This story from Sally, who lives in the Waikato, tells a very common Aspire for Life experience.
The plain message is ‘knowledge isn’t enough’ – Sally knew she needed to lose weight, but couldn’t. Now she can.
Sally completed a 12 week Aspire for Life programme and is now a ‘club member’.
Here is Sally’s story, completely as told by her. Sally has shared her story as an encouragement to anyone else who is in a similar position.
Sarah, Sally's dietitian
I found myself at age 43 years sitting in a cardiologist’s room with BP that was too high, cholesterol that was too high, and being told that I needed to lose weight. I left with various pamphlets – Facts about Fats, Healthy Weight for Adults, What Your Lipid Test Means for You etc etc.
So armed with knowledge, the cardiologist’s words ringing in my ears, and with a full understanding that losing weight would drastically improve my health, it would be logical to assume I would go out and lose the extra kilos in double quick time. Unfortunately the opposite was true. Over the next year to eighteen months I actually gained weight despite my genuine desire to lose weight. Such is the struggle of unhealthy eating. I really wanted to change my situation but was somehow “stuck” in a destructive pattern.
When I was presented with the opportunity to join Aspire For Life I was really excited as I had come to the realisation that to lose weight and gain a healthier lifestyle I needed help.
Russell, Sally's activity coach
I have now completed 6 months of the Aspire For Life programme and am thrilled with the weight lose I have achieved but I am more thrilled with having broken the destructive eating habits I had developed over the years. I am very motivated to go on and achieve my goal weight through diet and lifestyle change and am confident I can do this by following Aspire For Life principles.
Being overweight is no fun. I had the knowledge that being overweight was destructive to my health. I also had a genuine desire to lose weight. This was not enough for me though and I needed extra input and help. The Aspire For Life programme provided this for me. Not only has it given me the tools to lose weight in the here and now, it has given me the tools to maintain a healthier lifestyle for the long term.
Sally
(Waikato)
We are so proud of Sally and her achievements. Well done, Sally!
On Aspire for Life, each person has their own coaching team.
If you offered people a drug which can dramatically reduce the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, some cancers, and even delay cognitive decline, and which has no negative side effects (and a lot of positive ones), you would be trampled in the rush!
According to a challenging article in The Guardian forwarded to me by a UK based colleague, a pill which promised the same benefits as just 30 minutes of moderate intensity activity a day would make headline news around the world.
In fact, in a study published in the British Journal of Sports Med, low fitness levels was found, perhaps surprisingly, to have had a bigger impact on health risk than the usual suspects – high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or even smoking (in the group studied).
In the April Aspire for Life newsletter, we noted that a group of experts had concluded that exercise, on its own, is not an effective tool for reducing obesity.
However, if we move the primary target from ‘lose weight fast’ to ‘become healthier quickly’, more exercise may well be the very best place to start.
If you are unfit and have a sedentary life, and you want to make fast health gains, building your activity levels up to 30 minutes a day, even if you have to do that 10 minutes at a time until your body gets used to your new life, is a good strategy.
Then, if you take steps to improve the nutritional value of your food, by upping wholegrains, vegetables, fruit and legumes; and keep away from foods with low nutrition, your risk of heart disease, diabetes, certain cancers, and osteoporosis will fall quite quickly. All gains are good.
Note, nobody has used the word ‘diet’ yet, or asked you to count calories. Yet if you do these two things (become more active and eat more nutritious food), and do them well, the health benefits will follow.
Don’t get me wrong. Weight loss is important, and the best health gains do come with proper weight loss. But, let’s not get fixated on the scales.
Aspire for Life is first about improving your fitness and your food choices. Do that, and you will find the weight loss stage is so much easier to do.
It’s all about starting in the right place and aiming at the right target.
On Aspire for Life we help you get the priorities right, right from the start.
I love TV’s ‘Fair Go’. I find it reassuring that in this mad, commercial, competitive world the old Kiwi notion that everyone deserves a ‘Fair Go’ still has its place.
The programme on Wednesday last week included a small item on ‘Deb and Lynne’, who had both ordered a ‘free sample’ of African Mango supplement capsules. They then felt somewhat ‘ripped off’ when not only did the free sample not arrive, their credit card account was charged for a month’s supply.
