Not my ribs! With the warmer weather coming to the UK, but still a hint of winter in the air, for me pork ribs in a good sauce bridges across the seasons and leads me to outdoor cooking in the months to come.

Here is my idea for ribs in a sauce but be warned, it is sweet and sugary so take it easy on the sauce and make it as a treat rather than an everyday meal. Here are the ingredients for the rib sauce:

Any extra virgin oil (rapeseed here, but make your own choice) , vinegar (I like coconut palm vinegar for flavour) , the most important ingredient, home made chutney from fruit and vegetables grown in the garden (this has the sugar content) and finally some salt. Make a liquid marinade from the ingredients as you see fit and coat the ribs. Leave to marinade for 2 hours or overnight in the refrigerator.

When you are ready to cook the ribs, put them in a dish or tray, cover and cook in a hot oven for 30 minutes then turn it down and cook moderate for 90 minutes. After 2 hours it will be a wet mess and you need to dry it out and caramelise the sugar. So, spread the racks out on a tray and cover with the wet marinade from the cooking tray. Turn the oven up and drive the water off and crisp up the ribs in 30 to 40 minutes.

Get a load of tissues, finger bowls, some coleslaw and salad leaves, get messy and eat primal.

“Exercise is Ineffective for Weight Management”

Exercise is ineffective
Finally, some in the medical profession have put their heads above the parapet and said some things that they haven’t dared to do for a long time. My reading of what they say is this:

• A calorie is not is calorie wherever you get it from. Different calories have different effects.
• Sugar is sugar whatever it is packaged in or sold as.
• The human body is designed through millions of years of evolution to store and burn fat as its primary fuel.
• Saturated fat is not “unhealthy” but sugar in excess leads to obesity. I believe that the optimum amount of sugar in the human diet is zero.
• If you burn fat rather than sugar you do not need to refuel during exercise. No more “gel tyranny”.
• The medical profession and food industry know this and have been misleading us for years.

I say: teach your body to burn fat again. Stop spending money on sugar drinks and gels and use the money you save to buy butter. I like Kerrygold as the cows are fed on grass 🙂

If you have read William Banting’s 1863 “Letter on Corpulence” you will know that his doctor also prescribed exercise to help him lose weight. What happened to Mr Banting when he exercised? He got fatter!

It’s only taken us 150 years to notice the same thing… 

And here’s a link to the original article 

BJSM

What could be more tedious than beige coloured food?

Colour is one way of estimating the nutritional value of food. On the whole, the more colour the higher the nutritional value. It doesn’t always hold true but it’s a useful rule of thumb. Just to be clear, I am talking about the natural colour of food. There is nothing remotely nutritious about bright blue cake frosting, however colourful it is!
🙂
Anyway even if it isn’t always true why eat beige when you could be eating a rainbow!

Here is my dinner from last night, chicken roasted with anti-inflammatory turmeric and cinnamon, yellow swede mashed with cream and green spinach in butter and cream with nutmeg.

Spinach can be a food of the Gods!

Kettlebells… are they worth it?

Here’s a link to the Guardian newspaper where a reporter tried out the kettlebells in his local gym.

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/04/is-it-worth-it-kettlebells

Fairly emphatically, he has decided that kettlebells are worth the effort and I couldn’t agree more! An all round exercise that can combine cardio-vascular, resistance, co-ordination and flexibility training with a single low-cost piece of equipment in a small space. And frankly, what could be more primal than picking up a heavy weight and swinging it round your head!

What’s not to like!

One thing that isn’t mentioned in the article is that, in my view, it’s always best to start with a qualified instructor. Kettlebells have a particular technique and developing a bad technique can be dangerous (for you and those around you!!) but almost worse than that, bad technique probably won’t produce the results you are looking for.

On reading the more or less famous Pure White and Deadly by John Yudkin, I came across a reference to a TL Cleave 

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_L._Cleave

who I mentioned in a previous post. He was a doctor in the Royal Navy and argued amongst other things that the consumption of sugar and refined carbohydrates caused a host of modern diseases that he described together as “the saccharine disease”. Saccharine in this context meaning “sugar” rather than the artificial sweetener. He argues that, in evolutionary terms, we are simply not adapted to cope with these concentrated foods and the body does not recognise what it is eating and when we have eaten enough of it or, indeed, too much. This reminded me of Melissa Hartwig’s description in It Starts With Food of sugar and refined carbohydrates as “food without brakes”. 

He says many things in his 1975 book The Saccharine Disease (I found a second hand copy on Amazon but it’s online too, link on his wiki page) that a modern day paleo person would agree with and of course some that we wouldn’t, but it set me wondering who first started this paleo thing.

My thoughts then went to William Banting who I first came across years ago when I was discovering the Atkins Diet and losing a lot of weight.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Banting

If you haven’t read his 1863  Letter on Corpulence you should give it a go. At the very least it will probably make you smile. At last week’s seminar a lady from South Africa asked me if I had heard of him. I said yes, of course. She told me that in South Africa they still had “Banting” restaurants where you could eat food based on his diet recommendations. 

Low carbohydrate living has a long and successful history that started a bit before even William Banting though. About 7 million years before…