Food standards

It's been quite an interesting week in the world of food here in Ireland. Yesterday, it emerged that 'beef' burgers on sale in all the major supermarkets can contain up to 29% horse-meat  as well as some meat from pigs. Beef burger my ass!

Today comes an absolutely disgusting image of some of the food being served to patients at the Coombe hospital in Dublin.

So lets go back to basics. You are what you eat. YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT. Every cell in every part of your body is short term. It fullfils its function, dies off and is replaced. The best example of this is in the lining of your mouth, your cheek cells. They have a lifespan of about 3 days.

What about my bones you say, they last more than three days..
True, they do. Are they the exact same as they were yesterday? Nope. Calcium is constantly being leached out of the bones, and topped up. This is an ongoing process.

You are what you eat.
Every cell, corpuscle and fibre of your body is made from the food and drink you have consumed. Food and drink gives us the building blocks for new cells. Healthy food and drink begets healthy cells.

This sausage roll with potato wedges and a blob of tomato  ketchup is, in my educated opinion as a health and fitness professional, shit on a plate. How any hospital administrator could permit this utter garbage to presented to a human being in a hospital is beyond me. Good nutrition is crucial to healing & growth. You are what you eat.

Burned food contains acrylimides, which are carcinogens. The sausage roll is made of saturated fats, refined white flour, and more saturated fats, with the possibility of some protein (most sausage rolls are made with what a butcher friend of mine calls BLS, or barely legal sausage; they contain only the minimum pork required to allow them to be classified as a sausage; thats 4% pork, allowing a total protein content of about 1%).

And this crap is supposed to help people to heal?? Gimme a break! There's nothing in it except calories and cancer!

What the hell happened to getting your 5-a-day?

Whenever I hear about incidents like this one, it convinces me more each time that here in ireland, we don't have a HEALTH CARE system, we have a SICKNESS MAINTENANCE system.