What to Eat?

Oh dear! I forgot to let you know what the speaker said about the kind of food we should be eating. He talked about cavemen whose lifestyle was such that they didn't have dental caries nor heart disease. They had to hunt for their food, bring down animals or gather fruit and edible plants.

So indirectly he was recommending that we revert to that kind of lifestyle where we turn to Nature for our food. We eat what is natural, and not man-made. So he recommended that we be guided by these two questions: Can I eat it raw? Which came first?

Food that can be eaten raw will be good for us such as fish, eggs, nuts, vegetables and fruit.

As regards which came first, he gave examples of breakfast. Is it better to have a bowl of vitamin enriched cereals in milk or a couple of half-boiled eggs?

The answer is the latter as the eggs came first while the cereals are processed from grains and other stuff are added to them.

Eggs are a complete food and the most nutritious part is the yolk. It is healthy food and will not cause heart disease or increase your cholesterol level. Come to think of it, my grandfather lived to a ripe old age of almost 90 years and he ate two half-boiled eggs every day with strong black coffee ( kopi-o ) plus two packets of cigarettes which he enjoyed smoking.

Noodles, bread, rice, bacon, sausage: all these are out if we want to be healthy and avoid metabolic syndrome which is a cluster of diseases resulting from eating unhealthy food.

Sigh...... the unhealthy food are actually tastier than healthy food except nuts and fruit. That's why he said it's going to be very challenging to change our eating habits and life style since we have become so used to them. However, we can still try.... take one little step at a time. Take nuts instead of crisps or chips.

The Beginning of a New Life?

Today I attended a talk which was most informative.

The speaker is a well-known pharmacist and he told us that the majority of us are consuming too much sugar. Asians have rice as their staple food while Caucasians would consume potatoes as theirs.

It was horrifying to learn that a bowl of rice is equivalent to ten teaspoons of sugar! He pointed out that taking into account the bread we consume for breakfast, and the teh tarik ( pulled tea ) we drink at tea time plus snacks of noodles and pau ( Chinese pastries ) the total is as high as 50 teaspoons of sugar per day!

He said that sugar is poison to our system and is the cause of metabolic syndrome. Today’s Star ( a Malaysian national newspaper ) reported that many children as young as ten years old, have been diagnosed as type 2 diabetics. This type 2 diabetes or Diabetes Mellitus is actually a disease contracted by middle-aged people, usually those above 50 years old. Fast food such as burgers, French fries, fried food and carbonated drinks are contributory factors to acquiring this disease. Anything that contains carbohydrates contains sugar. However, fruits contain a different type of sugar called fructose.

If we cut out sugar totally, we will have a healthy body. However habits die hard. We are so used to taking sweet stuff, or for that matter, noodles ( which also contain sugar ) that it will be most challenging to change this diet.

I guess it will help if we visualize the consequences of developing diseases such as diabetes ( picture kidney failure, dialysis, blindness, amputation ),

heart disease and high blood pressure ( picture being incapacitated by stroke, semi-paralysed, unable to speak coherently )

against the sweet temptations of the palette such as our favorite food, i.e. fried food, fast food, cakes and confectionery,

carbonated drinks, syrups, etc etc. So when will be the beginning of a new life for you, sans sugar?????

Tawau, gateway to Sipadan Island

I was in Tawau for the last few days on an assignment.

It is a little town on the east coast of Sabah. Although it is very laid back it is the gateway to Sipadan Island, a renowned diving site that brings divers from all over the world back again and again.

It is only a 40 minute flight from Kota Kinabalu but the airport is quite a distance from the town. If there is no traffic jam, it is half an hour's drive.

The people here are very friendly and the sea food is fresh and cheap. Here are some pictures of what we ate for dinner.

The stalls have some batik sarong and apparel to offer but the quality is very mediocre and they are mostly from Indonesia. One can’t expect to get good quality products in the small stalls but if the sarongs are for home use, they are okay. The softer the material, the higher the price. My friend purchased a few pieces of batik sarong for home wear.

We visited one school. It is a large school with a well-kept compound. There is a koi pond with three small pools and a landscaped water feature. Very attractive indeed.

Oouch!! This hurts!

Haven’t been swinging by because of some problems. First of all the internet connection sucks.

One minute it’s okay but the next minute the message flashes on screen “Webpage cannot be displayed”.

Internet users will appreciate how frustrating it is to be in such a situation. Network provider could be inefficient or downright cheeky in that it distributes usage to different areas by turning off connection in one area to service another area. This is the case because someone whom I met during a meeting said that he experiences disconnection problems ever so often that he made continuous complaints and after that, he gets his connection. However it didn’t last long and he was soon back to square one. His experience lends credence to what I mentioned earlier. Network provider playing musical chairs with subscribers’ connections.

This is downright unfair as we all pay for the service. It’s just gross inefficiency and the usual malaise of indifferent attitude due to monopoly.

The other problem is the elbow which hurts each time I use my right arm. Sitting at the computer aggravates the pain so I’ve not been doing much, apart from the usual mundane household chores which have to be done, pain or not.

This is a recurring problem and the doc has said that surgery is an option which is not an option for me. So I guess it’s grin and bear it!