WHAT TO EAT WHEN by Michael F. Roizen, M.D. and Michael Crupain, M.D.,M.P.H.

what to eat when

I was asked if I would like to review WHAT TO EAT WHEN by Michael F. Roizen and Michael Crupain and as I’ve never read anything like it before I thought it might be an interesting read – and it was. I must say though that a lot of the information is just what I would call common sense, but I suppose not everyone has common sense. It’s A Strategic Plan to Improve Your Health & Life Through Food.

The main thing seems to be the timing of people’s meals. It’s suggested that people should fast for twelve hours overnight. I do that anyway. Eating late on in the day is not good for you as you’re more likely to put on weight that way as your body’s clock deals with the food differently as you sleep. It seems obvious to me that you shouldn’t go to bed with a heavy meal sitting inside you!

Pay attention to what you eat – that means don’t read or watch TV whilst eating. I so agree with this as people just don’t notice how much they are eating if they do it mindlessly. I would also add that people should chew food properly. Most of the very overweight people that I know eat so fast that the food hardly seems to touch the inside of their mouths. Don’t eat like a ravenous dog!

There are tips on what to eat when you’re stressed and hangry, fighting fatigue, bummed, experiencing grief, when you can’t sleep, when you get a lot of headaches, when you’re sick, when you’re in pain, when you have digestive problems, when you’re trying to get pregnant, when you need to shrink your prostate, when you have hormonal issues, when you have hot flashes, when you want to prevent type 2 diabetes … and many many more situations.

Unsurprisingly the advice is to avoid processed foods and there are tips on how to make that easier, but to me many of the foods suggested seem very uninteresting and quite boring, however I know from experience that it doesn’t take long to re-educate your taste buds. Nuts seem to feature a lot though as substitutes for something sweet. I find that if you are on a healthy eating kick then the best thing to do is to have one day off a week – for me it was Sunday so I always had a lovely Sunday dinner and pudding to look forward to during the week.

I don’t see myself ever getting excited over eating an egg white omelette.

Small amounts of dark chocolate are allowed. My brother in Holland was advised to eat that after he had his triple heart bypass so that must be a universal ‘medication’.

I actually think this is a good book for lots of situations as there’s advice on what to do if you have gout, kidney stones, restless leg syndrome, gallstones and also how to reduce inflammation. All in all it’s – Quite Interesting – and is written in an easily accessible style.

Thank you to Trish Collins of TLC Book Tours for sending me a copy of this book.

tlc

When Women Ruled the World by Kara Cooney

nefertiti

When Women Ruled the World by Kara Cooney is a recent publication from National Geographic and the subject matter is six women who ruled in ancient Egypt at the time of the pharaohs. The introduction is titled Why Women Don’t Rule the World. The epilogue is titled: Why Women Should Rule the \World. In between there are six chapters dedicated to each of the six women who had a measure of power in ancient Egypt. Merneith, Neferusobek, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret and Cleopatra. I must admit I hadn’t heard of all of them before, but I do tend to watch TV documentaries on ancient Egypt, so I wasn’t a complete novice to this.

I’m finding it quite difficult to review this book because although the author has a laid back style which makes it very readable, at times I thought her style was just a wee bit too casual. Call me old-fashioned but I don’t think that the word ‘kid’ should be used to describe a young pharaoh, it just seems so incongruous somehow. There are several pages of interesting photographs featuring statues, coins, jewellery, painted images and such.

I read all 325 pages of the book but at the end of it I don’t seem to have learned an awful lot more than I already knew. This is because there’s very little that anyone knows about what went on in ancient Egypt. Cooney uses the word ‘likely’ constantly, so it’s mainly supposition. However I don’t think the book was written as a means of educating people, it’s mainly about the female/male power balance. But what it comes down to is that at times men were happy for women to fill in and rule the roost until the young pharaoh was old enough to take over. Bizarrely the word ‘regent’ is explained, but maybe in a society unused to such things it has to be spelled out.

The section on Cleopatra is far more specific, but that is inevitable due to her links with the Romans who loved to write about her.

In the UK we’re well used to women having power and being at the head of things, I believe our society just isn’t as paternalistic as some others are. However, at the moment we still have a female prime minister because the men are all very happy to stand back and observe when things are too difficult, they have no intention of taking on the poison chalice and they want a woman to clean up the mess!

I have to say though that I have no time for those black belt feminists for whom every female is good and all males bad. Kara Cooney says: “It is the men who all too easily allow their thin-skinned sensibilities and lust for power and domination over their enemies to lead them to maim and murder.” What a lot of nonsense. Just think of Margaret Thatcher who took us into a war with Argentina (which she provoked) all so that she would get re-elected in the general election – and it worked. History is full of awful women .

Thank you to tlc Books who sent me a copy of this book to review.

Almanac 2019 – National Geographic

National Geographic Almanac 2019 over

Have you ever looked at a copy of the National Graphic Magazine? Well Almanac 2019 is like those – with bells on. It contains 381 pages of all sorts of fascinating facts and is stuffed full of beautiful photographs.

The contents include: Exploration and Adventure, classic travel, iconic destinations, the solar system, life on earth, world history, continents and oceans, countries of the world, flags of the world, the future of the planet – and that’s just a few of them.

I suppose this book is aimed at adults but I know it’s the sort of book that I would have loved to dip into from about the age of twelve.

My thanks go to the publisher tlc for sending me a review copy.