Mals Lazy Tomato & Basil soup

Tomato & Basil Soup Garnished with Blackpepper & Basil

This tasty warming soup is filled with nutrients, and loaded with heart healthy Lycopene. This is a compound found in tomatoes, and the potency of it is actually enhanced by gently cooking the tomatoes for over 20 minutes. The onion and garlic also add to the cardiovascular benefits of this rich soup, especially if you set them aside exposed to the air for at least 5 minutes after chopping. This allows the oxygen in the air to bind with and further enrich the sulphur containing compounds that are involved in many of onions health benefits. Anyway, that's enough science, here's what you need...

Taste the green this St Patricks weekend

Why not celebrate St. Patricks day by consuming something nice and healthy, instead of green Guinness!!!

Okay, back to normal colour text, the green gives me a headache ;-)

 To make this a little easier for you, here are a couple of green recipes for you to try, one soup and one smoothie. Enjoy.

Green soup with Broccoli, Spinach and Ginger.

This easy soup can be thin or thick, depending upon the amount of water you add. Best of all, it cooks quickly.

 Ingredients:
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
2 tablespoons diced onion
1 inch of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped
4 cups fresh broccoli, cut up

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.

What's wrong with how we eat

I'd love to hear everyones thoughts on this video, I hadn't realised how much food and eating have changed in the last 100 years. After watching this thought provoking presentation, it's hardly surprising that there are so many more food related fatal illnesses now than 30 or 40 years ago.

Personally, I've consumed red meat less than 5 times in the last 18 months. The reason? When I returned to college to finish what I'd started many years before, one of my assignments involved researching the links between what we eat and what kills us. What I learned while plowing through research articles in medical and nutrition journals sealed the deal.

Eat more veg and less meat or die a painful death at a younger age.

With that kind of motivation, I found making positive changes to eating habits a lot easier. If you want to make some changes to the way you eat, but aren't sure where to start, have a look at my top 7 healthy eating tips.

32 Foods which prevent harmful cancers

I love food, and I love experimenting in the kitchen with new ingredients. I'm also a total nerd, and thankfully have never lost my childish curiosity. I keep asking what, how and why. Over the last few years, I've been applying this thirst for knowledge to the foods I love.  Well, the more I learn, the more interesting things get.

I've mentioned phytonutrients before (those health enhancing substances found only in plants) in relation to blueberries and how they help preserve nerve function. I've mentioned how ginger can help prevent muscle soreness (it's also been clinically proven to be better at preventing travel sickness than any tablet on the market). I've also mentioned how the lycopene in tomatoes is a powerful anti-cancer compound. But tomatoes aren't the only effective food. In fact, there are lots of them. Here's a list. For best results, have 5 or more of these foods, 3 times a week or more.

If you are interested in how these foods help prevent harmful cancers, then I recommend watching this 24 minute video from last years TED conference. Also, please bear in mind that this list only includes foods which fight cancer by this one method. Some foods work by a different mechanism.

Once you go black...

Image of black & white peppercorns from Wikipedia

Did you know that black pepper contains an active ingredient called piperine, which helps you get more nutrients from food? It is believed to stimulate production of stomach acid, which is necessary for the digestion of protein.
It has been shown to dramatically increase the absorption of the nutrients selenium, vitamin B, beta-carotene and circumin, amongst other nutrients. Extracts of black pepper have been found to have antioxidant and cancer fighting properties. 
As if this wasn’t enough good news, piperine also increases the production of seratonin and endorphin (feel-good chemicals) in the brain. 
The final piece of good news about black pepper is that the outer layer speeds up energy metabolism in the body, mainly due to its breaking fats down and producing heat. 

So while salt may be bad for you, it seems pepper is not to be sneezed at!

Is your dinner giving you cancer?

In the UK, one in four people die of cancer. In Ireland, one in three will die from it. This is a startling statistic, and may be a damning indictment of modern lifestyles. With the wealth of research that has been carried out on all aspects of cancer, why is it still killing one in three in this country? (one in four if skin cancer is excluded).

What are the factors which cause cancer? Many associations are well known and high in the consciousness of the general public, such as tobacco smoking and excessive exposure to UV radiation from sunlight. What is much lower in the awareness of the general population is that we may very well be eating ourselves to death.