Herbie Neil's Zoe Diary

I don't intend to post here all that often but here's an update with some (I hope) interesting snippets. Doing Zoe has been fun so far and it is changing our eating habits without banning anything we like.  I log the meals we eat and each week I get a summary of how I did on : Limiting ultra processed foods - I scored excellent last week Plant diversity - score excellent, I ate 36 different plants Fibre - I need to improve this from 20g a day to 30g  Protein (important for over 70yr olds), good but I need to up it Lower quality fats - good but I need to limit further. Here's a part of it For each of the above there are hints and tips on how to improve.  Here's a sample screen shot There's a lot more when I scroll down. I do try to heed the advice and it is motivating me towards improvement.  For instance we intend to eat more of various types of beans and legumes which are good for both fibre and protein. e.g. butter beans in a stew or a curry, or a mixed bean salad...

 Now that I have my scores, I've been using the app to explore the scores for all sorts of food and logging what I eat so I can monitor my daily scores and I'm pleased to say that I'm doing OK so far.  Kath and I are making a number of subtle changes in our diet and enjoying the changes.   Here are a couple of examples and how they scored.  I'm not going to bore you with this stuff everyday, but I thought a couple of examples might   On Tuesday I made a tasty veg curry and instead of having it with rice I just made a green lentil dahl.  Of course that scored really well.  Sadly I didn't have any mango chutney with it but that's a small sacrifice. I had a cheesy omelette with some spring onions and sliced red pepper in it for lunch and my normal fruit and yoghurt and sprinkling of all bran for brekkie.  And my overall day score was 71.  That's pretty good Yesterday Claire and Grace came round for dinner and we had 'fishy dish' which ...

 My Zoe scores have arrived and there is a lot to take in and loads and loads of food suggestions. I've shown a lot of examples here for you to look at. First things first. I'll tell you my three main results before explaining about all the goodies that follow. Each category result is a score out of 100 and broken into Bad, Poor, Good and Excellent bands My blood sugar control score - as measured by the monitor after eating the prescribed cookies.  The not so good news is that I scored 35 which is in the middle of the poor range.  However people of my age and sex generally score between 31 and 39 so that makes me about average. My blood fat control measured in the blood sample I took 8 hours after eating the first chocolatey cookie is a similar story.  I scored 42 (poor) but people like me score between 26 and 53 so again that's about average.  I didn't take my usual statin pill on the day of the test, so I might be a bit better than this suggests. I'll put in a...

 Interesting lesson today.  We've all heard of probiotics , but today I learned about prebiotics which are the foods your microbes eat and postbiotics which are the chemicals which the gut microbes produce after eating the food you send them.  This is what it's all about really because you need these postbiotics to produce vitamins, immune responses, enzymes, things that keep body cells going etc.   Getting the right prebiotics in your food is a matter of eating a good variety of foods, especially plants. The Zoe poo analysis looks for the presence of 15 'good microbes' that produce the important postbiotics and 15 'bad' ones that produce harmful postbiotics or just get in the way of the good stuff.  Research shows that people with the 15 good ones in their gut have all round better health e.g less belly fat, lower blood pressure, better sugar handling etc. Hmm I think I might have a few of the bad ones.  We'll see.  The good news is that Zoe will...