By the time a small toddler is taking his or her first
tentative steps with mother around the supermarket, the taste for
foods is already set. Babies when they are weaned should have been
subjected to as many tastes and textures as are possible between
the sixth and tenth month. Omega 3 doesn´t only stop us
developing disease in our hearts and arteries, but also nourishes
the brain especially in childhood.
If they have been fed only on sweetened fruit juices, milk or
tasteless, bland pasta, toddlers may well become food refusers as
small children and addicted to a typical British diet when older.
This is even worse than the average American diet and is, when
compared to a typical Greek one, only half as nutritious.
Jamie Oliver has transferred his revolutionary zeal from the
high life of Montes, the many-starred restaurant in London’s
West End, to the tougher life of school dinners on a housing
estate. His research showed that not only did Jamie’s new
clientele of pupils have a taste in food that would shock their
grandparents, doctors and the Institute of Food Research, but they
preferred it. When asked to swap turkey twizzlers and chicken
nuggets for a more healthy, simple and high cuisine option, they
were disgusted, spat it out and looked for the twizzlers. If only
they had had a wider choice of tastes and textures in infancy, they
might now be wolfing down the peppers, sweetcorn, beans, peas and
spaghetti bolognese and might even be tempted by leeks and broccoli
if not brussels sprouts.
Household menus should be part of a traditionally balanced diet
with a mixture of protein, carbohydrate and fat. Few foods are in
themselves ‘bad’. However an excess of only one type at
the expense of the rest of the basic diet is undesirable. The diet
should also be rich in trace elements and vitamins. The vitamin
content of foods is falling because in many instances modern
marketing and travel result in it being less fresh by the time it
has reached the supermarket shelves hundreds of miles from where it
was grown. Research has shown that this delay can cause the vitamin
content to have drooped as seriously as a tired lettuce leaf.
One of the features of a well balanced diet is that the
proportion of calories taken as fat is under 30 per cent. Only a
third of this should be as saturated fat, such as is found in
butter, margarine or fat around a steak. Carbohydrates should
contribute around 55 per cent of the calories, but not all are
equally desirable. They can now be divided and described according
to their glycaemic index. The higher the index, the faster they are
absorbed from the gut into the metabolic system. Carbohydrates with
a low glycaemic index are nutritionally the best. As much of the
carbohydrate as possible should be as complex, coarse
polysaccharides. Wholemeal bread, with a low glycaemic index, is
therefore to be preferred to highly refined bread or sugary
sweets.
Protein can either be vegetable, such as is found in beans and
peas, or animal protein. The more mixed the diet, the better. As
well as carbohydrates being of varying value according to their
glycaemic index, so are some fats better than others –
certain ones being essential. The omega 3 essential fatty acids
found in oily fish have a special role in maintaining a healthy
cardiovascular system. It is the correct balance between the
essential fatty acid omega 3 from fish and the essential fatty acid
omega 6, found in many vegetable oils, seeds, nuts, as well as in
smaller quantities in eggs, beef and liver, that has such a
beneficial effect in reducing the amount of heart disease in those
who eat fish regularly. It is relatively easy to have enough omega
6: the difficulty is to keep up the intake of omega 3. It is
recommended that people should have at least two meals weekly of
oily fish. Among the best to choose are anchovies, salmon,
sardines, herring, mackerel, fresh tuna (not tinned) and trout.
Speaking for myself, I can manage two fish meals weekly easily, and
with pleasure, unless I am travelling. When on the move, to
compensate for a lack of herrings for breakfast, I take at least
one capsule of fish oil daily. Omega 3 doesn’t only stop us
developing disease in our hearts and arteries, but also nourishes
the brain, especially in childhood. If mothers have oily fish while
pregnant, their children have an advantage when they start school;
this advantage is still apparent up to primary age and probably for
longer.
As well as the approved amounts of fat, carbohydrate and
protein, we also need to take fibre and the essential vitamins and
trace elements. These are found in fruit and vegetables. We need
five different portions of fruit and vegetables a day, not
including potatoes. Only two of these portions should be of the
same type: we can’t get away with having five glasses of
orange juice daily for that would lack fibre. In diet, variety is
not only the spice of life, it may even be the means of preserving
life.
The good news is that the vegetables don’t have to be the
cabbage, brussels sprouts and broccoli of our childhood. We can
equally well reach our five portions a day by having canned,
juiced, frozen and dried fruits and vegetables. The portions
don’t have to be very large. A glass of fruit juice (not a
fruit drink or squash that may not have much fruit in it) can count
as one, or at most two a day. Two handfuls of raspberries would be
a portion, as would half a pepper, three tablespoonfuls of
sweetcorn, or three dried apricots. A bowl of mixed salad is one
portion, but the emphasis is on the mixed. Pure lettuce is not much
use to health by itself. It is the other vegetables, fruits and
nuts in the salad that matter, for it is the tomatoes, cucumbers,
peppers, radishes and onions that provide the nutritional content
of a salad. I also always recommend a daily multivitamin to
maintain vitamin trace element levels and health.
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