Top Tips for Eating More Fruit and Vegetables

http://www.5aday.nhs.uk/topTips/default.html

Some unusual tips at getting kids to eat healthy food:
• Sugar snap peas are a great choice for lunch boxes as a finger snack.
• Cut the top off a kiwi fruit and give them a spoon to eat it like a boiled egg.
• It can be very easy and cheap to include veg in evening meals – just add a tin of chopped tomatoes to a spaghetti bolognaise.

Unfortunately potatoes and other related vegetables such as yams and cassava do not count in the Five a Day Plan. This is because they are classified as starchy foods.

What I learned that was special:
• Peppers, mushrooms, onions or pineapple on your pizza topping count as 1 portion

Beyond Baked Beans

http://www.beyondbakedbeans.com/

This site has cheap healthy food for students, singles and anyone else on a budget.

The Beginners Basics recent features include how to make and toss pancakes, how to make a gorgeous gooey cheese fondue and how to cook a stir-fry. It is encouraging to know that the first pancake you make with probably be a dud but after that you should be able to turn out ones that look impressively professional.

What I learned that was special:
• If you want to make a basic sponge cake and don't have a recipe, just weigh 2 eggs, and add the same weight of sugar, butter and self-raising flour.

Sausage Links

http://www.sausagelinks.co.uk/

Sausages are judged according to taste, texture and fat content. In contests they are cooked by slow frying or baking and eaten hot and cold. Tasting cold sausages allows the texture and fat content to be assessed and many think cold sausages actually taste better anyway! The tasting panel ranges in age from 3 to 60 years.

A typical portion of sausages (which is only 2!) could contain around a quarter of an adults recommended daily fat intake and a typical sausage meal of sausages, chips beans could provide around 70% of the recommended daily salt intake. As with most of the better things in life, it seems that we should eat sausages in moderation - and if so we should try to eat the best we can!

Never prick a quality sausage! They have natural sausage skins and your holes will let all moisture and taste out.

What I learned that was special:
• More sausages are eaten on Saturday than any other day.

Food Commission

http://www.foodmagazine.org.uk/home/

The Food Commission (UK) Ltd is a not-for-profit company and takes no funding from the food industry. The Food Commission's work is mainly funded by subscriptions to The Food Magazine, project grants and individual donations.

The Food Commission has been instrumental in ensuring that the public, and the media, now have a much greater interest in the food we eat and the effects it can have on both our health and our environment.

Some of the campaigns supported by the Food Commission are:
• The Food Irradiation Campaign was a long running campaign designed to prevent the unnecessary irradiation of food in the UK. The campaign made clear that, 'good food does not need irradiating'.
• The Menu Labelling Campaign wants to improve the public's health by requiring fast-food and other chain restaurants to provide calorie and other nutrition information on menus and menu boards.

What I learned that was special:
• Almost 30% of household expenditure on food in the UK is allocated to eating outside the home and 30% of people eat out at least once a week.

Friends of the Earth

http://www.foe.co.uk/index.html

A book promoted on the site is Make Do and Mend, a nostalgic reminder of wartime austerity, but also packed full of hints and tips “that are still relevant today”. The government issued the leaflets included in Make Do and Mend to advise on how best to avoid wasting valuable resources by recycling curtains into dresses and old sheets into underwear.

Topics in the book include:
• What mothers can do
• How to darn holes and tears
• How to look after rayon
• How to patch an overall
• How to look after parachute nylon
• Smarten up your men!

What I learned that was special:
• 95 percent of our wildlife-rich lowland peat bogs have been destroyed in the last 50 years.

The Recycling Consortium

http://www.recyclingconsortium.org.uk/

The Recycling Consortium (TRC), based in Bristol, in the South West of the UK has merged with Network Recycling and SWAP to form Resource Futures Ltd.

One of the key projects is the Real Nappy Project, which promotes the use of washable nappies as an alternative to disposables. Outreach teams give talks and demonstrations in clinics, parent and baby groups, health centres, leisure centres, city farms, libraries and other public venues – wherever parents might be converted to a 'new' approach to an age-old job.

The project also runs a lending service, so that parents who wish to try out real nappies can do so without committing themselves financially. I am not sure if you return the dirty nappies if you don’t like them.

What I learned that was special:
• Every baby will need more than 5,000 nappies in their first 2½ years. At present these can represent half of all household rubbish for families with just one child. It means that in the UK we send 9 million disposables to landfill every day – that's about 3 billion a year.

The Centre for Ethics in Medicine

http://www.bris.ac.uk/ethicsinmedicine/
The Centre for Ethics is located in the medical school of Bristol University and was opened by Lord Limerick in 1998.

Top of the news list is Ainsley Newson, part of a consortium that has been allocated £1.8million over 5 years to study non-invasive prenatal diagnosis (NIPD). Dr Newson will work with Dr Zuzana Deans at CEM to lead on the ethical research within the RAPID project.

There is a long list of research areas that cover the Centre’s main areas of interest and expertise including children & young people, enhancing human capacities, end of life decision making, justice and health care and evidence based medicine.

What I learned that was special:
• Synthetic biology is the engineering of biology: the synthesis of complex, biologically based, or inspired, systems which display functions that do not exist in nature. Possible applications of synthetic biology could include the creation of systems to generate power, new medical applications, nanoscale biological computers, new approaches to cleaning up dangerous waste or sensitive biosensors for health or security applications.