There’s a general consensus that omega-3 fatty acids (like fish oils) are generally good for your health, and help treat many chronic health problems; but did you know that how much omega-3 oils are in your diet isn’t as important as their balance with your omega-6 intake?

The difference between omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids is purely molecular – they have a slightly different structure that makes the omega-3 molecules a little more flexible, and omega-6 molecules a little stiffer. Both have a role to play in your body, but in our modern diet the ratio has become so skewed as to be unhealthy.

Omega-3 fatty acids are naturally anti-inflammatory, soothing arthritic joints and skin rashes, and even reducing depression and anxiety.

Why do they affect your thinking? It’s all to do with cell membrane flexibility (remember that difference in the molecular structure of omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids). Your brain is mostly fat, and the more flexible your brain cell membranes (from a better omega-3 intake), the more effectively your brain will be able to transmit messages from one cell to another.

In the stone age, before we began gathering in villages and farming, our diets had a very different omega-3 / omega-6 ratio: about one to one. This is because our diets were much richer in seafood (easier to catch than a large animal) nuts, seeds and oily fruits, and had almost no dairy, meat or grains (all rich sources of omega-6 fatty acids).

As human settlements became more industrialised, our diet began to contain less seafood, and more meats, dairy and grains. A modern diet now contains about 10 times as much omega-6 as omega-3 oils. The result? Lots of chronic disease that stems from inflammation, and lots of mood disorders through our population.

You could take a large amount of fish oil capsules to take up the gap; but it’s more fun to change your diet and include more foods higher in omega-3 oils . This will naturally decrease the proportion of omega-6 oils in your diet.

As you change your diet to favour omega-3 oils, you’ll notice your skin becoming softer and more flexible; stiff or painful joints may ease; and if your mood tends to be low or anxious, you may notice a change there too.

Foods to improve your omega-3 / omega-6 balance:

-          Seafood, especially oily fish like sardines, salmon and tuna. Try sardines on toast with tomato paste and spring onions for breakfast.

-          Nuts (not peanuts). Walnuts are especially valuable, and make a great snack with some fresh fruit.

-          Oily fruit like avocado and olives: Use olive oil for cooking; add avocado to your salad.

Foods to eat less of:

-          Butter and yellow cheese: Loaded with saturated fat! Use avocado or hummus as a spread instead.

-          Pastries, cakes and biscuits: Choose fresh fruit and nuts for a snack instead.

-          Fatty, processed meats (ham, bacon, salami)

If  you’re going to use a spread on your sandwich, on your toast, or topping your baked potato, why not give that flavourless margarine a miss, and avoid the saturated fat-laden butter. Choose a spread that’s going to give you lots of flavour and the added benefits of vitamins and minerals too. It’s the humble avocado, an oily fruit that will give your lunchtime salad a gourmet twist, and contribute mightily to your nutrition.

Nature designed the avocado as the nutritious pulp that would help the seed within it grow a new tree; so the avocado fruit contains almost every vitamin and mineral you can think of. More fun than a vitamin tablet.  If you’re trying to put on weight, or recovering from illness and don’t have much appetite, avocados can give you a nutritional boost without overloading your stomach.

The humble avocado is a very nutrient-dense food, particularly when it comes to fat content. Although it’s mostly good oil, there is still a lot of it. Half an avocado (without the stone) weighs about 100g, and that half-avocado contains around 20g fat. If you’re a woman who spends most of her day sitting at a desk, that half-avocado will provide almost half your recommended daily maximum fat intake. So enjoy some of that avocado, but don’t go overboard! A good ‘serving size’ is about 25-30g.

Avocados taste best when they’ve been allowed to ripen and their flesh is creamy. Just cut the fruit in half lengthwise, prise out and discard the seed, then slice, scrape or scoop the flesh out. The cut edge will turn a dark colour on exposure to air, but you can prevent this by sprinkling some lemon juice or vinegar over.  If you have avocado left over, store in an airtight container in the fridge. It will keep for a few days.

Here are some easy ways to enjoy your avocado:

-          Bake a starchy Sebago potato, serve topped with a few slices of avocado and some cracked black pepper.

