Wine keeps you slim, fruit makes you fat and eggs are now a super food! (I wonder does that include Cadbury’s Eggs, given the season!) If you go back a few short years juicing fruit was hailed as a cure all for both health and weight loss, red wine was never considered a slimming aid but good for your heart and, at one point, eggs were nearly sold with a skull and crossbones stamped on the box to avoid over consumption. We’ve never had so much information about food and we’ve never been as confused. You even hear small children using words like ‘protein’, ‘fat’ and ‘carbohydrate’, words that always sounded as if they were from another planet and little to do with the wonderful world of food. Today’s generation of children are growing up with a completely different set of food rules and beliefs. Of course it’s necessary as there is much more variety now. When we were given milk at school, milk was milk. These days there’s the bewildering choice of milk, chocolate milk or strawberry milk! Why didn’t they just leave it alone; it was perfectly good to begin with?
‘Low carb’, ‘low fat’, ‘gluten free’, ‘protein rich’ ‘full of fibre’ are all buzz phrases used by marketers to enhance sales. Health grounds are now seen as a way to distinguish a product and as a society we have bought into the game. If you take a step back for a second, shouldn’t health giving properties be the basic quality you would expect from anything you are about to ingest into your body? If we really considered what is in certain products we would naturally steer clear of them.
I grew up with the ‘must clean your plate’ mantra ‘because of all the poor people in Africa!’ Many a comedian has since made the point that the expanding waistlines and clean plates of western world children never made any difference to the starving anywhere, least of all Africa. The other revelation of the 70s and 80s was the low fat craze. We eradicated natural fat to the point where food tasted like cardboard and in turn manufacturers put the taste back with chemicals, which made us even fatter in the long run. Sugar was next on the hit list so we just solved that problem with another chemical; something that was even sweeter than real sugar but was calorie free. It may not be making us fat but God knows what it’s doing to our insides. Coffee has been through its fair share of positive and negative swings. One article will have you believe it is nothing short of poison while others will claim a few cups a day are good for you. There’s even another school of thought that believes using coffee enemas will clean out the liver and detoxify the body. I think I’ll just stick to a mug in the morning, imbibed through the mouth.
The author and motivational speaker Anthony Robbins wrote in one of his books once that if you owned a car but didn’t have a juicer, you should sell the car and buy one, it was that important for your health. Jason Vale is known as the Juice Master. He has sold books and has many franchised juice bars throughout the UK and Ireland. There isn’t a shopping centre or mall in the country that doesn’t have a juice concession or smoothie counter. Yet, here’s a headline from a newspaper only last week, “Too much fruit can make you fat! Thought plenty of grapes or apples will keep you healthy? Think again…” Meanwhile the health authorities are at pains to encourage at least 5 a day. Apparently exceeding the recommended amount is fine if you are a healthy weight, but if your are overweight or suffer from high cholesterol or diabetes, too much fruit could mean trouble. The main concern is in the area of smoothies and juices. Fruit sugar doesn’t trigger the ‘full’ feeling in the body like other foods and therefore even though you are taking in lots of energy calories with your juices and smoothies you don’t feel satisfied.
Eggs have gone in an out of popularity too but now they are being hailed a ‘super food’. Blueberries, broccoli, oats and turkey are other foods that have reached the dizzy heights of the ‘super’ tag. Eggs are even being credited with the ability to tackle obesity and are considered necessary for eye health, once the domain of the humble carrot. The nutritionists say eggs are one of the most nutrient-dense foods and are recommending one a day for the maximum benefit. They discovered that, despite being low in calories, eggs are a rich source of protein and are packed with nutrients thought essential to good health, particularly vitamin D, vitamin B12, selenium and choline. When it comes to protein rich foods, eggs contain the richest mix of essential amino acids, crucial for children, adolescents and young adults for body growth and repair.
Perhaps one of the best reports to emerge recently is the one about red wine. If you thought sweating at the gym was the way to go, forget it. Just take to the sofa with a glass of Merlot. Quoting the report, “Women who enjoy a glass or two of wine a day put on less weight than those who stick to mineral water or soft drinks – with red wine particularly forgiving.” I wondered why they didn’t mention men and then realized that the study was only carried out on women. The study also proved that while a glass of wine has calories, those calories are burned off more quickly than calories from other foods. So if a glass of wine has 120 calories and so does a chocolate bar, the wine will disappear fast while the chocolate will take up residence on your hips, get married and have a large family and live with you forever.
Sifting through it all there is only one answer; enjoy all food in moderation and as close as possible to what nature intended it to be and you can’t go too far wrong. And I’m delighted to include in that wine and Cadbury’s Crème Eggs!
I welcome your comments to pat@jwb.ie
Apple and Jameson Tart
Ingredients
- 250g (8 oz) shortcrust pastry
- 50g (2 oz) ground almonds
- 4 large Bramley apples, peeled and diced
- 2 tablesp. sugar
- 250ml (½ pt) cream
- 3 egg yolks 50g (2 oz) caster sugar
- Dash of whiskey
Method
Set oven Gas Mark 6, 200°C (400°F).
Line four individual tart tins with the pastry. Sprinkle some ground almonds on the base of each one. Then add the apple and enough sugar to sweeten. Heat the cream. Beat the egg yolks and sugar together. Stir in the cream and a dash of whiskey. Spoon a little of the cream mixture into each tart. Keep remaining cream. Bake tarts for 25-35 minutes.
Pour the remaining cream into a bowl. Place over simmering water. Stirring constantly, continue to cook until the custard thickens. Set aside – keep warm
Serving Suggestions
Serve the tart, dusted with icing sugar, with the warm custard. Vanilla ice-cream, thin almond biscuit, raspberries etc. are optional.