The African Mango story is a common theme – a new wonder fruit with an attractive exotic name (who doesn’t like mangoes?) and a small number of ‘clinical trials’ (in this case, three, all by the person who holds the patent) with very scientific sounding words, like ‘increases thermogenesis’ in the claims. It is likely that most, if not all, of the weight loss benefits come simply because it is high in fibre and protein, giving a sense of fullness, coupled with the power of ‘believing’ it will work and maybe some fluid loss. It doesn’t help lose body fat (see this review). Buying capsules is a very expensive route to a simple solution, because you can get the same benefits or more, at a fraction of the cost, just from brassicas and beans.
Which leads me to an exciting topic. A farmer’s market popped up in Mount Pleasant a year ago, after the February earthquakes. If you live in Christchurch and think cauliflower is a boring food, go there! You will find a glorious range – purple, orange, green, and one we nicknamed ‘dinosaur’ (because it looks dinosaur-ish). I like food to be fun, and what could be more fun than busting off a few bits of each sort, a quick cook in the microwave, then put together in a salad with green beans, sliced capsicum, and whatever else takes your fancy. Delicious, healthy, and very filling.
People often talk about ‘food fibre’ as if it is all one thing. It isn’t. In fact there is a huge range of different plant fibres in foods, all with different beneficial properties. Some are good at reducing cholesterol absorption, and others are better for bulking, giving satiety and bowel health. The ‘stem’ bits of cauliflower and broccoli happen to have an excellent balance of all sorts of fibre, so leave plenty on when you prepare them for cooking. It really is a ‘wonder’ food, with much, much more than the ‘fibre’ benefit going on.
If you think cauliflower is boring, why not give it a ‘Fair Go’ – find some of the new, fun varieties, and start inventing your own cauliflower salads. Its OK cold, so quick to do, and you can eat lots of it while still losing weight (if that’s what you want to do).
Lose weight while eating chocolate cake for breakfast? Yes, says nutrition researcher Professor Daneila Jakubowicz of Tel Aviv University.
“Please, please can Aspire include this advice in your programme” asks Aspire for Life member ‘J” of Christchurch. “J” is clearly a lover of sweet things.
Lets look a little further at what the researcher claims and how it compares with ‘Aspire for Life.
Note that Prof. Jakubowicz has been promoting the benefits of a big breakfast for some time. She even published a book on the subject in 2009.
Her thesis is fairly straightforward:
- Diets fail because after an encouraging start cravings kick in powerfully and de-rail the dieter.
- Cravings are driven by hunger hormones.
- You can manage hunger better if you start the day with a big breakfast.
- If you have a sweet tooth, by including a sweet treat at the end of breakfast you can hold off the hunger hormones for longer.
When she tested a group with a moderate breakfast against a group with a big breakfast topped off with a sweet treat, the big breakfast group had less hunger.
Both the ‘big breakfast group’ and the ‘normal breakfast group’ had the same total daily calorie intake, at a level that would lead to weight loss.
The trial required the ‘big breakfast’ to be at the right time – no later than 9am, to have the beneficial effect.
“Ultimately, this shows that a diet must be realistic to be adopted as part of a new lifestyle, curbing cravings is better than deprivation for weight loss success” says Prof Jakubowicz as she concludes her research paper.
What does Aspire for Life have to say about this?
Both diets on Prof. Jakubowicz’s study are in fact crash diets, with weight loss at four times the rate of Aspire for Life. You can expect to have severe cravings if you diet like that. The ‘cravings’ the diets are trying to manage are therefore diet induced and unnecessary. Both diets have around 15% less calories than Aspire for Life.
Yes, breakfast is an important meal, and for most people it is helpful to have a good breakfast.
The ‘Big Breakfast plus treat diet’, however, has 43% of your daily food eaten at breakfast time. For most people, that is an unrealistic way to live. Its hard to even imaging what sharing dinner with friends and family in the evening would consist of under that regime.
The report sounds too good to be true, especially as shown with a delicious slice of sponge cake as in the ‘Stuff’ report. Sorry ‘J’ we live in the real world. If it sounds ‘too good to be true’, there is a high chance it is.
To prevent cravings while dieting it is best to take a three-fold approach:
- Eat well – build your daily diet with a wide range of nutrient rich foods which will satisfy your body’s needs.
- Eat foods which naturally deliver satiety, Aspire for Life recipes show you how to do that..
- Take it slowly. It’s better to lose 20kg over a year, than to lose 20kg over 4 months put it back on again by the end of the year.
If you have a sweet tooth, don’t go ‘cold turkey’ (unless you have strong will power) but do, step by step, tone it down. Just quietly and steadily cut back the treats.
