Author: Akinrodola Owanikin

Top Reasons To Stop Buying Meat The Way We Do

Post author By Akinrodola Owanikin
Post date 19 May, 2015
No Comments on Top Reasons To Stop Buying Meat The Way We Do

When we want to buy red meat, many of us just go to the market or to the butcher and as ask for the prices of pre-cut section of a meat carcass. The butcher or meat seller tells you a very high price and we continue to bargain until we think we have gotten a very good price. The meat seller usually disagrees with you, lifting the piece of meat several times to show you how big it is. And of course the piece of meat truly appears big. We agree at a price, open our purse or wallet and pay for the meat.

That is basically how many people in Nigeria buy their meat. What is wrong with this? You may be expecting me to talk about the improper way animals are being slaughtered at our abattoirs (which is a very big issues) or the unhygienic was they are being processed and displayed for sale. No, this is not what I am going to discuss. Today, I want to try to be a cost-saver by showing you that we often lose money when we buy meat the way we do.

Have you even noticed that when you buy the white meats – Chicken and Turkey for example, the sizes you get at different times for a particular amount varies. What I mean is that some chicken that you buy one some days for N1000 are smaller that some you buy on other days for the same N1000. This is because we buy by weight. That is how chickens and turkeys are being sold and that is the way red meat should be sold in the market too.

Meat Content of water, protein, fat, ash & calories

I will use the following data to show you how you lose money when you by red meat using size rather than weight.

A typical red meat flesh consists of roughly 75 percent water, 19 percent protein, 2.5 percent intramuscular fat, 1.2 percent carbohydrates and 2.3 percent other soluble non-protein substances as shown in the table below. When we cook meat, most of the water are either lost into the cooking pot or goes out as steam. At the end, our meat shrinks and become smaller.

	Product	Water	Protein	Fat	Ash	Calories / 100g
F R E S H	Beef (lean)	75.0	22.3	1.8	1.2	116
	Beef carcass	54.7	16.5	28.0	0.8	323
	Pork (lean)	75.1	22.8	1.2	1.0	112
	Pork carcass	41.1	11.2	47.0	0.6	472
	Veal (lean)	76.4	21.3	0.8	1.2	98
	Chicken	75.0	22.8	0.9	1.2	105
	Venison (deer)	75.7	21.4	1.3	1.2	103
	Beef fat (subcutaneous)	4.0	1.5	94.0	0.1	854
	Pork fat (back fat)	7.7	2.9	88.7	0.7	812

Source: Food and Agricultural Organization

Some meat sellers even try to make meat swell by dipping them in water or blood for a long period so that they can ask us to pay more for it. If we had bought our meat by weight, water would have counted for little in the weight and we would have gotten more kilos of meat added. Therefore, when you get small meat with heavy weight, you know there is not much water in it.

Next time we want to buy meat, we may want to go to where it is being sold by weight so that we can stop paying more for water than meat. Insisting on buying our water by weight will really help everyone. This way, both the buyer and the seller gain; nobody is cheated.

ALSO SEE: Is The Red Juice From Raw Red Meat Blood? Is It Safe?

Food & Body

Reasons You Should Not Skip Breakfast; Day’s Most Important Meal

Post author By Akinrodola Owanikin
Post date 11 May, 2015
No Comments on Reasons You Should Not Skip Breakfast; Day’s Most Important Meal

The work schedules of many people have made them to perpetually skip breakfast. It has become a norm such that this habit is even inculcated into their children, as the children are made to eat only brunch at school. While this trend has increased over the years, there has not been a decrease in the calorie intake of people and obesity has become popular.

What could be the cause of this considering the fact that breakfast had been skipped by many? Skipping meals, especially breakfast, can actually make weight management a difficult task. Breakfast skippers tend to eat more portions of food than usual at the next meal. In this article, I will be sharing with you why breakfast should not be skipped for any reason in order to get your body system performing optimally.

4 Important Reasons To Stop Skipping Your Breakfast

man late for work — Photo Credit: jobs.aol.com

1) Why Start Your Car With No Petrol?

Just as it is called “Break-Fast”, there is a need for you to eat something light after fasting. You could ask lent faithful Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters about this. As a general rule, you should eat your breakfast with 2 hours of waking up. The body needs fuel to get going with daily activities. Your body’s metabolism will crumble if you do not start your day with breakfast thereby leading to moodiness and expression of lethargy.

2) Improve Cognitive Abilities

I have had my fair share of experience teaching children in the past and I could tell if a child had not taken or does not eat breakfast. This group of children pays lesser attention to instructions while casting their minds to brunch time. Parents should not drag their children into this as it greatly affects their abilities to comprehend in schools and pass exams.

Asides children, as an adult, you will notice your cognitive skills are more evident at work on days you had breakfast. The simple reason is that you had provided food and fuel to the brain to function properly.

3) Helps In Weight Management

Lots of people have been deceived to believe in crashed diets and have decided to delete breakfast. While they do so, no remarkable improvement had been seen. In fact, things got worse. In order to reduce your overall daily calorie intake for proper weight control, you must take breakfast. According to a study published in The American Society of Nutritional Sciences’ Journal of Nutrition, researchers found that calories consumed early-on in the day were more satiating than the same amount of calories eaten later in the day; this led to lower calorie consumption overall. Therefore, eating breakfast helps with weight control.

4) You Will Lose Out On Nutrients

The breakfast is supposed to be a low calorie, highly nutritious food. It is advisable to include some servings of vegetables. Your lunch and dinner could be a bit more calorie-dense. If you decide to skip breakfast, you have only deprived your body of essential vitamins and minerals which are important for growth and development.

