Healthy eating...some renewed resolutions

There was a time when the only salt we knew (in Ireland anyway) was common table salt, and we added it to everything without pausing to think. Saxa 'fine flowing' was the one that most Irish people identified with. Then along came sea-salt and rock salt - and in fairness most of us ignored them as being awkward to use and didnt give the same saltiness.

Then came all the scares about salt and its impact on our health - mainly on blood-pressure, and many of us cut back or looked to use LoSalt or the like, with its lower sodium content (cant say that I ever liked any of these!). Now we can get Maldon and Sel de Guerande and other such salts, which are supposed to be actually good for us again - mainly due to the presence of sea minerals and some of the stuff that you get in seaweed (iodine, isnt it?).

If we move onto butter then - once again this was a great staple of the Irish diet - lashings of it on our spuds and our bread (that was in the days when most Irish mammies baked bread every day!). Then the margarine and other less natural products came on the scene (including the dreaded trans-fats!) and we were persuaded that they were much better for us than saturated fats such as butter... and so on through the various flavours of the month, as each manufacturer tried to persuade us that their product was good for our health - some by more honourable means than others (always check the background to any new health report to see who funded it!).

At this stage of the game, I'm taking my lead from a book that I've been reading recently - called the Mood Cure (by Julia Ross). She puts forward some great arguments for us using butter and olive oil as our staples for cooking and eating. I'm not going to go into her arguments here (buy the book if you are that interested - it is well worth it!), but what she said made a lot of sense to me, so I'm giving it a go for the next while...

Will I go on to low-carb vs high-carb diets, whether eggs reduce, increase or have no impact on cholesterol, is meat good for you or bad for you (and does it depend on whether it was raised on grass out in the field, or on grain indoors - and the answer seems to be - probably!). Is there no end to the confusion out there for those of us who want to eat the best possible diet for our health into the future??? The conclusions I've come to are:

I will use butter and or olive oil

I will eat all kinds of meat - variety and portion size are probably very important here as well

I will use only 'good salt' and limit the amount of it

I will minimise sugar, white flour and white rice and substitute brown versions in the flour and rice categories and nothing at all except maybe some honey for cooking with instead of sugar

I will eat lots and lots and lots of vegetables and salads - as many of them organic as I can manage

I will use garlic, ginger, chillies, spices and herbs for flavour and their health-giving qualities

I will cut down on caffeine (this is proving very difficult to give up altogether!)

Ditto for wine (trying to keep it for a treat at week-ends for a while)

I will get my carbohydrates from complex carb sources as far as possible

Fruit in moderation and on its own inbetween meals

Good vitamin, mineral and amino-acid supplements!

No problem...

PS: Just in case any of you interpret the photo in this blog entry as me tilting at windmills - the photo is actually of salt flats where they dry grey salt in Sicily!