People often eat sweet things for other reasons than hunger. Do what you can to manage stress, by becoming more active (helps you sleep better), doing things you enjoy (other than eating cake!) and understanding what your stress triggers are. Coaches can be a great help here.
“I’m not hungry, I don’t crave and it’s been remarkably easy to change to healthy eating habits” (Mark, of Christchurch, after losing 20kg on Aspire for Life.)
We all love the taste of healthy food. Really.
Of course we do, we have to, we are wired that way.
We have been living in Nature so long it’s innate, essential for survival, that we like what is good for us.
Not only that, when reasons for food preferences are compared by researchers, sensory enjoyment out-ranks other characteristics hand-down. It’s a case of “if it doesn’t taste good I’m not interested”.
That leads us to a question ‘” if our sensory systems are wired to lead us to good health, why are so many attracted to poor diets which put on weight?”. Then, “if we know why, can anything be done about it?”
That is a complex pair of questions. Let’s make a start at the beginning.
If you source food directly from nature, as we once did, you forage or farm plants, or capture animals. Your food comes to you whole, and you process it at home. That’s how we lived, in close connection with our food. Perhaps the current trend for Farmer’s Markets expresses a wish to get back to basics. If so, it’s a good thing.
To help us forage and find, we were equipped with three strong sensory preferences, namely:
- sweetness – for the carbohydrates in fruits, root crops, grains, and vegetables
- fat – for the energy and protein in meat
- and salt.
Salt is a special case – essential for life in small amounts. If you are interested in the extreme lengths humans and other animals have gone to to get adequate salt supplies, I commend Mark Kurlansky’s ‘Salt: a world history’ as a surprisingly interesting read.
As well as these flavours there is an extraordinary range of other sensory experiences we can enjoy as we eat food. Our receptors change as we grow up, so usually we do not enjoy the more complex flavours in leafy vegetables until after childhood. The ‘artisan’ sector of the food industry – craft bakers, cheese-makers, brewers, vintners, and the like, work in this ‘complex food taste’ arena. So do chefs.
As for enjoying veges, mums, you just have to wait! Most kids will develop a taste for veges when they grow up. The sugar, fat, salt taste dominance, however, is so strong that if our basic diet tastes mostly of those, our ability to even notice more complex flavours fades away.
This effect didn’t matter much before the industrial revolution. Then, in our cleverness, we discovered ways to isolate sugar and starches, to separate white flour from wholemeal, and to produce fatty food in abundance.
Professor Adam Drewnowski, Director of the University of Washington Center for Obesity Research and leading researcher in the role of cost, taste and convenience in food choice makes an interesting statement in the introduction to this book chapter.
He notes that as societies become more prosperous, they undergo a ‘nutrition transition’ where a diet rich in healthy, plant based foods, becomes more fatty, salty and energy dense. First, the rich get to enjoy a bad diet, then as living standards rise, everybody does!
Some sectors of the food industry are very skilled in using dominant sensory properties to increase their profits. A quick look at this slide show on ‘mind mapping and sensory economics‘ shows just how advanced that science now is – the first few slides will be enough to get the picture. Moskowitz and Jacobs, its authors, claim to be able to work out exactly how much more a given consumer group will be willing to pay for increments in particular elements of sensory enjoyment.
You can expect that the more sophisticated and global a food manufacturer is, the more likely they are to have used tools such as these.
‘Memory’ has a curious effect. The ‘aroma’ and ‘memory’ areas in our brains are adjacent and influence each other easily. It’s very easy to invoke sensation and hunger just by bringing up memories. Try this experiment. Think about your best food memory? How easily can you smell and taste it even now? Many food ads try to invoke nostalgia for this reason.
In another curious twist, it seems we like ‘crunchy’ foods more when we are angry, bored or frustrated. Better keep the chippies away when we have any of those emotions or they won’t last long!
Now to the second question. Can we re-capture a healthy diet without feeling we are missing out on something?
Happily, the answer is ‘we can and its easy, but it does take a bit of re-training’.
First, the food industry does have a lot of good food products on offer.The guideline is to look for foods that are relatively whole – i.e. a stable version of the fresh item.
Clarence Birdseye did us all a great service when he invented frozen veges. Now there are all sorts of useful things from the food industry that a well stocked pantry shouldn’t be without – canned tomatoes, tuna, tinned beans, lentils, chickpeas. Easy to use and very good value.
Second, learn enjoy the many flavours of food, especially vegetables. Eat them fresh, or lightly cooked (microwave is good), mix them up and enjoy them more. Use tasty dressings in small amounts, so you can still taste the food. Gradually become used to smaller amounts of meat, and bigger servings of veges.
