Eating for Tomorrow

I've been thinking about the future recently. More specifically, getting old, and what I can do to make my old age as healthy and happy as possible. Both my parents suffer from age-related ill-health, and I see at first hand how awful it can be. So I've been doing a fair bit of reading. Most of what I've read just confirms and reinforces what I know already. Eat good stuff, exercise, make sure you're not overweight, control blood pressure, keep active mentally, and you will reduce your chances of many of the horrors of old age such as dementia, stroke, and so on. 

Well I need to do something about it. I've put on weight in the last year, which has been a very stressful one, and am definitely feeling less healthy for it. I also have high blood pressure and have had for years, so I need to make sure it doesn't get any worse. So it's time to make a change for good. I want to be fit and alert in my old age and I owe it to myself, and even more so to my family, to do as much as I can to ensure that this is the case. 

First step has been moving towards a semi vegetarian diet. Eating loads of fruit and veg is shown to increase health and reduce the risks of so many age-related problems. We've always had a lot of meat free meals, in fact twenty odd years ago we were fully vegetarian. With the advent of more easily obtainable ethically and organically farmed meat we moved back to omnivorous eating but meat, although we do enjoy it, has not been an essential part of our everyday eating. Now I've made a decision to formalise how much meat we eat, and we have become weekday vegetarians. Well, I have. The boys have autonomy over their own lunches, as they eat at school and work. But Monday to Friday our evening meals are veggie. 

I've also done something I've been meaning to do for a while, and that's to join an organic veg box scheme. My purchasing of vegetables has been erratically green/organic/sustainable over the years, but I felt that it was time to make a commitment. So I went on the Riverford website and am now the proud recipient of a weekly box of fresh, organic, and seasonal fruit and veg. You know in advance what you're getting and can change your order up to a couple of days before delivery, so there's plenty if chance to plan meals around the week's delivery. And if I'm more organised with my planning, I shall save money, as fewer vegetables will end up on the compost heap because I haven't got round to using them. 

There are many reasons for buying organic. But the one that I'm focussing on here is the health issue. Strawberries, blueberries, spinach, apples, grapes, potatoes, apples, peppers, celery - all these are among the foods most contaminated by pesticides. And these are some of the fruit and veg that a) I use most often and b) are great at promoting health. It makes sense to buy them from an organic source. If I'm piling my muesli high with fruit in order to make myself more healthy, I don't want to be poisoning myself with chemicals at the same time. 

So, this is step one. Not a particularly painful transition, I have to say. Step two is a bit more tricky. I do like a glass of wine. And over this stressful last year we have found ourselves relaxing over a bottle of Cote de Rhone rather more frequently than we should. But alcohol is not only full of empty calories, it also has been shown to increase the chances of dementia, so this is another thing that we need to tackle. Unfortunately just going for organic wine doesn't really work for this problem!