Ideaplants

I just listened to an entertaining iTunesU podcast on Nutrition by Berkeley University taught by Nancy Amy. The topic: Alcohol


“That men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains” is the Shakespeare quote that opens the discussion.


Nancy explains how alcohol enters your stomach and gets absorbed so quickly that it can get to your brain in less than a minute. As stated by Bert Valley, alcohol has been consumed for over 10000 years. One reason that made our ancestors drink was the fact that people knew about the contamination of water and the impacts this could have on the human body (e.g. diseases). Since not many people had access to clean water they simply used fermentation to purify the water. That is one important reason why alcoholic beverages were so popular in the Western world back in ancient times…


In Asia another method became popular to purify water and avoid diseases: cooking water and brewing tea.
As in Western Europe alcohol was consumed over generations, the gene that helps us absorb a fair part of the alcohol became a quite important feature in daily life while in the Asian world, the gene was not needed and therefore did not develop as strongly in the Asian gene pool.


Interesting that the issue of water contaminations brought us to a regular consumption of alcohol, isn’t it?


For more lectures on Nutrition by Berkeley University have a look here 

This blog post is about meat, fish and veggies and how you can easily make better choices.

Meat
Am not going to go into the environmental effects of meat production (especially red meat), but rest assured it takes a lot more energy and causes more pollution to produce. For more info, you can start reading here or here.
Against what you may expect I am not going to advertise going all vegetarian. Why? Because I believe that everybody’s body works differently and that sustainable solutions mean that they have to be a free choice.
Take me for example, I consider myself 95% vegetarian (sorry if you are a 100% vegetarian and this offended you), but this is my sustainable approach (I don’t care if my food has touched meat (makes it way easier to be invited for dinner), I eat fish (whilst recently paying attention to MSC..) and I will have duck for Christmas!)
Somebody once told me rather than buying the cheapest meat to eat every day, he now buys quality meat to eat once a week and I thought that was a great approach. As a side effect he discovered his creativity in the kitchen (and his taste butts )

Fish
According to Greenpeace “More than 70 percent of the world’s fisheries are ‘fully exploited’, ‘over exploited’ or ‘significantly depleted’ (click here for more info), but there are still fish that can be consumed with a good conscience. The Marine Stewards Council is labelling them with their MSC logo, so keep your eye out for that! But even outside the labelled items there are better and worse choices, click here for a printable overview (which by the way fits conveniently into any wallet).

Vegetables
The less vegetables (or any food for that matter) travel to get onto our plate, the better – not just because of the transport costs, chances are they will be fresher (vitamins!) as well. Here two charts (pdf, html) for which vegetables are in season (paying attention to low prices in supermarkets and Belgian product logo gives you a pretty good idea as well ). You can even order a calendar for 2011 with this info at info@bruxellesenvironnement.be (pdf version here). Alternatively there are the deliveries of organic and seasonal fruit right to your doorstep.

Bon appetit,
Sylvia

Links:
Organic food deliveries in Brussels (of course there are more.. but I don’t know them :-S):
http://www.vevyweron.be
http://www.reason2.be