Third, if you need to, upskill. Get used to the idea that you can whip up a salad, a stir-fry, a pasta dish, or even a home made hamburger in just a few minutes. The takeaway food industry are artists in the addictive tastes built on Fat, Salt and Sugar. They want you back, often. Don’t go there. Do it fresh, at home.
To get back to sensory and food. The taste of, and enjoyment of food can be one of life’s great pleasures, especially when shared with family and friends. Enjoy it more.
This series has been about how marketers can entice you to buy, without necessarily giving you better food value. The key questions: Does it taste good? Is it safe? Is it good value for money? is it healthy for me? Is it easy to use? are all important. Your daily foods should be all of these.
Bread, and other grain based foods have been the mainstay of civilisation since mankind developed agriculture. For the 10,000 years since then, the absence of bread, or rice, maize or barley in other cultures, meant disaster and famine.
In Old Testament times, the sound of millstones was a sound of plenty, and its absence, of desolation (Jeremaiah 25; 10,11). By the time of the French Revolution, buying bread accounted for about 50% of the cost of living, for peasants. A shortage of flour could lead to rioting.
Nowadays, bread is plentiful, cheap and affordable. Its wonderful stuff, very versatile, and there are many ways to enjoy it. If all you know is Anglo-Saxon loaf bread – spread your wings a bit, there are so many other ways to enjoy ‘the staple of life’.
But, we humans are a funny lot, aren’t we?. Over the last decade or so, we have seen wave after wave of ‘don’t’ food fads, as if cutting out one food group will be the cure-all for a bad diet. The hardest hit has been the baker – they had 8 years of ‘anti-carb’, followed by the current anti-gluten fashion, and now just when you wonder whether there could possibly be another angle, the ‘paleolithic’ no-grain diet emerges.
What’s going on here? Yes, a diet that is excessive in total energy and deficient in nutrients because it is mostly refined foods, is a bad diet. Yes, some people react badly to gluten and should avoid it.
But there is also the ‘Yes’ that says a diet rich in wholegrains (and more than 50% of the grains as wholegrains is enough to bring the benefits) leads to better heart health and many other benefits. Even the USDA allow that as a health claim, and they are professional skeptics when it comes to claims.
Look at it this way. Do you like eggs? I do.
Well, grain seeds are the plant kingdom’s ‘eggs’. They contain all the nutrient the embryonic life will need until it has grown enough to seek its own nutrients. In eggs, this is until it has feet and a beak. For ‘plant eggs’ it is until the new plant has leaves (to harvest energy) and roots (for nutrients and moisture). Food that does that just has to be good!
The Neolithic Revolutions that invented agriculture at six centres around the globe so long ago did so because it is a ‘good thing’. Lets enjoy a good thing.
FOOTNOTE: Some Aspire for life tips on bread.
The small dense commercial loaves (like Burgen and Vogels) scored extraordinarily well as sustained energy foods in our lab tests.
Wholegrain is good, and light bread with wholegrain included still gives good amounts of wholegrain benefit,
Soft, white, fluffy bread will be the fastest digesting. Crusty, chewy breads – like real French baguettes, and flat breads with a large amount of outside surface, will digest slower and last longer.
White bread is not evil! It has very little fat or sugar and has a moderate fibre and protein content. Nutritionally it is way ahead of potato crisps. It can be OK, especially if you use healthy toppings and have it with protein – rich food. With added fibre it is better, and with some whole-grains even better still.
If your choice is soft, white, covered in icing, or made with lashings of butter, it’s a treat food not a staple.
Sorry to all you lovers of pink buns out there.
Cheers
Tim
If you are a marketer trying to create a new food product wave with premium price opportunities, the ‘Food Safety’ button can be the pathway to big profits.
It works like this. The food industry knows how strong a motivator ‘fear’ is. After all, one of the things they fear most is a food scare based on a real event. Companies suffer greatly, and may even go under, if a food scare hits one of their products.
If real food fears are so potent on their impact on consumers, can ‘food fear’ be manipulated to drive people to favour your products and pay a premium?
Indeed it can. The perception of safety is the absence of fear. Therefore anything that generates fear will allow marketing of products to ‘protect’ us from that fear. To make us feel safer.
We seem, for the last two decades at least, to have experienced ongoing series of ‘food fear epidemics’, where a common healthy and nutritious food type or food component is placed under suspicion of making us sick.
