I love garlic. It’s a staple in my fridge and I chuck it into so many dishes that my wife occasionally complains. I always point out that we have had ZERO vampire problems in all our years of marriage. So, really, she should thank me! In fact, I love garlic so much it was one of the three superstar ingredients I wrote about in my book The Honey Garlic and Vinegar Miracle (you can grab a copy of it from…
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As I’ve said before I love gardening but I’ve had a disastrous start to my gardening year. For some reason, I’m the target of a local fox-gang vendetta – they’ve made a concerted effort to dig everything up. This is despite me using all kinds of natural deterrents. Constant rain, saturated conditions and the cold have made things really slow. And I’ve abandoned almost half of my crops to the elements or the animals! However, yesterday I was delighted to…
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I often rail about the unnecessary prescriptions GPs give out. Drugs with side effects are dished out to masses of patients, when a lot of these people could have found other more natural preventatives and remedies. And I’ve long promoted the idea that by making some lifestyle changes, especially dietary ones, we can reduce or avoid a lot of serious health problems. So I was not at all surprised by the results of an ‘innovative’ pilot scheme in Tower Hamlets…
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I had to laugh when I read this… It was an article in The Times, with the headline: ‘Buy half your food locally, public bodies told’. It was about how schools, hospitals and councils should get at least half of their food from local and sustainable sources. And it included a call for the government to implement a strategy to shift people away from poor environmental farming practices and towards healthier, seasonal food. Nothing wrong with that – I’m all for…
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I’ve had struggles with weight in the past. And I’m sure plenty of Good Life Letter readers have, too. So I completely get the attraction of a drug that seems to ‘cure’ obesity and make you slim again. But I also despair… Because it feels like we had a chance, as a society, to address the fundamental problems that make us prone to weight gain… The abundance of cheap convenience food… alluringly packaged products loaded with sugar, salt and trans…
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At the end of last month, I wrote about PFAS – also known as ‘forever chemicals’ – and how they’ve been found in 95% of strawberries. I had a few emails about this, asking whether thoroughly washing fruit would help? Alas, no… In a recent Independent article, Nick Mole, a policy advisor at the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) said that while washing food can get rid of mud, germs and some bacteria, it cannot get rid of PFAS. “The pesticides…
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