The Fresh Network Blog

SubLime Green Mousse

Ever since I first made this a few weeks ago I can't get by without my daily fix. So creamy, so tangy, so cheesecakey!

(Serves two normal people or one lime lover)

• 2 small avocadoes
• 1-2 limes, freshly juiced
• 1-2 tbsps agave nectar
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 tsp Celtic sea salt

1. Scoop the flesh out of the avocadoes and place in a Vita-Mix or other high-speed blender.

2. Add the lime juice, agave nectar, vanilla extract and sea salt and blend. You may need to add a little water to get to the requisite smooth, whipped-cream-like texture.

3. Place in bowls (or a bowl) and enjoy.

Would you like fries with that?

I spent most of today editing articles for the next issue of Get Fresh! magazine, and in the course of fact-checking one of them, I found myself on the website of a well-known fast food chain, clicking on their nutrition tab and scrolling through lists of ingredients. And I mean scrolling. Here as an example, dear reader (as I am so shocked by this I couldn't not share it), is the natural goodness that goes into said fast food chain's bacon sandwich:

INGREDIENTS: Egg Patty [Whole Eggs, Whey, Pasteurized Process Monterey Jack Cheese (Monterey Jack Cheese (Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes), Water, Milkfat, Sodium Phosphate, Salt, Sodium Hexametaphosphate), Green Pepper, Red Pepper, Skim Milk, Potatoes (Potatoes, Dextrose, Disodium Dihydrogen Pyrophosphate (Added To Maintain Color), Potassium Sorbate (Added To Maintain Freshness), Swiss And Mushroom Round (Swiss Cheese And Pasteurized Swiss Cheese Product (Swiss Cheese (Pasteurized Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes), Water, Milkfat, Sodium Phosphate, Lactic Acid, Salt, Sorbic Acid (Preservative), Natural Flavors, Sodium Citrate, Xanthan Gum), Roasted Mushrooms (Mushrooms, Canola Oil, Salt , Pepper)), Butter Flavored Oil (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Salt, Soybean Lecithin, Artificial Flavors, Butter Oil, Vitamin A Palmitate Beta Carotene Added For Color), Dried Cream Cheese Product (Cream Cheese (Pasteurized Milk And Cream Cheese Culture, Salt, Carob Bean Gum), Non Fat Dry Milk And Sodium Phosphate), Soybean Oil, Onions, Modified Food Starch, Salt, Xanthan Gum, Liquid Pepper Extract And Citric Acid], Croissant (Enriched Unbleached Wheat Flour (Flour, Enzyme, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid), Water, Palm Oil, Sugar, Canola and/or Soybean Oil, Contain less than 2% of the following: Margarine (Vegetable Oils [Palm, Canola], Water, Mono and Diglycerides, Potassium Sorbate [to Preserve Freshness], Citric Acid, Artificial Flavor, Vitamin A Palmitate, Vitamin D3), Yeast, Wheat Gluten, Salt, Artificial Flavor, Datem, Dextrose, Corn Syrup Solids, Fructose, Sodium Caseinate (a Milk Derivative), Monoglycerides, Soy Lecithin, Locust Bean Gum, Colored with [Tumeric and Annatto Extracts], Ascorbic Acid, Sodium Steroyl Lactylate, Leavening [Baking Soda], Azodicarbonamide, Pepper Bacon (Bacon Cured with Water, Salt, Sugar, Smoke Flavoring, Sodium Phosphate, Sodium Erythorbate, Sodium Nitrite, Bellies Coated with a Mixture of Ground Black Pepper), Colby Jack Cheese (Colby Cheese [Pasteurized Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes and Annatto (vegetable color)], Monterey Jack Cheese [Pasteurized Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes]).

Companies make and sell stuff like this? And it's legal? To package this stuff as food that men, women and children then eat?

But of course nowadays fast food chains cater for healthy eaters too, so there are several salads on the menu. You can't go far wrong with a salad, right? Well, we'll skip the Chicken and the Caesar but let's take a look at the ingredient list of their Mediterranean Salad......... Just lettuce, tomatoes and...

Come and join the juice feast!

Have you been bitten by the juice feasting bug yet? If not, it could be only a matter of time. It's been widely known about in raw food circles for at least a year, ever since Angela Stokes's widely-publicized feast, but suddenly it seems everyone is at it! The signs are everywhere. Do a google search and you will find numerous blogs and personal accounts of people currently juice feasting (or who have previously done so). The Juice Feast Enthusiasts group on leading raw food forum Give It To Me Raw has 117 members, making it one of the most active groups in the community. And just in the last couple of days, two prominent raw bloggers have announced their own forays into the full 92-day experience (this will be explained below!) - Heidi of Raw Food Right Now and Philip from We Like It Raw.