‘Milk is mucus forming’; ‘carbohydrates make us fat’; ‘gluten mucks up our immune system’; ‘grains were never intended to be eaten by people’ ; ‘we all need more protein’; ‘organic is definitely healthier’ and so it goes.
Don’t get me wrong on that last one, I am all in favour of sustainable farming practices and very tough standards for agricultural chemicals, but in terms of food safety, ‘organic’ alone is not a reliable guide. Recent food caused deaths in Europe support that view.
And, yes, it is also true that a number of people react badly to certain foods and need to take great care with their diet. Food allergies, compromised digestive systems, and other medical conditions needing dietary management are to be taken seriously and managed with care. At Aspire for Life we do take such matters seriously and strive to be as professionally helpful as we can be.
M
y ‘beef’ is that the food industry is ever on the lookout for profit opportunities. As soon as a new groundswell of ‘food fear’ starts arising, you can be sure that food producers will take interest. As the trend grows, you will see first the small producers, then as it becomes more widely fashionable, the larger companies, promoting products that will appear to ‘the fearful’. You can be sure they will carry a premium price. Then, for the marketers, it’s a case of putting the fad words out there as much as possible to strengthen the trend. Eventually ‘Low Carb’; “Gluten Free’; “Protein rich’ or whatever the current fad is becomes accepted as synonymous with ‘healthier’. Sometimes you can target multiple fears. How many ‘food fear ticks’ can you fit on a can? (The picture is an artists take on it).
They may well not be. While some may be normal foods branded with a new label to fit the trend (for example labelling rice as gluten free), other ‘made for the market’ foods may meet the dietary restriction by using purified, low nutrient ingredients, such as starches, fibre isolates, or protein from waste streams. The ‘fad’ product may well be nutritionally inferior to the original.
The fact of the matter is good nutrition is straightforward. Vegetables, fruit, wholegrains, legumes, with healthy nuts oils, and moderate amount of high protein foods (fish, meat, dairy) will provide most people with with everything they need. You can eat widely and safely from this delicious and nutritious palatte of foods. No-one is going to make a trendy wave of food fears to drive you to these products – they have been around for so long and, are readily available. They are not easily ‘differentiated’ for higher profit margins, other than by being better. You pay more for higher real value.
In reality, the two biggest food risks you face are food fraud and food poisoning. Of being ripped off or being fed bad food. There is nothing new in food fraud – Mediaeval manuscripts list severe punishments for passing off adulterated, unsafe, or underweight products. Good food hygiene should be regarded as a basic human skill to have, like knowing how to brush teeth.
Thinking about fear fads again, some commentators are predicting that the gluten free fad has peaked. What will be next? Any guesses?
A while back I started a blog series on ‘what matters to consumers about food’. I wanted to look at how food companies try to change our perceptions of their products, rather than improve the real qualities, to increase the price to us, the consumers.
Today we look at the that central attribute, price. 
We all want good value for money. Those who own food companies want them to be profitable businesses. That leads to a tension. By understanding how marketers play with our perceptions of value, we can get better ‘value for price’ for ourselves and ‘win the game’. Remember, you are doing the paying, you are in the driver’s seat.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those people who see the food industry as an ‘evil force’. In fact I have worked with many fine people over the years who are justifiably proud of the products they make, especially in the bread and grain based foods industries and our fabulous artisan bakers. I love shopping for food.
Its just that the means companies may use to increase their margin may also deliver less real value for us, the consumers. Lets look at some tricks they may use so we can spot them and save our spending power for better brands or other things.
Trick 1: Bulk the product with cheap ingredients
The following ingredients are cheap, easy to use, and can bulk up products without necessarily adding value: water, air, sugar, fat, industrial waste, starches and flours. With a little thought, I’m sure you can add to the list.
Sometimes I wonder if all ‘Lite’ on a label means is ‘we managed to get more water in the product’. ‘Lite’ may not always be the best or even the healthiest buy, check the label – is it the same as the regular version, with more water added? If so, all nutrients will be down, there is just less food in the product.
Food processing by-product such as apple pomace from juicing is plentiful and cheap. It can be used to bulk up products while at the same time seeming to lift the nutrition by raising the fibre level. The best source of fibre in food is whole fibre from foods that are should be in the product – check it out – where did that fibre come from?
A good place to work out what is really happening is the food ingredients list on the product. Just make sure the foods you think you are buying are in fact the main ingredients. Simple lists are a good sign that it is less likely the product is highly ‘bulked’.
