Networking Lunch: Can good nutrition lead to a healthier, happier and better performing workplace?
We are delighted to have Colin McKeand with us on Tuesday 1st March 2011 to share with us his insights on very topical and indeed tasty subject nutrition and how healthy living and healthy eating goals can help us to look forward to a longer, healthier and often ailment free life. It is known that food is one of our greatest healers and what we eat can make the difference between feeling energised, motivated and fresh or feeling stressed, depressed and lifeless.
Colin is a popular and sought after speaker who has presented and talked to a wide variety of organisations. He delivers entertaining, interactive and powerful presentations and Colin will have a few surprises and promises to challenge your beliefs about food and nutrition. Full details of Colin’s company can be found at www.diet-nutrition.co.uk.
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BiG Event Report
Colin McKeand introduced this topic by reminding us that the way we live is greatly influenced by the way we eat and the fundamental factors in his talk were, there are a huge range of ‘myths’ surrounding food and what is best for us. He prefaced his talk by reminding us that in all things we need to treat the topic not in isolation but to look at food, nutrition, diet and lifestyle as a whole rather than something to be focused on narrowly.
Colin exposed many of the myths that have become fact in our understanding of eating and about what foods are good for us. He reminded us that in 1977 in the United States and then 1983 in the UK there was a complete ‘u turn’ of advice on food: basically fat was no longer good and indeed ‘demonised’. Subsequently carbohydrates were promoted as substances that we ought to eat much of, so therefore we were encouraged to base our meals on starchy foods, together with five fruit or vegetables a day and fish at least twice a week. In addition, the less salt we took with our food the better. The advice would be rounded of by drinking lots of water and fundamentally don’t skip breakfast.
Colin highlighted that the topic is a little more complex than the above. For example salt intake is an important issue but what do you cut out? Effectively sodium chloride is the salt that is not good for us but the salt we need is the unrefined kind and it is as important to consider the constituent elements of the salt as much as the amount.
Colin took us back to the fact that in 1991 in California a marketing company devised the scheme of eating five pieces of fruit and vegetables a day, this has been the mantra of most health organisations and government agencies ever since. The irony is, as far as Colin could make out this is not evidence based. It sounds good but what about the issue of what is better to eat, vegetables or fruit? Colin highlighted the fact that vegetables are probably the better for us and when we eat fruit we should eat it in conjunction with nuts and seeds because they are full of minerals and that fat soluble vitamins need fat receptors to absorb them.
He also highlighted the need for Vitamin D in our diet and with the discouragement to spend too much time in the sun, there is an upsurge in the vitamin D deficiency in the form of rickets.
It was quite clear in the way Colin was taking our talk that a lot of the things we take for granted needs to be looked at even more closely. He also highlighted that our food is the poorer now because minerals essential to our bodies are depleted in the soil and therefore we do not get the same benefit out of our food that we once did. Therefore he was more open to taking supplements to sustain the vitamin deficiencies that we have through the lack of poorer quality food available to us.
Colin also believed that fats were hyped too much as being bad for us because fat is one of the main nutrients for our bodies and that we have lost some of the good fats for our health, for example butter being one of them. Butter is a good food, especially butter that is not liquidised and put into a tub to make it spread better. Similarly, a diet with fish would be a healthy diet but where are the fish sourced from and what is the mercury content within them?
One of the questions from the floor was that even with good quality supplements to complement our diet; do they lose some of their potency as soon as they are opened to the air? Colin recommended that the higher quality supplements which were based on natural foods and plants were better at being able to retain their potency.
Colin delivered a talk that challenged the complacent attitude we can have to our nutrition, another helpful resource to our BiG seminar repertoire.
01 Mar 2011 |
