Tag: spinach

A Gut Feeling

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

I started reading a book on the stomach call Gut by Giulia Enders about six months ago. I mentioned it when I was writing about stomach cleanses back in December and recently again. It’s an incredibly interesting and easily accessible book which I will write about properly once I’m finished but considering I jump in and out of it when I feel that may just be a while away yet. The reason I mention it is because I am trying to build up my microbiome gut flora, or fauna, I can’t remember, and she discusses this is quite a lot of detail. In late February just as this virus kicked off I bought a pile of vitamin C and multivitamin tablets online, as well as some probiotic capsules. While it’s impossible to tell for sure, I instinctively feel that these tablets have been doing something, the vitamins I’m unsure but I have a gut feeling – sorry – that the probiotics have done something. I feel good in a whole way that that includes mood and all round energy. It is always risky linking that with one particular thing and is likely an accumulation of factors like diet, not sleeping too much and probably multiple other things. I am cautiously optimistic though.

There is something though that I’m not quite comfortable with. When I gave up eating meat for eighteen months many years ago, I gradually stopped craving lamb or beef when needing protein or iron and started craving lentils and spinach instead. I remember distinctly recognising the change. For me my mind had stopped associating the required and desired minerals with one type of food and now it recognised it in another. It makes perfect sense that we would crave particular foods that provide particular nutrients when we need them. This may be a leap and is merely an as yet unevolved idea, but if we’re taking multivitamins with each meal, they recommend three times a day and I take roughly twice sometimes less, then surely the mind will not be able to recognise what food provides what nutrition. If each pill provides a third of your daily intake of iron and you eat it with a jam sandwich, does the mind start to associate jam sandwiches with iron. Is there a danger that we’ll stop eating the necessary balanced and healthy diet as we lose our instinctive ability to choose which foods to eat as and when our body requires it. Although if we’re getting all our nutrition anyway does it really matter. This could be a half cooked idea and may in reality have an affect at the base level only. I am unsure though, it is only an idea. I shall meditate on it some more.

Daily Recommendations Of Happy & Healthy

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

To be a happy and healthy human being in this world we seem to need to combine a rather large variety of things. This combination too varies from person to person and while there are probably a few fundamentals like food, shelter and company, to be both happy and healthy may require a little more than the basic versions of these things. Perhaps being able to attach a noun modifier like good would help and add a little further clarity. We could attempt to include the idea of various possessions like a mobile phone, car or warm jacket, but it’s not worth going down that avenue as it’s validity would be questionable at best. So we stick to the three fundamentals above. There are more I imagine but right now these are the first that come to mind. Perhaps you could throw liberty in there too but unless it’s severely restricted it would probably be something we could adapt to without much fuss.

Shelter seems like an obvious one but there is a difference between a fifteenth floor inner city apartment and a countryside estate. There will be the same extreme ends of the spectrum for company too from friends and lovers to flatmates we have to endure. It is the issue of food that I want to focus on though. I definitely see happiness in food, I associate it with love and one of my favourite things is sitting around a table eating and drinking with friends and family. The happy then is covered but the healthy is were I’m a little confused. There are the obvious things like making sure you eat vegetables and wholegrains, as much organic as possible and to stay away from processed anything when you can. I have a varied level of success on all three of those but I still don’t always feel healthy. I suspect part of that is down to how healthy my gut microbiome is and I’m working on that to the point where I think I can sense and feel improvement specifically because of it. The other is whether I get my recommended daily allowance (RDA) of the required vitamins and minerals. I was looking into how to get enough magnesium yesterday and discovered that perhaps it’s not as easy to achieve this mythical RDA as previously thought. Unlike child poverty figures, it’s not possible to simply change the definition to achieve the desired outcome. Our bodies need what they need and this RDA seems to already be the minimum.

One avocado then provides 15%, a cup of lentils 30%, a two hundred gram fillet of salmon contains 15%, two bananas 20% and half a cup of cooked spinach the final 20%. That’s not impossible to imagine eating in a day but these are also some of the more magnesium heavy foods so the rest of the weeks diet would need to be of a similarly high standard. It is for this reason we must attach good to food. If you would struggle to fund such a diet, which in itself is reasonably common, then there’s a good chance you’re going to struggle to stay healthy and considering that a lack of magnesium can affect our energy and mental health, probably happy too. It seems life is complex. A good life at least. But that’s nothing a new pair of trainers can’t fix.