Welcome to my ‘What I Ate in February’ blog post – in this month’s post read about a simple soup you can make to improve gut health, how to clean your ‘dirty genes’, paleo cookery and more. Plus you can download my free two week autoimmune protocol meal plan.
What will you find in this article?
What’s in Season in February?
Apples, Beetroot, Brussels Sprouts, Cabbage, Carrots, Celeriac, Chicory, Jerusalem Artichokes, Kale, Leeks, Mushrooms, Onions, Parsnips, Pears, Purple Sprouting Broccoli, Spring Greens, Spring Onions, Squash, Swedes.
Jerusalem Artichokes for Gut Health
Jerusalem artichokes are high in a prebiotic fibre called inulin which feeds beneficial gut bacteria. They are a starchy root vegetable which are delicious mashed or boiled. Recently I have been making a soup out of them which I have been eating 3-4 times a week for lunch.
When you first try this soup you may feel bloated and/or gassy afterwards. But what you are experiencing is a massive feeding of the good bacteria in the gut, which will cause the bacterial colony to grow and strengthen.
The long-term benefit of this is that bloating will ease and many aspects of digestion and digestive health will improve.
Ingredients:
- 1 clove of garlic
- 1 onion
- 1 white potato
- 500g jerusalem artichokes
- 500ml chicken bone broth
Method:
- Finely dice all the vegetables and add to a pan with the stock.
- Bring to the boil and cook for 30 minutes.
- Add the soup to a blender or use a hand held blender to blend thoroughly.
I have a soup maker which is brilliant. It makes a smooth blended soup in just 20 minutes and I’ve been eating so much more soup as a result. Making soup with bone broth is another important way to improve your gut health.
You can also cook Jerusalem artichokes just like potatoes – boiling or roasting them, or you can grate them raw and add them to salads.
Slim Wine!
I was recently contacted by a company selling a new wine called Slim Wine. Their wine is certified to contain zero sugar and zero carbs, so its suitable for anyone following a low-carb or even ketogenic diet.
How Slim Wine becomes Sugar-Free: As with areas such as Epernay in the Champagne region of France, the ‘World Heritage’ vineyards in Piedmont, Italy have the perfect conditions to grow the perfect grapes.
Each harvest is picked by hand to ensure that only the best and most suitable grapes are used for Slim Wine. The unique growing conditions are the backbone of what they do. They produce premium grapes that make lower alcohol content.
The production methods are proprietary but nothing is added to the wine, meaning the live and unique yeast they use has only fructose to work on. No additional sugar also means up to 80% fewer sulphites as an example. Slim Wine is certified Zero Sugar Zero Carbs by an EU certified laboratory.
The Autoimmune Protocol
As some of you may know, I qualified as a Nutritional Therapist last summer. I have been helping a lot of clients with autoimmune issues to implement the Autoimmune Protocol (AIP).
Recently I had a client who had Ulcerative Colitis and was very sensitive to FODMAPs so I created a two week Low-FODMAP Autoimmune Meal Plan for them. You can download this meal plan for free and also read my updated Autoimmune Protocol post here.
If you would like advice or support in reaching your personal health goals I am available for one-to-one consultations. I can help you with weight loss, show you how to increase energy levels and help you with meal planning as well as addressing various aspects of your lifestyle that may be impacting on your health and wellness.
We will discuss and address your gut health, sleep, stress and exercise routine as well as your environment. Contact me chloe@chloearchard.com if you want to know more.
Book Reviews
Ages ago I preordered a copy of Ben Lynch’s Dirty Genes which I have just finished reading.
After doing my 23 and Me test last year I have been waiting for this book to help me better understand my results and what I can do to optimise my health based on my genetic profile.
The book is an interesting read but it was disappointing that Dr Lynch doesn’t actually explain how to analyse which variant of a gene you have. The seven genes he covers are MTHFR (of course) and then COMT, PEMT, DAO, NOS3, MAOA and GST/GPX.
Dr Lynch explains that you can have a fast or slow variant of many of these genes, but does not explain how you would know whether the variant you have based on your 23 and Me results is the fast or slow variant. So for me this made the book less useful.
The book culminates in the ‘Clean Genes Protocol’. The diet recommended excludes processed food, gluten, dairy and soy so it is essentially a paleo diet.
The other lifestyle recommendations involve optimising your sleep, managing your stress and detoxifying from environmental chemicals.
If you are interested in optimising your lifestyle to improve your health then consider signing up for our 8 week online course: Live Smarter.
As part of the course you get:
- 4 Week Meal Plan
- Over 100 Whole Food Recipes
- Goal Setting Worksheets
- Fitness Workouts
- 28 Day Sleep Optimisation Challenge
- Detoxify Your Home Guide
- Mindfulness, gratitude and self-care challenges
- And lots more!
If you are interested in purchasing this course (for which you get lifetime access) you can use the button below.
Gary Taubes in London
On March 17th and 18th Gary Taubes will be in London speaking at the lastest Re-Find Health Event.
This will be a fantastic event – Gary will be joined on stage by special guests Dr Aseem Malhotra, Dr Andreas Eenfeldt, Dr Campbell Murdoch, Dr Zoë Harcombe, Dr David Unwin, Dr Malcolm Kendrick and Ivor Cummins!
Here’s what Re-Find Health say about the event:
For the past half a century, the concept of a healthy diet has been synonymous with a diet low in fat, and particularly low in what is all-too-often referred to as “artery-clogging” saturated fat, the fat found in quantity in eggs, butter, meat and dairy products. The result has been a national dietary prescription to eat ever more plant-based diets: copious fruits, green vegetables and whole grains ,while we minimize our consumption of animal products.
For those of us who are overweight or obese, this advice has been accompanied by the insistence that we got that way merely by eating “too much” and that the only way to solve our problems is to eat less and exercise more.
And yet this now ubiquitous dietary advice has coincided with unprecedented increases in the prevalence of obesity and diabetes, raising the obvious question of whether this advice and the belief system associated with it may somehow be to blame. Are they based on sound science?
And if they’re not, which the evidence strongly suggests, then how did we come to believe them and why? And, perhaps most important, what’s the alternative? Why do we get fat and diabetic, and what can we do about it?
By asking these questions for the past 20 years, Gary Taubes has become perhaps the single most influential journalist covering nutrition and health today. He’s certainly the most controversial. His investigative reporting on the science of nutrition and the dietary triggers of obesity and diabetes are fundamentally changing the way we eat and live.
Michael Pollan has described him as the closest thing we have to a “scientific Alexksandr Solzhenitsyn,” exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of current nutrition science. The Atlantic recently described his investigative journalism as so tenacious and obsessive that he had “fallen through a wormhole from reporting into expertise.”
Taubes’s skeptical, rigorously scientific approach to nutrition science is unparalleled and now he wants to share both the approach and the implications to our health and how to eat to remain healthy.
To buy tickets for the event click here.
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