Wholefood Diets

The wholefood movement grew out of the belief that eating food in as near a state to the original will do you more good. You will experience more energy and live a longer more healthy life. The idea is that hunter gatherers went about collecting berries, nuts and seeds in season, and killing animals for food only occasionally. Sweet foods like honey were a highly prized treat that made the risk of climbing trees, or roping down cliffs a risk worth taking. Farmers came into hunter gatherer territories and had to justify taking their land. Inuit, Athabaskan, Nisga, Masai and other Aboriginal tribal communities have had to justify their existence in the face of colonisation. Read the book by Hugh Brody called "The Other side of Eden", if you want a fuller story. 

For 16 years I worked in the wholefood industry. the obvious escapes many people's attention. For instance, food comes from soil, animals, bushes or trees. We used to visit apricot farmers in Turkey. I asked them why organic unsulphured apricots contained more stones and grit than sulphured apricots. They said that they dried them on the soil instead of cotton sheets to absorb the heat from the ground. We encouraged them to change their practice to avoid harming our customers. So what was the industry like 20 years ago? You would be surprised. Our immune systems were stronger simply because we were less protected from insects and vermin. Cashew nuts looked grubby and nibbled simply because they were grubby and nibbled. Sesame seeds had tiny insect droppings in them simply because the growing countries harboured an awful lot of cockroaches. Moist figs and apricots smelt fermented and crawled with mites simply because they were fermenting and crawling with mites. Mites themselves don't cause much harm. It is what they leave behind that causes the stomach upsets. Nuts went mouldy simply because mould spores were already present. Nuts sometimes tasted off because they were off. Here are some tips for choosing wholefoods:

Remember that most of the farmers have only one crop a year. Think of the part of the world were they are grown. Find out when they were harvested, add two months and you will probably be buying new crop nuts, seeds or fruit.

Avoid sales: special offers, two for one, they are probably selling off last year's stock. 

Buy your Christmas fruit as late as possible. The retailers will sell off older stock first.

Look carefully at the colour. For instance light and dark walnuts might be a mixture of this year's and last year's crop.

Slipped or Bulging Disc

I run manual handling courses. The participants look together at the causes of back pain. Here are some of their comments: Back pain is caused by poor posture, lifting things badly, twisting, over-stretching, badly designed beds or soft chairs, wrong shoes, body shape - for instance a long back, musculoskeletal diseases, osteoporosis, type of job, stress, depression, pregnancy, overweight, falling, accidents. All of these comments are valid but the groups never mention the most common story that people with back pain are told - the slipped disc. The story is that some of the gel from the disc or cushion between your vertebrae  is pressing on a spinal nerve and causing pain that radiates through the back and across the back of your pelvis. In my experience only about 1 in 100 people who come to see with severe back pain suffer from this condition. 

The bulging disc does not particularly lead to back pain. More commonly it affects the buttocks, back or outside of your leg or calf muscles. It might cause numbness to a big toe. If you lose feeling when you go to the toilet, or lose bladder control you must go to hospital as a medical emergency.

Bulging discs are not the cause of back pain. they are the result of a long series of events that start with the list that the manual handling course people rightly point out. To live with the story of a herniated disc is to take health out of your control. It is important to remember that you are responsible for your weight, your fitness, your posture, the way you do your job, sports, hobbies, your choices of diet. Just about everything in your life can come back under your control. 

Conception Childbirth & Infertility

As an osteopath women often came to see me with pelvic problems. Some common factors emerged. They either had back pain or sciatica. They had difficulties in pregnancy or giving birth. Emergency caesarians were sometimes needed. They had symphysis pubis disorder (SPD) in pregnancy. This condition is a softening of the ligaments that join the pubic bones putting a strain across the groin. It leads to lack of stability & difficulty in walking. In studying the anatomy of the pelvis and through helping hundreds of women I discovered that osteopathic treatment can not only relieve back & hip pain or some causes of sciatica, but also help improve the chances of fertility. A number of women found that they became fertile not long after osteopathic treatment or that they did not experience severe difficulties in pregnancy or childbirth.

Tesco's Value

A friend called Deanne did not like her own friend's choice of boyfriend. He was too much into himself. Deanne said, "Men come into a few categories. There is Tesco's finest. Then there is Tesco's Basic. Then there is Tesco's value. Then there is Lidls." I disagree about Lidls. You find lots of good value bargains in there if you keep dropping in. 

Energy Medicine

One of my daughters kindly bought me a CD on relaxation. The voice on the tape told me to breathe deeply and to experience an energy shower every day. I like a shower but I could not understand what she was on about. We took the tape back. It got me thinking about energy. We hardly think about energy until we feel that we have not got any.  We expend energy by work and lose it as heat. So every day we need to replace the lost energy. Where does it come from? Ultimately it comes from the sun. Light travels in tiny units called photons. Sometimes photons act like particles, sometimes like waves. Energy also arrives as heat. Plants take up the energy and convert it by photosynthesis. Either we, or animals eat the plants, or we eat the animals. Plants store energy as either starch or as sterols. Sterols are fats. Ergosterols are plant fats (ergo means work). Cholesterol is a type of human fat. Humans also store energy as glycogen. Glycogen is found in muscles and in the liver. How much energy you feel depends on your ability to convert food, and stored energy into work and heat. People who train their bodies to use energy become very efficient at converting it.

School Exams

If you don't  know the answer make it up and hope for the best, is a reasonable approach to exam questions. Here are a couple of creative answers,

"Flirtation makes water fit to drink. It removes particles like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists."