-          Spread your salad sandwich with avocado instead of butter or margarine.

-          Blend avocado with a little liquid to create a creamy salad dressing, or a dip for carrot and celery sticks. Try a mixture of lemon juice and a little chilli; or apple cider vinegar and seed mustard. The right flavour for dressings and dips is a very individual choice, so taste test to get the right mix for you.

-          Make up a Mexican bean dip then create nachos using corn chips, fresh diced tomato and blended avocado. No cheese needed!

-          Toast some high quality sourdough rye bread, top with a few slices of avocado and a poached egg.

-          Make your lunchtime salad exotic by adding some cubed avocado. I like it with a salad of greens, tomato, cucumber and black eyed beans.

What's your favourite way to enjoy avocados?

You’ve got to admit it – as a major organ, your brain is kept pretty busy. Not just with making decisions about what you’ll have for lunch, but with orchestrating the co-ordination of your immunity, hormones, digestion, and all the involuntary muscle movements. Oh, and checking that your heart is still beating. Your brain is active 24 hours a day, and needs a steady supply of glucose to keep firing those neurotransmitters.

Alas, your brain isn’t good at storing glucose for lean periods, so it relies on your blood delivering fuel on demand. If supply falls too low, your brain will prompt you to eat.

Ever found yourself with a foggy brain mid-afternoon? Life seems to move into slow motion as you mentally struggle with normally simple tasks. At the same time, you might experience an intense craving for something sweet, or some coffee. This comes from your brain signalling that your blood sugar level is low, and it needs more glucose, fast, to keep working.

It’s tempting to reach for some cake and coffee, and that will certainly boost your blood sugar level . Your brain will be refuelled - but not for long.  This kind of food isn’t sustaining, so you can expect your energy levels and thinking power to drop again within a couple of hours.

For students’ this kind of energy rollercoaster can have devastating effects on their success (who wants to have brain fog during an exam?). Other people can experience nasty mood swings as their blood glucose level goes up and down rapidly. But you can take three easy steps to keep your brain fed and happy, and if you follow them, you can expect to start losing the brain fog within a few days:

1. Eat a protein-based breakfast. Odd, but what you eat for breakfast will influence how you feel mid afternoon. That old-fashioned practice of making breakfast the main meal of the day is going to give you sustained energy, because it takes longer to digest. Eggs are ideal. My favourite is a poached salmon fillet on home made baked beans (recipe for the baked beans here)
2. Don’t give into the temptation to use a sugary snack or caffeine-laced drink to get you going again when your energy slump s. Choose something sustaining that has just a little sweetness in it – like nut butter spread on celery sticks, with a few sultanas. Or breakfast cereal, which makes a great afternoon snack. Or fresh fruit and a handful of nuts.
3. Exercise. Every day! As soon as you start exercising your body becomes more sensitive to insulin, and more able to keep your blood glucose level within healthy limits.

If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also enjoy "Why you might be on the mood swing" or "The Trap of the Low Fat Diet"

If you suffer from chronic inflammation (think chronic joint pain, skin problems that won’t resolve, that sort of thing) you may be able to ease that discomfort a little by deliberately choosing foods that are anti-inflammatory (and avoiding the foods that promote inflammation).

Its easier to get a handle on this when you consider that everything you eat gets broken down into a biochemical mixture of molecules that your body then processes to create a whole new set of molecules: To build new cells, feed your brain, promote immunity etc. Some foods that you eat can actually cause more inflammation, exacerbating the pain and discomfort you’re already experiencing. And some foods can help calm that inflammation too.

The foods that can make your problem worse are, not surprisingly, foods of our modern industrial age: sugar, saturated fats, additives. Foods like biscuits, sugary doughnuts, sugar or syrup in coffee and tea….the list goes on and on. Its always an interesting exercise to write down everything you eat and drink during a day, then go back over the list and highlight any of the foods that contained sugar (you can find out by reading the nutrition label on the packet) or where you added sugar.

