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With less than a week to Christmas, we need to have some strategies to survive the traditional lunch or dinner or maybe both.

Apart from feeling bloated and nauseous, over eating and the type of food consumed can quickly derail all the hard work you have done during the year.
Like anything, good habits are easy to break and reaching for another serving of food can re ignite some older nuerological pathways of bad eating habits.

So try to resist the temptatation to keep eating if the food is available, especiallyif aunty Thelma says you need some fattening up or it seems disrespectful to decline, remember you will have to deal with the post Christmas repercussions, not Aunt Thelma.

Try drinking plenty of water during the meal as your body cannot distinquish between fluid and solids.
A great idea is trying to get the family involved in the good old aussie game of back groung cricket or maybe alk down to the local park and throw the frisbie.

Rember if you’re having desert, maybe a Christmas pudding, try to dilute it with some fruit salad.

It’s great to see that the Green light nutritional Guidelines that were required by McDonalds to operate at the Royal Childrens Hospital have been rolled out to all hospitals in Victoria.

All the bad stuff such as pies, deep fried food, sugary soft drinks, ice creams and pizza can now only represent 20% of the menu.
This makes common sense as hospitals should be seen as one of the pillars of healthy lifestyles not encouraging bad nutritional choices.

Unfortunately the rules will not be mandatory so food vendors have a reprieve until it is rolled out to all hospitals and made compulsory. Once again it comes down to whether the Health Minister Daniel Andrews is representing the interests of the general public or business.

Like many initiatives to combat the obesity and the diabetes epidemic, the hard decisions are never made, only a token gesture is adopted. Maybe having a voluntary nutritonal guideline is better than nothing.

Well my special chick pea recipe was a hit at our social night. Generally when i cook I like to adopt the Julia Child’s style of cooking (a movie was released recently starring Meryl Streep).
It’s just thrown together with a lot of love and feeling you’re way around the quantities. generally unless it sa recipe that involves achemical reaction, it’s all about making adjustments, just like making the perfect coffee, the grind is never the same.

2 big hand fulls of salad leaves, spinach and those bitter variety
2 beetroots, cooked and sliced into the shape of a garlic glove
1 punnet of cherry tomotoes, not the mass produced style that are the size of a small apple
1 cup of cooked chick peas (soak overnight in water)
1 salad onion
1 packet of mung beans
Himalayan crystal salt & coarsely ground pepper
Mmm another ingredient, can’t quite remember

Salad dressing (placed poured over salad before serving)
Seeded mustard
Himalayan crystal salt
Garlic (local only)
Honey
White Malt Vinagar
Chilli
Extra Virgin Olive oil (I like Mount Zero, not paid for this plug)

So there you have it, my special boot camp salad recipe.

Obesity and people’s health is becoming the new marketing frontier for food companies.
Products that bring weight management, that make you feel better, have more energy and help the digestive tract are going to be big movers on the supermarket shelves.

Numerous companies adding nutrients, bacteria and minerals to our highly processed foods in order to win the sale, with Omega 3 and anti oxidants topping the list.

Recently Kelleggs made some crazy nutritonal claims that “Now Helps Support Your Child’s IMMUNITY” right on the front of the cereal box with the added claims of 25% of the daily value of antioxidant vitamins A, C and E.

Together with Kellogg’s, Groupe Danone and Nestle are getting into the nutritional bandwagon with creating additives that make there products more nutritionally appealing.

Danone have Dannon Activia and DanActive Yoghurt are leading the charge with there Probiotics, the healthy bacteria that are found in your gastrointestinal tract. Once again there is limited research to support the benefits of probiotics and more importantly the different strains of probiotics.

It’s a shame that as a society, we are increasing becoming more reliant on the avalanche of processed foods that large food vendors are happy to produce to satisfy demand.

Ultimately clever marketing and development of new products will persuade unsuspecting consumers to make choices as to what they consume, be it food closer to it’s natural state or the processed variety from food companies.

Chemical free garlic verses imported garlic, well after going to the local farmers market last Saturday, I decided to do a test to determine whether the local chemical free garlic is better.

Well this image was taken today, exactly 1 week after purchasing the chemical free garlic and an imported variety from my local supermarket.

A big test of freshness and the state of the fruit and vegetables is how quickly it rots and deteriorates. Try this out with your onions as well as it starts to sprout some stalks if it is still living and hasn’t been killed by chemicals and pesticides.

Most imported Garlic contains Methyl Bromide, a very nasty chemical.

So while the chemical free garlic may not more expensive than the imported garlic, what price can you place on your health.