As a physiotherapist I like the following:

What is the fibula? "It is a small lie."

Near Misses make the best stories

Yesterday I saw an e mail asking for someone to help lead a Duke of Edinburgh Gold group. Someone else had responded by the time I had cleared the weekend. The leader still invited me to go as it would be great to share the group. It was one of my favourite stretches of white water, the upper river Wye. The Wye and Usk Foundation are a charity that manage the two rivers. They work hard to build the stocks of salmon, trout and coarse fish. I phoned the administrator Angela, to check the access situation. She said that there was a right of navigation below Hay and an access point at Glasbury. From March 15th there was no access above Glasbury. The only exception was if the river level was above the red line on the depth gauge at Erwood. I packed my boat and camping stuff for the 100 mile journey. Early the next morning I phoned the organiser to ask whether he had checked the access situation. It was news to him as he assumed that canoeists had the right to paddle the river. I disagreed and said that I probably would not come. It left me with a dilemna. If we took a group of young people on water that pushed their abilities, what if something happened? Where would we stand with insurance liability? Their parents would show us no sympathy if, for instance, one of them suffered a head injury. The insurance company might claim that we were paddling water that had no rights of access, therefore we were not covered. The leader was prepared to follow his understanding of the Welsh Canoeing Associaton guideline: paddle anyway and be polite to fishermen. What kind of example would we set to the young people? Given all of these questions I decided not to go on two grounds. One is is safety; another is the example that we set to young people. 

Later in the day I thought, well the canoe is on the car so I might as well use it. However there is a snag. None of the rivers that I normally paddle have an access agreement. My wife suggested Derbyshire but I cannot think of anywhere where I could go for a last minute paddle. Over 90% of the rivers in England and Wales are denied to canoeists between March and October. Is there a difference between a quiet paddle on our own and leading a group down water with lots of fun and some risk? I think that there is a difference.

This evening I checked the webcam at Erwood for the river Wye. At 8 am it had been above the gauge; by 12 noon it had dipped below the gauge. Does that mean that having driven 100 miles I could have paddled from 8 am to 12 pm but had to leave the water for the afternoon? No, because canoeists are only allowed on the river between 10 am and 4 pm. The situation for river access is heavily weighted in favour of anglers but note this: the close season for coarse fishing starts on 15th March. That should give us 3 months of uninterrupted paddling until 16th June. It does not, because coarse fish are thought to be spawning & the trout and salmon season has started. I am a fisherman & a canoeist. As a fisherman I find a canoe to be a fantastic way of reaching swims that are not normally accessible. In the winter I cut branches that block the river, remove fishing tackle and trim back nuisance branches. Most of the fishermen in Scotland have a different attitude to those in England and Wales. Paddling once on the Tweed, the river that straddles the border we passed a ghillie and his client. He ran towards me gesticulating wildly after I had shot a natural weir in their swim. I stopped a little puzzled. Seeing that I had a bowsaw in my boat he asked if I could cut a troublesome branch that was sticking up out of the water. Reaching deep down I cut the branch below water level. It would have needed a JCB to remover. Now what disturbed the fish more. The ghillie & his client were so delighted that they showed us a beautiful place to camp in the grounds of a stately home.

Fisherman might rightly argue that they pay good money for sections of river or beats, that allow them to quietly search for the fish. In comparison canoeists pay a nominal sum to a national body. Canoeists might argue that they would respect access agreements if they were fair. In Belgium for instance there is a rule that canoeists paddle between certain times. That keeps the hire companies with their inexperienced groups off the water at key times. 

Coming back to the safety issue. My memory of group canoeing and of Duke of Edinburgh trips is that unless the preparation is done very carefully, anything that could go wrong does go wrong, not just to trainees. Four times I personally have suffered hypothermia. Once I rescued a tipsy sea kayaker who fell out of his boat. The "victim" was rushed off in a Landrover to a warm bath and rehydration. I was left on the beach in my swimming trunks and cagoule at that stage beyond shivering. On two other occasions I was taking part in canoeing assessments as a leader. On one more occasion I had completed the four star assessment run by a hard taskmaster off the coast of the Orkney Islands where we used to live. 

Another experience of things going wrong was on a walking trip. As a gold assessor I took an independent role to the groups. However I made it clear to the supervisor that I was not happy with the route that the gold groups intended to take. It involved a traverse of huge scree slopes the day that snow melted, loosening the rocks & boulders. We comprimised in that I guided the boys group, the girls took a lower level route. Half way through the day I had to find a way down a particularly steep boulder strewn slope. I asked the boys not to follow me if it was too steep. They could not see an alternative route so they followed me. Boulders dislodged from their boots. I saw them flying down and took evasive action. One boulder bounced sideways and struck me on the back of the head. That started the longest fall of my life. I bounced an estimated 350 feet down the mountain in Austria 2000 metres above sea level. Miraculously despite a large gash in my head and knee and extensive grazing I broke no bones. The first aid training instinctively came into play, full body scan, stop the bleeding, reassure the group and call for a helicopter. The boys were great and I made a good recovery even though it took 2 years of living to win back my strength. 

Risk assessment always asks the question, "What if?" What if a young person had been almost killed? What if we had taken them into a situation way beyond their competence? What if the press got hold of the story? What if our insurance did not cover us? 

The experiences have made me cautious about taking risks. Possible litigation is a big issue. Balanced against that we must allow young people to make decisions, push themselves, prove their resources, care for each other and enjoy an adventure with a limited degree of risk. I would value the thoughts of others who have had to face similar circumstances.