Who am I?
We were discussing diet, and my friend said “why should I believe you (and not Lola Berry), standing in your brown jacket telling me to eat cans of soup? It’s so boring”. Lola Berry is one of a bevy of young and gorgeous celebrity nutritionists. Good on Lola for making nutrition exciting, but I am not Lola Berry.
I am reluctant to claim the life changing benefits of stevia, bee pollen and kale chips; or suggest that losing 20kg in 20 weeks is even advisable. I wonder whether anyone will be using her fancy recipes more than once.
What I can claim is that I have combined my knowledge of nutrition with the challenge of getting an inexpensive healthy meal on the table for a family, most nights for 30+ years. And, I have seen my patients make lasting dietary changes and show improvements in their blood test results. It can be boring and it takes time. That is the reality of it. I have found that my picture recipes are helpful to me, to my family, and to my patients. They seem to make it a bit easier for people to make healthy changes.
My husband (Ian) tells me that I have to tell you more about myself. So, reluctantly I will. I did my medical degree at Melbourne University, and it is only later that I noticed that food, diet and nutrition were simply not taught in that degree. The situation is slightly better now, but not much. My favourite subject has always been chemistry, and particularly biochemistry. When I was a young mother I completed a PhD in neurochemistry.
I have always been interested in cooking, like many people, but knowing biochemistry really helps to understand nutrition and diet. So I decided to combine these passions by focussing on nutrition. I did a degree in nutrition at Monash. Although I learned plenty of food chemistry, it turned out to be the public health aspects that excited me the most about this degree.
I started working as a GP, specialising in nutrition. Nobody will be surprised to learn that persuading people to change their diet is hard work. It was stressful trying to motivate patients to make dietary changes, many of whom didn’t like cooking, and then come home and get food on the table for my own family. I had to find shortcuts without compromising on nutritional value. So I started developing picture based recipes that I could give to people who were reluctant cooks. They are really ideas and modifications of commonly used recipes. These have been for my personal use as well as for patients who don't like cooking, or reading recipes, don’t have cooking skills, and often don’t have a lot of money.
In general, my guide to what is healthy, is based on the Mediterranean Food Pyramid. There is abundant scientific evidence that this is a healthy way to eat (there are other ways as well, such as Okanawan Japanese, Californian Seventh day Adventists). What these diets have in common is that they are plant-based with little red meat, and focus on more legumes and nuts, whole grains, fruits and vegetables (especially root vegetables and leafy greens). Importantly, the Mediterranean style is not actually low fat. It is the type of fat that is important- plant fats rather than animal fats.
I was confident that my recipes were nutritious, but wanted to check. Eventually, I broke the recipes down into their ingredients and put them through a food-analysis program called Foodworks.
This verified that eating these recipes over the course of a week would fulfill all of the requirements for macro and micro-nutrients of the Australian Dietary Guidelines. I am not suggesting, of course, that you eat nothing but these recipes, but it gave me even more confidence in the recipes.
I went on to tutor medical students in nutrition for a number of years which helped improve my own knowledge in the area. And I became even more motivated for the need to improve diet after working as a surgical assistant in operating theatres for 12 years. It is truly appalling how many surgical cases are on the table that could have been prevented, whether it is joint replacements, gall bladder surgery, bowel cancer, just to name a few. No one realises just how difficult, and sometimes risky it is to operate on obese people either.
I first became interested in edible weeds living in South Africa in 2003. It turns out that many of what we think of as weeds, are actually more nutritious than conventional vegetables. An iceberg lettuce doesn’t have much going for it nutritionally. I have built up an edible weed repertoire of about 20 different plants that I use regularly. Where appropriate I often include them in my cooking. I once bought silverbeet and my kids said "why can't we have weeds? They are nicer than this stuff". I have done so much experimenting on my family getting them to eat prickly pear cactus pads, ground up wattle seed biscuits (that tasted like “sand”), and acorn muffins (I don’t recommend these).
In conclusion, these recipes have been useful for me and my patients. I hope they will help you as well. I am also increasingly concerned about food security with effects of climate change. We may need to become more resourceful in the future. I welcome all comments and hope that you can follow these pictures. I can alter them according to feedback. I can also supply scientific references, on request, to support any claims that I have made.