Compassion Fatigue Solutions

Photo by Sakurai Midori - Autumn Fruit and Vegetables Japan from wikimedia commons

On the lovely topic of food:

One of my very first memories is watching my Inuit babysitter roll and fry her daily bannock when I was 2 or 3 years old. I can still conjure up the smell and taste of that hot bread now. Fresh deep fried bannock tastes like nothing else you'll ever try, it's just one of those things. You likely have foods like that too from somewhere in your past?

I have always been passionate about food. I'm not sure why, though I recall that when I was young my mother and my aunt used to love planning meals together, poring over recipes and trying new and unusual things. I remember one hilarious day when my mom and I bought one of each of the new tropical fruit that had just arrived in the grocery stores. This was in the early 1980s and we had never seen these strange things before nor did we know how to tell whether they were ripe (they weren't - we ended up feeling like we had fur growing on our tongues and racing for water but laughing our heads off.)

My mother was also always a strong believer in healthy eating and tried to the best of her ability to offer us fresh produce. I am not sure how she managed that during the years that we lived in a place where the ship came only once or twice a year with our groceries but she soldiered on: she made home made yogurt, sprouted beans, granola...

Anyhow, this rather lengthy introduction is to talk about a fascinating radio show I heard on Thursday. If you speak French, you can skip the rest of this post and simply go to www.radio-canada.ca/radio/christiane and look for Christiane Charette's January 29th interview with Dr Richard Béliveau.

Dr Béliveau is a biochemist who works as a research scientist at two Montreal Universities. He is an expert in cancer prevention and is also a gifted communicator who aims to bring his lab findings to our dinner tables.
He has written three books on cancer prevention and nutrition:
Foods to Fight Cancer, Cooking with Foods that Fight Cancer and his most recently released Eating Well, Living Well: Everyday Preventive Medicine which will be available in English in the Fall of 2009. He also writes a weekly column in the Journal de Montréal which you can read online:

Here are some findings:

-Reaching your healthy weight reduces your chance of developing diabetes by 90%
-26% of Canadian children and teens are overweight
-Excess abdominal fat is linked to certain types of cancers (the rates are staggering: 75% of colon cancers are nutrition related).

Dr Béliveau recommends five key strategies to improve your health and reduce the risk of cancer

1) Quit smoking
2) Exercise at least 30 minutes per day
3) Aim to reach and keep your healthy weight
4) Eat a large amount of fruit and vegetables each day
5) Eliminate junk food

Key foods to add to your diet:

-Any vegetable from the cabbage family: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage...
-Garlic and onions
-Soy products (soybeans, tofu)
-Turmeric (1 tsp per day)
-Green Tea
-Berries
-Omega 3 fatty foods (salmon, walnuts, flax seeds)
-Tomatoes
-Citrus fruit
-1 glass of red wine per day
-Two squares of 70% dark chocolate per day

Of course you know all that already, right? But are you walking the walk?

My children were thrilled when I announced that from now on, desert would have to be chocolate!