Eat to Save Your Life

I don't even have a decent excuse for not blogging for so long. Let's just say, Facebook has heaps of neat little applications and I've been hooked on The Hatchery during my free time.

The night before last, Jamie Oliver's "Eat to Save Your Life" aired on Channel Ten at 9:30pm. What an eye-opening show. For example, we all vaguely know that sausages aren't particularly healthy, but Jamie got a butcher on the show, who made typical sausages from scratch. He started by mincing leftover cuts of meat (they were more like fat and sinew lined with a touch of meat) into a bowl, then adding the preservatives (including copious amounts of salt, sugar and unidentifiable emulsifiers) usually added to give that nasty, cheap, tasteless stuff some flavour. UGH. I am NEVER eating a sausage again. I don't usually eat them anyway, but will at times have a bite of James'. Forget that.

True, I could make them myself or pay premium prices for good quality sausages that actually contain meat and natural flavours, but why bother? There's plenty of other stuff out there I'd rather eat.

Other interesting features in this 90 minute show were an interesting look at the cross-section of two people, one of a healthy weight and size and the other an obese size. Yes, literally a cross-section ~ they were two bodies that had been frozen and preserved and then slice taken from head to toe for our viewing and education. The freaky Dr Gunther also performed a dissection of a 25 stone man (that's over 150kg for the non-British out there). The amount of fat stored in his belly area was typical of males that overweight. What I NEVER knew was that the fat was so excessive, his lungs were tiny, only HALF the size of that of a normal man! Shocking. So a large part of the reason that people who are too overweight can't really do any cardiovascular activity without wheezing and half collapsing to death is because they don't even have the lunge size to take in enough oxygen to fuel their bodies.

If you didn't watch the show, it is certainly worth it. In our modern society many of us are eating ourselves to death, with NO IDEA of what we're doing to our bodies! I hope Jamie releases this show on DVD because I'll be buying myself a copy.

Next week, Wed 9:30pm on Channel Ten is another show by Jamie Oliver - "Jamie's Fowl Dinners", this time about the chicken and egg farming industries. I'm not looking forward to watching that one, but whilst I feel I want to avoid the discomfort of learning the truth, avoiding the truth never actually made the truth less true.