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How to die young
at ninety

What the doctor ordered
Daniele de Winter and Joanna C Read

£5.00

Foreword

The Philosophy of "Eating Sensibly":
10 rules to remember

1. "Eating Sensibly" means choosing food low in fat, sugar and salt but rich in fibre, protein, vitamins and minerals
2. "Eating Sensibly" means cutting down on butter, margarine, oil and cooking fats, as well as on whole milk cream and cheese.
3. "Eating Sensibly" means reducing the consumption of eggs, red meat, processed and salty foods, sweet desserts and alcohol.
4. "Eating Sensibly" means replacing white bread with wholemeal bread; exchanging white flour products for wholemealflour products; and swapping puddings for fruit.
5. "Eating Sensibly" means preferring boiled or baked potatoes to chips; preferring grilled or steamed food to fried foods; and preferring porridge or mueslis to eggs and bacon.
6. "Eating Sensibly" means adopting fruit, vegetables and whole grain cereals as everyday staple diet in preference to meat, fats and confectionery.
7. "Eating Sensibly" means accepting that cold food is not less nutritious than hot food; and that bread and potatoes are not more fattening than meat and fats.
8. "Eating Sensibly" means restricting the total daily amount of one's food intake sufficiently not to cause obesity.
9. "Eating Sensibly" means being always painstakingly discriminating in one's choice of food, even when invited out.
10. "Eating Sensibly" means subscribing joyfully to a new, more disciplined and thereby much safer way of life.

Some basic principles and useful hints

Since the most commonly consumed fats such as butter, margarine, cooking fats and oil are not only unnecessary but can actually be harmful, particularly when eaten regularly, fats have been left out of the recipes and replaced, where necessary, by skimmed milk soft cheese.

Ideally, fish, poultry or veal should not be fried; they should be grilled, or cooked in stock and the excess fat skimmed off.

When grilling, the food is brushed with stock in place of fat. Even better, when first wrapped in foil it does not need to be brushed and, besides, it retains all its moisture, flavour and goodness.

Since sugar, (whether taken as white sugar, brown sugar, raw sugar, Demerara sugar, molasses, syrup or honey) is extremely fattening and totally without nutritional value, it is not used in the recipes; in its place, harmless, low-calorie, artificial sweeteners are used.

Whether liquid or in tablet form, sweeteners are very concentrated and are best and most exactly used when first diluted in water. The more water is used for the dilution the easier it is to get the taste exactly right. When in tablet form, dissolve in a tablespoon or larger quantity of boiling water in a cup and then spoon out the required amount. Drops of sweetener should be similarly diluted with a tablespoon, or more, of cold water in a cup and then spooned out to taste.

Since salt may contribute directly to high blood pressure and so to heart disease or a stroke and since it is difficult to determine in advance who is and who is not sensitive to salt and hypertension, it is best to reduce the salt intake for everyone. (Since calcium has been shown to reduce blood pressure, drinking at least one pint of skimmed milk a day is as important as avoiding salt).

Three salt substitutes have been used to replace the sodium-rich, and thus potentially harmful common salt in the recipes.

1 ) The diet-salt Ruthmol which, unlike table-salt or sea-salt, is low in sodium-content and rich in potassium instead.

2) Another substitute is Miso, a flavouring substance, produced by cereal fermentation, which is rich in protein, vitamins and minerals.

The third substance, Vecon is a yeast, iron and vitamin B12-containing vegetable concentrate.

a) High in protein content: Foods rich in high quality proteins and thus essential for maintenance of health, include fish, turkey, crab, lobster, chicken, veal, egg-white, yoghurt, skimmed milk cottage cheese, beans, peas, Tofu, (a defatted, low-calorie soya bean curd), or Bipro (a pure protein extract).

b) Rich in vitamins and minerals: Essential vitamin-and-mineral-rich foods include carrots, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, spinach, turnips, parsley, green peppers, watercress, broccoli, spinach and radishes.

c) Rich in fibre: Bran, whole cereals, whole potatoes and whole fruit.

It should be noted that fruit and vegetables maintain a higher vitamin content if cooked by steaming lightly; better still, eat them raw.

The temptation to eat between meals is often irresistible. To satisfy this ever-recurring craving, there should always be a bowl ready in the kitchen, or in the fridge, containing already cleaned raw snacks, handily sliced into holdable sticks of carrots, cauliflower, celery, courgettes, unshelled peas (which are great to pop), cucumber sticks or even an occasional whole tomato, or a lettuce leaf filled with a slice of courgette or cucumber and sprinkled, for more flavour, with a little diet salt.

Alternatively a bowl of only-very-slightly-cooked (so that they are still crunchy) beans, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach or other green vegetables, quickly boiled in a little diet-salted water, represent a welcome change from the raw vegetable sticks.

At coffee time or tea time a slice of bran-crispbread (85% bran) garnished either by a lettuce leaf and topped by a teaspoon of cottage cheese, or by a sliver of lean ham with a slice of tomato or cucumber and flavoured by diet-salt, are very acceptable. If, to keep happy, it has to be a sweet snack the answer lies in either whole earth jams (containing no added sugar) or a squashed ripe fruit mashed up with a drop of liquid sweetener, on a piece of crisp- or wholemeal bread.

Additionally, if the craving for something sweet is compulsive then a small, strictly controlled amount of high-calorie confectionery (about 300 calories) is legitimately allowable as a reward for having religiously kept to a low-calorie, fibre-rich diet all day.

Caring mothers should note that, when enforced in infancy "eating sensibly" automatically becomes an indelibly imprinted personal character-trait for life, since "teaching in childhood is like carving in stone".

"Eating sensibly" thus not only is a freely-entered total commitment to long-term health through disciplined eating habits; it is, above all, an enlightened philosophy that rejects habitual dietary indiscretions as too costly in terms of ill- health and needless suffering.

Dr Jan de Winter