Month: Nov 2015

Red Meat and Cancer Risk

EmmaLeave a comment

steakConfused about health headlines of late and worried that your low-carb diet might give you cancer?

That might be the case if you’ve been reading the reporting of a certain World Health Organisation (WHO) study looking into diet which said eating processed meat increased the chances of developing colorectal cancer by 18 percent, while red meat was “probably carcinogenic” but that there was less evidence.

It depends on where you read the news of course as certain reporting of the story (and other similar research) has blown it out of all proportion – at least with their sensationalist headlines. Take a bow the Daily Mail.

Zoe Harcombe’s blog dissects the research and the headlines. I’d recommend reading it for a more detailed take on the story.

Personally*, I buy good quality, unsmoked bacon and good quality red meat. I don’t eat ham and other processed meats, mainly because I don’t find them very filling – but I’m happy to eat chorizo occasionally. The headlines don’t bother me in the least.

I’ll keep buying and eating unsmoked bacon and good quality red meat because eating them helps me maintain a low-carb diet, which in turn helps me feel lively and energetic, instead of lethargic, grumpy and depressed.

 

*A disclaimer here – you must make up your own mind about what you choose to eat of course…

What experts say about getting blood out of stones

kaitiscotland1 Comment

Is getting blood out of you a trial for health care staff? If so, help is at hand, according to Associate professor Keith Dorrington and Clinical Pharmacologist Jeffrey Aronson from Oxford University.

They reckon, that perhaps taking blood in the opposite direction, could be the solution for someone for whom the regular tourniquets, hands and feet in hot water, hanging the arm or foot down and gently tapping and stroking veins has failed.

When you have a chronic condition like diabetes, but possibly more so with cancer treatments, someone is always after blood samples. Sometimes a lot. A good sized black pudding’s worth some days. Or at least that is how it seems. When the red stuff fails to flow, all sorts of tricks can be employed but sometimes all you get is tears on both sides. From my own experience I would say that sometimes the best thing to do is to leave it to someone else. Once you have tried two or three times, confidence is lost on both sides and it is best to jack it in.

William Harvey described the circulatory system in the 17th century. The blood flows from the heart to the periphery, that is the hands and feet, and then back up arms and legs via the veins to the lungs and then back into the heart. The Oxford due have discovered that if you put in a small venflon into the smallest vein it will gradually fill up with blood that was intended to go back to the lungs if you put it in facing the fingers.  Worth a try?

Based on BMJ Article 17 Jan 2015

Last Word on Sugar Tax

Emma2 Comments

jaffa cakes 2Pictured on your left are two items – one of which a large percentage of the population needs to buy and use regularly, and the other is a tampon.

Yup, this is the news that UK Prime Minister David Cameron faces a possible Commons defeat over the “tampon tax” as a group of Conservatives prepares to vote with Labour and other opposition parties (such as the SNP) to demand a strategy that will end the VAT on sanitary products.

VAT on sanitary products currently stands at 5 percent, and the attempt to get rid of VAT is led by Labour MP Paula Sheriff, who is tabling an amendment to the finance bill. Cameron has argued that is the EU that sets the rules on VAT and it would be difficult to get them overturned.

An amendment would force the Chancellor George Osborne to set out how he would negotiate the end of VAT on sanitary products.

VAT is a form of consumption tax, or a tax on the purchase price. Jaffa cakes have no VAT because they are classified as cakes, rather than biscuits and cakes are zero-rated. Customs and Excise took this case to tribunal – and lost because the tribunal thought Jaffa cakes “had enough characteristics of cakes to be accepted as such, and they were therefore zero-rated”.

So – Public Health England has called for a sugar tax in a bid to reduce this country’s battle with obesity, as we wrote about on The Diabetes Diet last week.

Jaffa cakes* escape taxes on the purchase price because they are “cakes” (why do cakes get to be zero-rated anyway?), and in the meantime David Cameron drags his heels over working to get rid of the extra money women pay for tampons and sanitary towels on top of having to buy them in the first place.

Crazy old world, hmm?

 

 

Ingredients in Jaffa cakes: Glucose-Fructose Syrup, Plain Chocolate (19%) [Sugar, Cocoa Mass, Vegetable Fats (Palm, Sal and/or Shea), Butter Oil (Milk), Cocoa Butter, Emulsifiers (Soya Lecithin, E476), Natural Flavouring], Sugar, Flour (Wheat Flour, Calcium, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Whole Egg, Water, Dextrose Monohydrate, Concentrated Orange Juice (8% Orange Juice Equivalent), Glucose Syrup, Vegetable Oils (Sunflower, Palm), Humectant (Glycerin), Acid (Citric Acid), Gelling Agent (Pectin), Emulsifiers (E471, Soya Lecithin), Raising Agents (Ammonium Bicarbonate, Disodium Diphosphate, Sodium Bicarbonate), Dried Whole Egg, Acidity Regulator (Sodium Citrate), Natural Orange Flavouring, Colour (Curcumin).

Yum yum.