Until two weeks ago I had juice feasting filed under 'Someday, definitely'. Then, without knowing why I found myself drawn to reading everything I could access on the subject and soon started to make it a part of my daily routine.

So what is going on? It's almost as if the '100th monkey' phenomenon is at play among raw food fans worldwide ; )

What is juice feasting?

Juice fasting has been around for decades, and involves consuming only juices and usually much less than your daily calorie requirement meaning (a) you will lose weight pretty rapidly; (b) you will need a lot of rest and might not feel great as the detox can be intense, meaning that (c) you may not be able to work or carry out your usual duties while doing it; and (d) you probably won't be able to continue on the juice regime for more than a month.

Then along came juice feasting.

On a juice feast you consume all the calories and nutrients your body needs; just in the form of juices (4-5 litres a day of them!) rather than solid foods. Though that said, a further difference is that solids are not completely verboten as they are on a juice fast; most juice feasters also consume a range of supplements and superfoods which may include MSM, bee pollen, B vitamins and powdered greens - to name just a few of the possibilities.

Juice feasting is basically about supplying your body with EVERYTHING it needs, but in the most readily absorbable form. Your body has to turn everything you eat into a liquid anyway before it can use it, so you're just relieving it of that work and freeing up the energy it would have expended on that - while supplying it with abundant vitamins, minerals, amino acids, fatty acids, phytonutrients and enzymes.   

A date for your diary!

How would you like to:

• hear two of the world’s leading experts on living foods nutrition sharing their most cutting-edge knowledge
• spend an evening among like-minded people
• AND enjoy some very special offers on the best raw lifestyle products on the market?

If all this sounds good to you, you will want to mark the evening of March 25 in your diary. We are delighted to announce that we are hosting Brian and Anna Maria Clement for a lecture entitled Life Force: superior health and longevity. This unique event ties in with the recent publication of Brian’s long-awaited new book of the same name.

You may well have heard of Brian and Anna Maria. They are co-directors of the Hippocrates Health Institute in Florida – the cutting-edge complementary healing centre that was voted 'The No 1 medical spa in the world' by the prestigious Spa Magazine. Those of you who have heard them speak before will know that their knowledge and their passion for this subject know no bounds.

Both Brian and Anna Maria have spent the past 25 years conducting ground-breaking research into living foods nutrition, ensuring that what they share is always right at the cutting edge. They are two of the most sought-after speakers in the field, and this event is a rare opportunity to hear them in the UK.

In this information-packed lecture, Brian and Anna Maria will zone in on the role of enzymes in health, healing, rejuvenation and longevity. Through their work at Hippocrates, this dynamic husband and wife team promote a diet high in enzyme-rich living foods. Living foods include sprouted legumes, seeds, nuts and grains, wheatgrass and a fascinating class of superfoods called ‘baby greens’. 

Health Food 'Junkies'

So raw food made another appearance on prime time TV last night, in a half-hour documentary which featured interviews with several raw fooders: Suki Zoe, Kate and Andy Richards, and Kate Wood with her delightful sons. American author and speaker Matt Monarch was also shown in action, during a lecture filmed in summer 2007. All of them did a wonderful job but clever editing ensured the show was like a whirlwind tour of Weirdsville for all except the very well-versed in holistic health and raw nutrition. You only have to look at the comments on this popular TV forum to see how the show came across to the average viewer.

It was by no means the worst 'raw foodist' media stitch-up job ever, but an indication nonetheless that mainstream TV is still not quite ready to take the subject seriously.

So the subjects were portrayed as obsessive, self-depriving and socially isolated, and their comments were taken out of context to ensure they would make as little sense as possible to the average viewer. So all of it sounded sane and reasonable and came across brilliantly...as long as you've been into raw food and holistic health for a long time and have read extensively on these subjects. The other 99% of the viewing public would have needed serious amounts of background information to make sense of it. That information was, no doubt, in the original interviews, but was promptly relegated to the cutting room floor once editing began.

Writing on the Give It To Me Raw forum last night, participant Suki Zoe had this to say about her experience on the show: "you do the best you can & then they take the bits they want & it's out of your hands. 5 hours of footage becomes 5 minutes & you just hope your knife skills don't let you down!! there was lots of great info that Kate Wood, Kate & Andy Richards & I talked about which didn't get used - that's the way it goes... ps. including me feeding the camera crew raw chocolate & their sighs of delight." 

