The Optimise Health Blog

 Here in the UK many still practise the Christian tradition of Lent: the discipline of giving something up to consider living simply, frequently a food item and for health benefit. The idea is to mimic the 40 day fast undertaken by Jesus in the wilderness, when he was tested by the devil and tempted to prove he was ready to start his mission. In England we start by making pancakes on Shrove Tuesday - to use up the sweet stuff in the larder so we are not tempted to eat it again for the duration of lent and to fuel the fast. Today the focus may be more about the challenge of reining in appetite or curbing bad habits like smoking or eating treats to excess and less about Christs' 40 days and nights in the desert being stalked by satan. Interestingly most ancient traditions held in them the concept of feasts: I.E. celebrating a particular event or time of year with a party and food. This meant eating special luxuries or taking pleasure in rarer foods or harvest time...

Putting the information on food packaging into context is important. Food producers are less keen on advertising the bad side of what is on sale and often the labelling is misleading. I have recently started looking at food labels to find out if the food I am eating is high in fat and sugar and salt, because in order to live longer I am trying to cut back on these three dietary components. Firstly I noticed that I often made a mistake in calculating the amount of fat in the actual whole packet rather than just "a portion", as I tend to eat the whole bag of crisps once open. For example I just had a camembert and chilli jam sandwich. Looking afterwards at the cheese packaging I was surprised to see that a portion was only 9% of my daily fat intake as an adult..which made me feel better, until I discovered that the portion was 30g! I had just eaten at least 90 g of the cheese in one doorstep sandwich and hence was shocked at the amount of fat I had just eaten in one me...