How to Eat Better


by James Wong (2017)

This book is superb. The abundance of nutritional information should inspire almost anyone to strive to eat as healthily as possible and can even convince one to warm to flavours that would previously have been eschewed. Green tea, anyone?

The book is packed with a shed load of useful tips which are easy to adhere to and indeed, in my case, can quite often be accomplished completely accidentally. Who knew, for example, that leaving a squash in the fridge for a month turns out to be good thing!

A tip about reading this book if you happen to be on the 5:2 diet, don't read it on a fast day. It will make it completely impossible.  Even on a feast day, it's a hard book to read as one is constantly stopping to note down ingredients, google to see if Morrisons has baby kiwis in stock, and most disruptively, to jump up to raid the kitchen.

I got there in the end, though, and my desire to take all the quoted research as gospel knows no bounds.  I want to have a good excuse to eat more cherries, (melatonin for sleep), pineapple (bromelain for bones) and super shallots (six times more polyphenols than some everyday onions)... the list goes on!  The recipes look delicious too, with puddings very much on the menu due to a liberal use of stevia. 

I only really paused to question the research on reaching the chapter on alcohol. I wanted to believe about the benefits of 1-2 units per day:  a reduction in type 2 diabetes, a diminished risk of age-related bone density loss, fewer cataracts, a rise in good HDL cholesterol, and a 25% reduction in heart disease but recent public health guidance suggests that claims such as these may have been overstated and that the increased risk of cancer more or less obviates any observed benefits.  Indeed James himself says that the benefits of drinking are "not as impressive as the kind of benefits you might see from, say, eating more fruit and veg or taking up regular exercise", so cutting out the alcohol needn't result in the early death one might imagine from a quick perusal of this chapter.

All in all, highly recommended, and many thanks to Kay for the recommendation and to Jane for all the information and inspiration to eat more healthily that she has provided over the years.

10/10

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