The Truth About Food?

Have you been following The Big Food Fight on Channel 4 this week? Last night's offering was a documentary called 'The Truth About Food', which compared discount supermarket meals with the premium versions marketed as healthier choices. The conclusion: don't waste your money on the expensive ones.

The show featured three families - one eating economy ready meals, one eating premium ones, and the third cooking everything from scratch. But instead of delivering the obvious message (stay away from processed food), the majority of the show was taken up with the minutiae of the relative merits of cheap versus expensive ready meals. In an age when the truth about food cannot get out into the mainstream quickly enough, it is a shame that this prime time TV slot was not put to better use.

Watching last night's show we were supposed to be shocked that a posh chicken dish from Waitrose contained 2 grams more fat per 100g than a discount one from Tesco's. But conspicuously absent was any mention of which kind of fat we were talking about. 'Gourmet' meals, at least, are more likely to contain olive oil - although not a health food once cooked, still nowhere near as bad as the cheap and often hydrogenated (read: trans-fat-filled) vegetable oils used in cheap processed foods. But the programme didn't say a word about what kind of fat was in the respective meals, and of course there was no need to even pose the most important question of all when it comes to fat (and any other component of the diet for that matter):

Is it cooked or raw?

Another segment of the show sought to horrify us with the news that tests had shown some top-range ready meals contained up to 15 calories more per 100g than their economy equivalents!! Yep, as far as nutritional know-how went, watching this show was like entering a time warp back to the 1970s. The words 'vitamins' and 'minerals' were not even mentioned, let alone 'enzymes' or 'life force'.

We're honoured!

We've been nominated for two Vegan Environmental Awards : )

The awards are organized by Bristol-based hemp company Yaoh, and will be announced at this year's Bristol Vegan Fayre, to be held on Saturday May 31 and Sunday June 1. It is the biggest vegan event in the country and for the second year running will feature a 'Living Raw area'. Word has it that this area is shaping up to be even bigger this year, and as well as all the shopping opportunities there will also be a 'Raw Food Prep Class Zone' and 'Living Raw Talks Room'.

Back to the awards... There are eight categories and eight nominees in each category. We are up for awards in the 'Best Vegan Raw/Superfood Suppliers' and 'Best Vegan Publications' categories. How we missed out on 'Best Vegan Entertainers' we will never know ; )

We are up against tough competition as each and every individual and company nominated is doing brilliant work and truly making a difference. Here is what the organizers had to say about us:

"Fresh Network: The original raw website and community going back to the 90's, started by the wonderful Karen Knowler [*see note at end of this post] and now continued by Cary of Kiki fame and his team, with loads of products, equipment, superfoods, ideas and inspiration for all things living and raw. Publishes raw magazine Get Fresh 4 times a year and also organizes the Fresh Festival which usually has all the USA raw luminaries over for talks, demos and food prep classes."

"Get Fresh - Brilliant quarterly raw lifestyle magazine oozing with passion and a vibrancy that reflects the best of the worlds liveliest lifestyle - the Raw Food Vegan Lifestyle. Editor Sarah Best consistently lives up to her name as issue after issue breaks new ground in this rapidly developing journey of discovery into the most nutritious options available today. Backed by the Fresh Network, an oasis of wondrous living foods, superfoods and equipment."

If you think that we deserve to win in either or both of these categories please support us by voting now - and remember, you can vote once a month and it's not even cheating 'cos the organizers are encouraging people to do just that between now and the closing date of May 31.

* As some of you will know, The Fresh Network was in fact started by Susie Miller. Karen Knowler took over in the late 90s, building on what Susie achieved and taking the company to new heights.   

Doctors to be told to stop giving antibiotics for colds

This is the leading story in today's edition of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, one of the UK's leading broadsheets:

"Doctors are to be told to stop prescribing antibiotics for coughs, colds and sore throats because over-use of the drugs is fuelling the spread of killer hospital superbugs. [...] Using antibiotics too liberally has led to bugs such as MRSA becoming resistant to treatment with the drugs."

Read the rest of the article here. As it states, antibiotics are often prescribed for viral infections, against which they are useless. Against bacterial infections they DO work. In fact they save lives. The problem is they are being – and this has been the case for decades – routinely prescribed for minor ailments that would clear up just as quickly without pharmaceutical intervention.