FROM THE SAME AUTHOR: No Fats, Only Fruits & 1 Meal Daily Diet Bad For Weight Loss

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Food Processing

Why Don’t You Just Stop Eating Vegetables?

Post author By Akinrodola Owanikin
Post date 5 May, 2015
1 Comment on Why Don’t You Just Stop Eating Vegetables?

Two of the most commonly eaten and cooked vegetables in Nigeria are Celosia argentea var. argentea or Lagos spinach (Efo Soko) and Amaranthus hybridus (Efo Tete). These vegetables are very rich in nutrients and they do a lot in our body.

For example, 100g edible portion of Celosia argentea contains; water 83.8g, energy 185KJ (44kcal), protein 4.7g, fat 0.7g, Carbohydrate 7.3g, fiber 1.8g, Ca 260mg, P 43mg, Fe 7.8mg. This vegetable also contains micronutrients and is especially rich in Iron, vitamin A and Vitamin C. It also contains phytic acid. These figures are telling us that this vegetable is very rich in important vitamins and minerals.

The benefits of eating vegetable with these nutrients

Calcium is essential for blood clotting and stabilizing blood pressure. It contributes to normal brain function and it is critical for communicating essential information among cells. Calcium is needed in our body for the release of chemicals that transmit a signal from a nerve cell to a target cell (e.g., when a nerve tells a muscle to move). Many people may not even know that calcium helps in reproduction/fertilization by assisting the movement of sperm into an egg to fertilize the egg.

I am not going to talk about what each and every one of these nutrients do in the body as that is beyond the scope of this topic. The benefits above are just those we derive from consumption of Calcium alone; and Calcium is just one of the nutrients available in vegetables.

These vegetables, Celosia (Efo Soko) and Amaranthus (Efo Tete) are very rich in minerals and some vitamins and we eat them a lot. The unfortunate part is that we don’t get these nutrients by the time we eat them – that is the case in this part of the world. Why is that?

Why we lose all nutrients in vegetables

Vegetables such as Celosia and Amaranthus are not to be overcooked but that is exactly how we cook them. Some of the nutrients listed above here are heat-labile (lost when subjected to high temperature), so overcooking them means they are gone before they even get to your table.

Boiling vegetables in water at high temperatures is not a good practice, nutrients are lost in the cooking water and since you are not going to drink the water, the nutrients are wasted.

How Should Vegetable Be Prepared?

If you want to cook Celosia and Amaranthus, the best practice is to boil your water and pour on your vegetable just to blanch it. This will kill many microorganisms on the vegetable, inactivate enzymes that could cause spoilage and soften it to make it edible.

If you want to add your vegetables to pepper, tomatoes, and onions, make the stew separately and add your blanched vegetable to the stew. Mix them together and you would notice it even tastes better than the one you overcook.

This is the best way to enjoy the taste and nutrients in your vegetables. If you cannot prepare it this way…why don’t you just stop eating vegetables totally? Am I angry? Yes, I hate when people overcook vegetables.

ALSO SEE: How To Maximize The Nutrients In Your Vegetables

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Food Processing

The Dangers of Cooking Food With Too Much Salt

Post author By Akinrodola Owanikin
Post date 1 May, 2015
No Comments on The Dangers of Cooking Food With Too Much Salt

Cooking with too much table salt (also known as Sodium chloride) has some side effects on your health. If you do not know this before coming across this article, now you do. I don’t want you to get me wrong, table salt has a lot of benefits it does to our body – from supplying electrolyte sodium to maintaining fluid balance within your cells. Salts are often fortified with Iodine these days in order to prevent Goitre.

How Much Salt Is Good For The Body?

Up to 1,500 milligrams of Sodium is needed by our body each day. This can be supplied by the amount contained in 3,800 milligrams of salt, according to the Linus Pauling Institute. But many people consume more than this amount each day without noting the adverse effects it has on their body system. So what are these side effects?

Swelling In Parts Of The Body

Sometimes you wake up to see your eyes puffy or swollen. This may be due to water retention around your eyes caused by too much Sodium in your body cells. The amount of sodium in the extracellular fluid helps to determine the amount of water your body retains.

If you have too much salt in the body, the Kidney would normally reduce the amount of water passed out through urine in order to balance the salt level in the body. The effect you see is swellings in parts of your body, like the eye example given above, hands and feet. The skin around the eyes are so thin, so the effect is pronounced there. This effect may also vary with age.

Dehydration Of The Body?

This can be very obvious when you start getting thirsty frequently. You may be wondering how this could possibly happen when I just said that too much salt retains water in the body. Yes, water retention happens when you consume enough water. What happens when you don’t? Salt in your body needs water to balance it out, but when you don’t have enough without water in your diet, your body may pull water from within your cells. At this point, you would normally start seeing symptoms such as nausea, dizziness, stomach cramps and thirst.

Too Much Salt Causes High Blood Pressure!

As explained above, too much Sodium and chloride in the body can make the body retain more water than necessary. The extra fluids that build up in body tissues in turn increases volume of the blood. The increased volume of the blood causes it to push against blood vessel walls — and the result is high blood pressure, or what we call hypertension.

Since symptoms of high blood pressure are not usually very obvious at the initial stages, damages to blood vessels, as well as the heart and kidneys would have happened. The most common noticeable effects of high blood pressure are usually stroke or heart attack.

Like it was pointed out in the first paragraph of this article, cooking salt or table salt has a lot benefits in the body but this should not exceed the recommended daily intake.