yesterday I had smoked mackerel with a large salad of raw spinach, grated carrot, fennel, tomatoes, cucumber, celery and seeds, grapes, and dressing made with rape seed oil, lemon and mustard. For tea I had a chickpea and sweet potato spiced curry which I will definitely try again. I modified it slightly with the addition of a little coconut oil, which really brought out the flavour. I has this with toasted buckwheat-really great. There's enough for a couple of meals too. After that I had some strawberries with soya yogurt and white tea.  It was a day of delicious eating!

Try the chick pea recipe here.

Chick pea and sweet potato curry

Breaking news this morning -my GP surgery contacted me  today to say that a test from four weeks ago had revealed sugar in my urine. Nobody had picked this up at the time, but they now want me to go for a blood test. As I am sure you know, sugar in urine can be a sign of type 2 diabetes, which is one of the illnesses I am trying to avoid with this new way of eating. Ironic? If I have diabetes then the food hourglass way of eating will be the best thing to keep it under control. Blood test is booked for later this afternoon, so fingers crossed.

Danby Health Shop

There's a great little health food shop in a village not far from me, called, unremarkably, Danby Health Shop. It's run by two sisters and their mother. The shop looks out over a glorious view of fields and trees. It's not too far from where the TV series Heartbeat was filmed and the scenery is spectacular.  They look after people in the very best sense of the word.  I was in there the other day and an elderly man came in. The sisters were all ears for news about an outing he'd been on, asking him what he'd decided to wear. He left with a beaming smile. A lady with mobility problems stood at the door while the sisters became her obliging personal shoppers. I can't find a website for this shop, but another company has featured them when they had their first anniversary after opening. You can read about it
 Here

I bought buckwheat kibbles, soya yoghurt, dark chocolate and root ginger.  I started off the day today with a glass of water, then I had my oatmeal porridge flavoured with unsweetened cocoa (93% cocoa solids), a handful of walnuts, some raspberries and dark grapes and I drank ginger tea made with slices of fresh ginger infused for a few minutes. I'm going to try buckwheat instead of white rice because it gets turned into sugar by my body more slowly, which I now know is a good thing. Apparently consuming a lot of cows milk and yoghurt  is not so  great so I am giving soya a go. Dark chocolate is brilliant for making our insulin response stronger and helping the cardio vascular system stay healthy (see chapter 4 step 4), so I intend to include a 10gram piece in what is becoming an array of colourful food for breakfast. Ginger, incidentally tastes fantastic as a tea and is a powerful anti inflammatory. This doesn't just mean it will help with external inflammation, but works at the level of our cells. Inflammation in the body can lead to disease so is best kept in check. (See page 115). 

My drinks have changed from:
Diet coke, tea with milk, shop bought fruit juice and too many cafe lattes, to 
Water, ginger tea, white tea, green tea, and coffee with soya milk.

I feel a little bit better than I did yesterday and alot better than at the beginning of this blog -and I haven't even tackled the demon exercise yet! 

A bit about sugar...

Yesterday we met up with Rob's family for a 60th birthday meal. The food hourglass way of eating went out of the window and we ate thai crackers, green curry and rice. Great. However, later that evening Dr Verburgh took me to one side and explained a thing or two.

When I eat stuff that's high in sugar, it gets absorbed into my bloodstream quickly. Insulin mops the sugar up, and gets it where it can be converted to energy to help my survive, or, more likely, to where it can be stored for later emergencies. If sugar is left to roam around free in the blood for long it does bad things. Ok so far, but what's so bad about bread, pasta, rice and that good old staple, potatoes? Well, here's an interesting thing. These foods contain starch which is really easily converted into sugar by the body. So when you eat these type of carbohydrates you are practically eating sugar. Your body responds to mashed potato in much the same way it would to a few spoons of white sugar.

Amazing! When these 'fast' sugars are mopped up by insulin they cause a dip in blood sugar levels pretty soon afterwards. That's the time you get so hungry you could eat anything, and often do, and because you are feeling desperate, you'll often eat more high sugar foods which sends the whole cycle off again.

So today I have eaten my oatmeal porridge, with a few blueberries, and a handful of walnuts. The sugar in oatmeal is released slowly so I didn't  get ravenous by 10 am. The blueberries have sugar in them but they are bound up with fibre and so again, the sugar is released slowly, the walnuts are apparently to prevent heart attacks. I haven't read up on this yet, but I'll take Dr Verburgh's word for it. Today I didn't get any of the highs and lows of energy I am used to. In fact I got glimmers of well being that I hadn't felt for years. Who would have thought that ditching sweet supermarket fruit juice and substituting it for water with a squeeze of lemon would taste so good?

Another talk with Dr. Verburgh..

I don't get to talk back to Dr Verburgh, but who cares - he's so interesting and as soon as I think of a question he's already answering it!

When I was growing up I was encouraged to eat a lot of starchy food, such as bread and potatoes, fruit and veg, a bit of dairy, meat, fish and nuts and hardly any fats, oils or sweets. I have been loosely following this type of diet all my adult life. Or at least, I have thought this is probably the best way to eat even if I haven't always done it. Dr Verburgh's plan is different. It follows these basic rules:

• Eat no or vey little, bread, pasta, potatoes and rice. (Instead eat oatmeal porridge with vegetable milk, legumes such as lentils, peas, beans, etc or mushrooms).
• Cut out dairy milk and yoghurt and replace with soya or nut milk, normal dairy cheese and eggs are fine.
• Eat fatty fish, poultry, tofu and quorn, rather than red meat.
• Eat LOTS of fruit and vegetables.
• Drink ŵater, green tea, white tea, fresh vegetable and fruit juice, coffee (in moderation), alcohol (again in moderation).
• Take the right sort of dietary supplement, eg, iodine, magnesium, vitamin D and the B vitamins.

Why eat like this? Because we will apparently age more slowly and feel really good while that happens. See a food hourglass diagram for foods to eat more and less of at:

Dr Verburgh's food hourglass website

My first thought is, how can I make this way of eating interesting enough for me to want to do it for the rest of my (long) life? I hope Dr Verburgh has some tips. I made some oatmeal porridge with soya milk this morning and had it without sugar accompanied by a few blueberries. It tasted remarkably palatable, quite sweet in a natural kind of way, and instead of Yorkshire tea with milk I had a pot of white tea. Delicate, clean flavour and preferable to the orangey brew I am used to. Feeling good about this.