Swiftlydoesit

Fruit and vegetables help fight cancers

Our parents have always told us that eating fruit and vegetables is good for us and now they have the proof.

The Times Online have published an article confirming that eating fruit and vegetables can keep cancer at bay. Scientists at the First International Congress on Nutrition and Cancer in Turkey explained that they can now “demonstrate how the micronutrients in the diet can interfere with the body’s cellular pathways to help to prevent cancer”.

Professor Walter Willett of Harvard University stressed that people needed to have a healthy lifestyle. People need to exercise more, lose weight and increase their intake of fruit and vegetables. Such changes could reduce the risk of cancers of the head and neck as well as gastrointestinal tract.

Fruit and vegetables can also help reduce the risk of sunburn. Tomatoes seem to be the best performers. They are rich in lycopene which offers some protection against “inflammation, premature skin ageing, photo-sensitivity disorders and some skin cancers. A study carried out by Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health which spanned 6 years, studied the diets of more than 47,000 men. Of the 46 fruits and vegetables evaluated, only the tomato products showed a measurable relationship to reduce prostate cancer risk. As you increase the consumption of tomatoes and tomato products the levels of lycopene in the blood increase and the risk for prostate cancer decreases.

Medical News Today confirms that people who eat a Mediterranean-style diet have at least a 25% reduced risk of dying from heart disease and cancer.

Add comment June 12th, 2008

Crisps and gravy - hardly haute cuisine

I’m somewhat embarrassed by my lack of culinary skills.

I do toast just like Henry Ford and his Model T car - anyway you want it as long as it’s black.

From time to time I do idly browse through one of the very many cook books that my wife has, but my occasional forays into action see me overstretch myself as I embark on some over-ambitious plan to cook something that I have never prepared before, which I don’t have the ingredients for, let alone enough time to actually make the meal within two hours of the intended time it was due to be served.

I have decided that rather than be a show-stopping virtuoso, there may be more merit in being able to cover the basics well, and when I am good and ready, bulding it up from there. On that note then I am on the hunt for my first ten easy dishes I can make. They need to be recipes that take no more than 10 minutes to prepare, I reckon. They also need to be healthy, easy enough to make once - and then repeat afterward from memory without having to stare at the recipe again - and ideally they should involve mostly basics so that I won’t need to go a wild goose chase for some, well, wild goose perhaps at short notice. 

Not sure what my first dish will be, but I am hoping it will be something more substantial than the crisps and gravy recipe a friend has recommended. As far as I can tell the ingredients consist of a) crisps (any flavour) and b) gravy powder and the recipe is thus: 

• 1. Boil kettle
• 2. Mix water and granules to make thick gravy
• 3. Pour over crisps.

It may be quick and easy to make, but it seems more yukka than pukka to me, and I hope to begin with something a tad more ambitious.

Add comment August 21st, 2007