Life with the Zoe-app, and recipes for a post-bacon existence

For the last few weeks, I have been doing the Zoe-app testing thing. And anticipating that bacon may not turn out to be a health food, I have included 3 things to have instead with your eggs.

Welcome to this week's newsletter – which comes from Tuscany, and is all about me getting to grips with Zoe. Today it was beautifully sunny, unlike yesterday when it looked like this:

Half the world seems to be doing the Zoe thing – if you are not, you might want to sign up  immediately  or you’ll soon find you have literally nothing to talk to your friends about.  

In case  you have been living in a cave or a hermit’s cell at the top of Mount Oblivious,   Zoe is an organisation filled with very impressive scientists who have been doing research on millions  of people on the subject of nutrition and human health, and come up with hard data and useable solutions to avoid some nasty and lethal diseases, and have a serious pop at controlling obesity.   

Given that the NHS is currently on its knees trying to deal with the results of the food industry’s experiment to see what happens if you feed populations with substances that look like food but are nothing of the sort, anything that keeps me from joining their waiting lists and helps me be thinner while it’s at it, seems a very good idea.

The first part of the process involves wearing  a blood-sugar monitor  for a couple of weeks to test your reaction to various foods.   They also test  your blood to see how it handles fats, and your gut microbes  (will not go into details in case you’re  eating) to see whether you have the right sort that will make you feel marvellous and live to a hundred, or the wrong sort that means you won’t.   Or rather, you might still live to a hundred, but feeling a sludgy, diseased, pain-ridden disaster while you do so.

N.b. You do not get  the right-sort of microbes by leading a life of doughnuts. Tragically. Despite a lifetime of lobbying by Krispy Kreme and Dunkin, they are still no closer to being a health food.    It is amazing how well the humble human body resists the  billion-pound efforts of the junk-food-multi-nationals to make it believe that their wares are some kind of nutrition.   And it finds some very clever ways to make its feelings known.

There is a bonus right-sort of microbe – a parasite called blastocystis (now there’s a bug who knows how to give itself a catchy name) – and everybody that has it is thin.   I don’t have it.    No,  I haven’t had my results yet, but it’s not the sort of thing you need a test for; just a mirror.

I don’t mind* that there are people who can be effortlessly thin  however much they eat. But I do mind if they treat their thinness as a virtue rather the devil’s own luck.

*Actually, I mind very much. I am just the person who would be very well-suited to eating as much as I like and staying thin – I am fantastically good at eating as much as I like.

And they do these tests,  because  everybody’s different, and all three factors affect what foods you should eat in order to be bounding with health and stop being a statistic in the obesity pandemic.

Blood-sugar graphs looking like the Himalayas are bad – those pointy spikes happen when glucose gets into the blood stream too quickly and insulin has to charge in at the gallop to store it as fat before it damages the body (there’s a reason why diabetes is so dangerous). So either they make you fat or they make you dead. It’s not a win-win  situation.  The spiky ones come with things like cake and chocolate; I can only imagine what happens with Grade-1-listed, ultra-processed stuff, because  I usually steer well clear, but my graph went pretty  haywire  just eating an M&S sandwich.

The ones you are after look like the Cotswolds, but without the celebs, and I got those when I ate lots of things with fibre – mainly veg and pulses, and a bit of protein. The fibre slows down the speed at which the glucose is released into the bloodstream so the insulin can sit around watching box sets instead of wearing itself out and making you fat. And as a bonus the fibre makes it all the way down to the bowel, which feeds the gut microbes.

But there was  some very surprising news about one of life’s most important delights: alcohol. I expected wine and spirits to give off-the-scale blood-sugar spikes, but they  didn’t:  despite drinking – well, I don’t think details of that sort  are necessary, but rest assured, my investigations were very thorough – my blood-sugar went down.   However, my euphoria at this get-out-of-jail-free card turns out to be less impressive than I first thought: the sugar dip happens because your liver is working so hard to break down the alcohol that it forgets to release glucose.  And despite my extreme optimism on the subject, it doesn’t mean that the stuff is calorie-free – or brilliant for your liver, driving skills or cognitive abilities.  Or stop you feeling dreadful when you have drunk too much.  Allegedly.

There is slightly better news on the subject of cake: if you must eat it   ( I must) or any other form of ultra-processed food, eat something full of fat or fibre  – an avocado pear or a salad 10 minutes before and it flattens the spike.  Which is as fine an example of having your cake and eating it as I have yet encountered. And probably why, when people ate their pudding at the end of a meal containing proper food and plenty of vegetables, the population was considerably thinner than now – when they eat their pudding … cake … chocolate … crisps instead of the meal.

And for some, the post-cake spike  flattens if you do 30 minutes of heart-rate-raising exercise immediately afterwards.   So leap up the moment you have licked the butter icing off your fingers and walk at a brisk pace somewhere, and then walk briskly back again, and the cake gets less of a chance to wield its evil worst.    Apparently you can also run, but I can’t recommend it. Yes, I did try it once, but people started writing to their MPs about the earthquakes. Blamed them on fracking. Which was ridiculous:  the nearest fracking was in America.

Given that I live on mountains of vegetables and fibre, I am reasonably confident that my gut microbes are pretty perky, but the thing that concerns me the most is whether my blood is good at handling fats

Am hoping that  it will be very good indeed: when faced with a roast chicken,  I have to dig very deep to not tear the skin off and leave the rest. And as  for that hideous practice that supermarkets have of cutting practically all the fat off their bacon – what do they think the point of bacon is?   