Case in point: my son, aged five, who has never had a single course of antibiotics. When there's an infection going round his school, not only is he less likely to get it; when he does he'll be over it just as quickly as his classmates who were dosed up with penicillin. And if you're anything like me, you were probably given numerous courses of antibiotics as a child, when little was known about their side effects, but avoid them now. And have noticed that any colds or sore throats you get these days are gone as soon as, if not sooner than, they used to be in the days when you brought in the big guns that are antibiotics to deal with them.   

'Antibiotic' means 'against life' and these drugs do not harm only the harmful bacteria your doctor is trying to wipe out when s/he prescribes them. They also decimate the population of friendly bacteria in the body, leading to digestive problems. Over-use of antibiotics has been linked with candida, chronic fatigue and a long list of other health issues. The best course of action is a lifestyle that supports a strong immune system, with the back-up of a knowledgeable practitioner you can call on for the best holistic remedy should you contract an infection needing treatment.

If the reports are to be believed, soon it may not be a question of whether you opt for that healthy, immune-supporting lifestyle or go the conventional route with antibiotics, but of living that lifestyle or putting yourself at massively increased risk of contracting serious, and even deadly, infections. In other words, the safety net antibiotics have provided for so long to those with compromised immune systems – whether through lifestyle choices or misfortune – is developing ever more gaping holes.   

If you haven't already, invest in a copy of the current issue of Get Fresh! magazine which has an article by Pete Vincent of Cellular Health Investigation all about the subject of infectious disease, antibiotics, drug resistance and why your immune system needs all the help you can give it – starting right now.    

The Big Food Fight

“After this January, you will never look at food the same way again.” That’s the promise from the UK’s Channel 4 as it launches ‘The Big Food Fight’ – a series of programmes which aim to “raise awareness and encourage debate about food production, animal welfare and healthy eating.”

The series begins tomorrow evening and includes a show on the raw food diet on Friday. It remains to be seen how fair and balanced that will be, but the fact that this is the one show in the series for which Channel 4 has not yet posted a full write-up on its website is not the most encouraging sign. Here’s a run-down of the series:

Hugh's Chicken Run - 7, 8 & 9 Jan, 9pm
In three hard-hitting programmes, chef and food writer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall sets up and runs his own intensive poultry unit, with a free-range unit for comparison alongside it. The objective? To get the nation to realize the true costs behind cheap-as-chips (literally) chicken.

The Truth About Food - 10 Jan, 9pm
In the first of two specials from current affairs show Dispatches, journalist Jane Moore investigates the health claims supermarkets make about their premium ready-meals and asks whether consumers are being told the truth about what they're eating. Verdict: it's buyer beware as labelling is often grossly inaccurate.   

First Cut: Health Food Junkies –11 Jan, 7:30pm
This documentary profiles three raw fooders and Channel 4's website states that it "investigates and asks whether there is anything to it." But the short review (scroll right down to the bottom of the page!) on the site also calls it "the most extreme diet in Britain" and adds that raw fooders "believe" that cooking destroys essential enzymes and nutrients.

Jamie's Fowl Dinners - 11 Jan, 9pm
Fifty years ago, chicken was a 'special treat' eaten maybe once a week, but now, thanks to modern farming methods, it has become an easily affordable everyday staple. Jamie Oliver hosts a gala dinner to dramatically demonstrate to his guests (and the viewing public) the reality of how chickens live and die. 

The Diet That Time Forgot - 15 Jan, 9pm
Four junk food addicts are put on “the healthiest diet on the planet.” The diet of the Shimshal people of northern Pakistan contains an abundance of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, and is devoid of all processed food and additives.

Eat Yourself To Death - 16 Jan, 10pm
Jamie Oliver explores the disturbing physical consequences of eating processed foods and anatomist Gunther Von Hagens conducts a hard-hitting autopsy of a fast-food addict.

It's Not My Fault I'm Fat - 17 Jan, 9pm
Journalist Jane Moore investigates the common excuses for increased girth and reveals why the habit of dining out is adding to the nation's health problems.

I assume readers of this blog will forgive me for not adding a link for the last show in the series: Gordon Ramsay in a live cook-along aimed at turning the nation on to 'healthy' eating by showing them how to prepare steak and chips and chocolate mousse! No, really.

If you're already reasonably educated about nutrition and the ethical issues surrounding what we put on our plates, this series is in fact pretty unlikely to change the way you look at food. If, on the other hand, you happen to be a fast food fan and/or cheap chicken chower, prepare to lose your appetite.