The Real Reason for Bargains is to Eat Well.

When I give you the weekly sales, I don't mean to have you drive around town to get them.

Instead, I want you to stick with your favorite stores but try to grab good deals when you spot them and pay attention to what is on sale recently. (Sorry, this won't work for folks in Southern Hemisphere, such as Aussies and Kiwis.)

See, you think bargains are all just about stretching the dollars and their buying power, right?

Well, that too but not so fast.

For centuries, people know to eat food at their peak, when they are in season.

When the food, especially fresh produces are in season, they grow faster, easier, more delicious and contain more nutrients.

Since they grow easier, the cost is lower and that's why, there are bargains.

Further more, we should eat food that is local and indigenous, if we can help, because these are fresher when we get them, they don't have to travel far and be harvested prematurely.

By eating local food in season, we make it more sustainable for our planet too.

So, by all means, buy the bargains, I mean, enjoy them when they are in season. I am here to help you notice it and prepare it, if you allow me.

Cheers.

Dessert Disaster!

When we eat a big helping of dessert calories packed with refined sugar and carbohydrates, which pass through our digestive system quickly and load up our bloodstreams with sugar in the form of glucose, our food mechanism would turn that big surge of glucose into energy and store it for later use, yes, in and around our bellies.

That means, 100 calories from syrup isn't the same 100 calories from a handful of almonds or from a bowl of brown rice in terms of how our body responds to them.

Foods with high GI, high sugar content and no protein or other nutritional value are usual a great quick fix for your hunger pangs, or boredom snacking, but they’ll leave you more tired, hungry and dissatisfied than you were to begin with.

The better way to eat is to choose snacks that will nourish your body and your mind – and keep your hunger at bay.

We all need tasty treats to keep us swinging until work is done in the afternoon and we don't have to give up all desserts, we just have to select a better kind, if not the right kind.

Note: 

Glycemic Index (GI) - 

It measures how a carbohydrate-containing food raises blood glucose. Foods are ranked based on how they compare to a reference food — either glucose or white bread. A food with a high GI raises blood glucose more than a food with a medium or low GI. The lower is better and generally, foods with glycemic index of 55 or lower is considered low, 56 – 69 as medium; and 70 and above as high.

Brown rice has much lower GI than white rice, while white rice has a lower GI than glutinous rice (the sweet sticky rice that makes mochi or rice dumpling.)

The same food can have different GI reading when prepared in different ways, for example, white rice porridge has lower GI than steamed rice.

When you eat rice with protein, that can lower the GI of the whole dish, as you can imagine the protein can slow down the break-down process for rice to turn sugar so it can't rush to our bloodstream as fast. That's why the same calories in a cup of sugar water as opposed to that in a handful of almonds have quite different impact to our body.

When Evolution Is Outpaced ...

Why do we eat too much and even continue to eat when we are full and consciously know we are undermining our health and shortening our lives? Why does our eating mechanism seem to be malfunctioning and going against our best interests?

The answer is, human beings have an evolved mechanism to eat whenever food is available.

Human nature evolved mostly on the plains of Africa, where our ancestors wandered around as nomadic scavengers, gatherers, and hunters, long before we settled in communities. Our days were spent looking hard for food. When we found some, it made a lot of sense to eat as much as we could because we had no way to store or carry extra food, and we didn't know how long it might be until we would eat again.

These days we have much more food than we need. We can eat as much as we want, 24 hours a day.

To make matters worse, we seem to have a particular penchant for sweet and fatty foods. Maybe these are fairly common on the plains when we evolved, so we did not need to be a glutton for vegetables. However, sweet fruits and fatty animal flesh were hard to get. When our prehistorical ancestors found sweet fruits and killed an animal, it was advantageous to eat as much as possible. So unless we work very hard to control ourselves, we feel fine and happy to finish that juicy hamburger and head off for dessert.

Our food industry has made so much progress while we still have the same stone-age brain that we inherit from our gatherer-hunter ancestors, with a hard-wired mechanism telling us to eat as much as possible. We are so out-dated, out-paced, out-numbered and out-smart'ed that it is for sure a tough battle to fight, but we have to try no matter what.

If we don't know how our food brain works, if we don't know what we are dealing with, there is no chance we can prevail.

To read more, go to Your Stone Age Brain.

Yes, I know. You want the recipes for good food. They are on the way...

Did you check out my salt page yet?

Enjoy.