I have to say, I am very, very worried about bacon.  I think I am about to find out that it is not, in fact, a health food. I could be wrong,  but so far, everyone I know who has been doing the Zoe-thing has had bacon at the bottom of the list of things they should be eating, and I am not convinced that I will be the one person they say: make sure you eat plenty of bacon every single day.

So in order to prepare for this apocalyptic day,  I have been working on some additions to my morning eggs that don’t involve cured meat.   You don’t have to eat them for breakfast, but they are ones that I particularly like eating with eggs.  And they stem out of my life-long habit of always having tomato with my eggs.

As they are for breakfast – and therefore full brain-function may be several coffee-cups away – I am not going to give a too precise ingredient list, or a barrage of instructions.   You don’t want the start to your morning ruined by weighing things out or worrying about not having all the ingredients; if you don’t have something or don’t like it, leave it out or add something else – always bearing in mind that salt and olive oil make most things tase delicious.

A very simple tomato salad (tomatoes, olive oil, salt and pepper) does very well  – perhaps with the addition of some garlic and basil, or onion and fresh mint or thyme – but to stave off the bacons, I think something a bit more exciting is called for.    They all keep well in the fridge, so make enough to last a few days to save further faff in the mornings.

Israeli Salad

I call this Israeli Salad because I was introduced to it by an Israeli friend, but it’s almost identical to salads from other parts of the Middle East, and is eaten daily with most meals, including breakfast.  Which is an excellent idea.

This is my South-East London version.

• Tomatoes

• Cucumber

• Red or yellow pepper

• Nectarine (optional)

• Salad onion

• Fresh chilli (optional)

• Parsley, mint, or basil

• Half a lemon

• Olive oil

• Salt and pepper

Finely dice everything, including the lemon (and finely chop any herbs).

Add a decent amount of salt, pepper and some olive oil, and mix it up really well.

Diva Notes:

Extra ingredients

Feel free to add extras like avocado or pomegranate seeds.

Finely diced – or not

If you don’t have time to finely dice, then roughly chop,

You can make it in a food processor using the pulse button. It is slightly more like a salsa, but it is MUCH quicker and very good.

Mixing with your hands

Your hands are much better at introducing the flavours to each other and getting them really talking.  

Roast asparagus with roast strawberries

This blew my mind when I tried it out and I wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. It’s got a bit closer to being a recipe now, so I thought I would write it down before the asparagus season is completely over.

It’s pretty marvellous with poached eggs, but also fabulous with Greek yogurt – or if using it for an antipasto, top it with a burrata (pictured). I shared it with friends for my first outdoor supper of the season.

• Asparagus

• Strawberries

• Parmesan

• Olive oil

• Balsamic vinegar

• Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 200º / 180º fan / gas mark 6

Wash and remove the woody ends of the asparagus; lay on a baking tray – with enough room for the strawberries as well.   Drizzle with olive oil and a good grinding of salt and pepper.

Wash and halve the strawberries. Put them in a bowl and toss them in olive oil, salt and pepper. Put them cut-side down on a tray, either with the asparagus or on their own, and put them in the oven.

After about 20 minutes, remove from the oven; drizzle over some balsamic and a sprinkling of parmesan. Return to the oven and roast until the asparagus is cooked and a little browned, and the strawberries have begun to caramelise and are a bit jammy.

Put the asparagus on a long platter and pile on the strawberries. Add more balsamic, olive oil, and salt and pepper if needed.

East Street Market Breakfast Salad

This is a lovely fresh salad to eat in the morning.   Similar to an Israeli salad, the juices of the veg and fruit combine to make their own dressing. It keeps really well in the fridge so I usually make a batch.

It goes well with poached eggs  or a dollop of yogurt.  Or both.  And perhaps a few slices of cured salmon.   I can see we are rapidly descending into the realms of brunch…

• A handful of cherry tomatoes

• A small red pepper

• ½ small red onion

• 1 mango

• 2 – 3 kumquats

• 1 green chilli

• A sprig of thyme

• Salt and pepper

Finely dice the tomatoes, pepper, onion, and mango.

Thinly slice the kumquats and chilli.

Finely chop the thyme. If the stem is woody, strip off the leaves first.

Mix it all together adding a good pinch of salt and a few grindings of pepper.

Diva Notes

Herbs

Mint or basil would also work well in this salad. I chose thyme because a friend had given me a lovely terracotta potful for my birthday and it was sitting in my kitchen, unlike the mint, which was down three flights of stairs in our lovely communal garden.

Mangoes

My first experience of a mango was one brought back from Peru by my mother in her suitcase. It was orangey yellow and so juicy that we were given it to eat in the bath: it was absolutely delicious – sweet and perfumed; I had never tasted anything like it. She never went back to Peru, so that was the last I saw of a mango for a very long time.

Eventually, they started to appear in British supermarkets, but for reasons best known to themselves, they almost exclusively sell a variety of mango that is mostly green, and very often hard and sour.  However, if you have access to a really good street market – in particular one serving an Asian or African community – you can find the same juicy, sweet yellow mangoes that I remember.  I am lucky enough to live near East Street market in South East London, where not only are the mangos fabulous, but they are often incredibly cheap. It is out of gratitude to have such a delight so near at hand that I have named this salad after it.

Kumquats

I am a great fan of kumquats, but if you can’t get hold of any, dicing a lime or half a lemon is also a good option.