Trick 2: Push addictive flavours
The tastes of fat, salt and sugar behave very much like addictive substances. They dominate other tastes, and play tricks with your mind to create cravings. That is why you can be charged for thin sliced potato cooked in oil and salt, as if it were steak. Do the sums, ‘chippies’ and sugary drinks are very expensive food.
The most important shopping decision you may make if you need to save money is to snack only on real food and drink.
Trick 3. Play the convenience card
We have already covered ‘convenience’ in an earlier blog. The counter for consumers here is to take back control. Re-learn a few simple skills with real foods. Apples, oranges, jam sandwiches (from grainy bread) and the like are very convenient and cheap. Lets face it, the more packaging you have to tear through, the more you will be paying for the package, not the food. Keep it simple, keep it real.
Shop smarter
Tesco in the UK ran an interesting study a few years ago. They looked at the what sort of people were buying their different styles of House Brand.
To their surprise, they found a group of consumers who were good buyers of budget brands (where the stuff in the can is virtually the same whatever the brand), were also regular purchasers of premium food products. These people were not poor, but saved where they could, and spent their saving on food that really was delicious and pleasurable.
That’s a good way to think, whether you are among the cans, in the vege aisle, or at the butchery counter.
Next week, we will look at food safety. Sounds dull, but believe me, its a hot topic.
Cheers, Tim.
Welcome to Tim’s blog. The website people have made a few changes to make it easier for you – you can now go straight into the blog without ‘subscribing’, and we are alerting all our Aspire for Life mailing list to each new posting. There is an ‘unsubscribe’ tool if you do not wish to receive these.
This week, the US-based not for profit ‘Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine’ (what a fine group of people they must be!) have posted two huge billboards in New York warning of the dire consequences of eating cheese.
Oh dear! Cheese just happens to be one of my favourite foods. So much so that a ‘Christmas Present to Self, For Sharing’ this year was to order a large round of Whitestone ‘Windsor Blue’ on-line. Its gorgeous stuff, a stunning snack with crackers.
That billboard thing gives me an uncomfortable sense of ‘Oh no! Here we go again’. Maybe I’ve been around too long, but sometimes it feels as if we are stuck in an endless procession of ‘blame the food’ slogans – carbs, gluten, dairy, red meat, and now cheese – without really thinking through the human dimension, or the food, for that matter.
Many years ago, when I was a student trying to live happily on very little money, I used two cookbooks quite a lot. The ‘Tassajara Bread Book’, written by the cook in Zen buddhist monastery in the USA sort of went with the times. A great way to make bread if you need time for meditation. I now know much better ways to make breads at home. The other was the ‘Moosewood’ vegetarian cookbook, valuable not because we were vegetarian, but more because it taught how to make tasty meals from really cheap stuff, like pumpkins. Our flat could put on a great feed for many with a fresh loaf of home made bread and a slab of cheese, or a dish full of a veges, covered with the yummy melted stuff.
So, what’s the problem with cheese? Well, there are a couple.
Cheese is a ‘mixed bag’ when it comes to food quality. Like other diary foods, its very good for strong bones and all that and is a high protein food. But, it’s got about as much fat as protein, and most of that is the ‘saturated’ sort. So its more of a ‘good-ish but be careful with it’ food, around the home.
Cheese also behaves itself so very conveniently in food manufacturing. About the easiest way to make a manufactured meal that won’t fly apart is to stick everything together with cheese. In food manufacturing, so often ‘easy’ means ‘cheap to make’, and ‘tasty’ means ‘fatty and salty’. Nobody does that quite like the US food industry, inventors of Cheez Whizz. Living on this stuff may very well lead to the dreaded ‘cheese abs’.
But, when it comes to being a gourmet food with great taste, cheese is in a class of its own. And why not? People have been making craft cheeses for centuries, in many countries, so we are now spoiled for choice . If you ‘go for flavour’, cheese is brilliant in small amounts as a snack with crackers, or as a taste boost for main meals – a few bits of feta, or scattering of grated parmesan can really lift a salad, pasta, pizza or whatever. Its all a matter of quantity and context.
Yum, I wouldn’t be without it. Love that cheese! So, let’s keep keep our heads and not make cheese the next ‘food villain’.
Footnote.
I’m now back from enjoying another ‘Abel Tasman’ area holiday. For my next blog, I will continue with the series on ‘the five things that matter about food’ and how they drive our choices.
Cheers
Tim.
Wishing all our Aspire for Life members and associates a very happy Christmas and holiday season, enjoying friends, family, and good food.
Cheers
Tim
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