Our modern diet is remarkably unbalanced in our fat intake – we eat way too many omega-6 oils (from farmed meat, grains, dairy) and way too little omega-3 oils (from seafood, nuts, seeds, oily plants like avocado). This is why fish oil supplements work so well in calming inflamed, painful joints – because they help re-balance your fat intake.

The vitamins and minerals in some foods also helps your body create the right biochemical reactions to calm inflammation.

Foods that will help calm inflammation:

-          Seafood, especially oily fish like salmon, tuna and sardines

-          fresh vegetables and fruit

-          raw nuts, seeds, oily fruit

Foods that aggravate inflammation when you eat too much:

-          sugar (including soft drinks, sweets)

-          processed grains (made with white flour, like pastry)

-          deep fried foods

-          highly processed fatty foods (like potato crisps)

If you’d like to assess just how pro-inflammatory or anti-inflammatory a particular food is, there’s a web site that provides this kind of data: www.nutritiondata.self.com Do a search for the food that interests you and you’ll see charts that include the inflammation factor rating. For example, butter has an inflammation rating of -720 (its strongly inflammatory due to its high saturated fat content) and sardines have an inflammation rating of 763 (strongly anti-inflammatory due to their high content of omega-3 oils).

We all know how healthy fruit is – packed with vitamins, minerals, fibre. But its important to make sure your fruit intake is a balanced part of your nutrition, not elbowing other important components out of the way. And the way you eat that fruit is important too. Here’s why:

1. Fruit is full of natural sugars. Sometimes it can be surprising just how much sugar you’re getting! Ideally, restrict your total sugar intake for the day to 10% of your calories, or 25g.  Here is the sugar content of common fruits:
1. Banana: 13g sugar in one medium banana
2. Apple: 14g sugar in one medium apple
3. Strawberries: 7g sugar in one cup of strawberries
4. Oranges: 21g sugar in one medium orange
5. Grapes: 19g sugar in 22 green grapes

You can see how just two pieces of fruit is enough, even without sugar that you get from other sources during your day.

2. Be especially rigorous with monitoring your fruit intake if you tend to suffer from thrush, candida infections, or skin fungal infections (fungal infections just love to feed on sugar!)

3. Fruit is full of fibre, especially soluble fibre, which will help keep your bowels healthy and lower your cholesterol – but if you juice the fruit you’ll miss out. Fruit juice is actually a very sugary drink, without the fibre to slow down the sugar absorption. So wherever possible, choose to eat a piece of whole raw fruit rather than juicing it.

4. Eat fruit in season. We are truly blessed with the massive range of fresh fruit available to us, and it changes all year round. Even better, the fruit that’s in season will be cheaper. So don’t feel compelled to stick to the same fruit selection week in week out!

5. When eaten as a snack, add in some protein food like low fat yoghurt or raw nuts. The protein will help slow the absorption of the sugar in the fruit, giving you a steadier blood sugar level.

6. Dried fruit is really concentrated, making it too easy to eat a lot. So always eat dried fruit with other food to avoid a blood sugar ‘spike’.

7. Use your fruit before your fitness training for a carbohydrate boost. Especially important if you do your training before breakfast. After an hour’s training you will need another fruit boost.

Did you find yourself hesitating the last time you purchased some spread for your morning toast? Perhaps you were intrigued by the alternatives to jam: Fruit spreads and sugar-free jam. Are they really healthier? I'd like to help you make an informed decision next time you're standing in that aisle of the supermarket.

When making spreads labelled as 'jam', Food Standards Australia New Zealand (who set nutrition labelling regulations here in Australia) require that the jar contain no less than 40% fruit.

And if you've ever made jam at home, perhaps from a glut of plums, you know that the general proportion is one part fruit to one part jam – about 50% sugar. Some fruits require more, some less.

Manufacturers of sugar-free jams or fruit spreads often use a different kind of natural sweetener – fruit juice concentrate. Fructose-based sweeteners instead of sucrose based sweetener. Both types of sweeteners have advantages and drawbacks, but here's what you need to examine on the label to make the right choice for you:

Look at the nutrition data label, the section listing contents "per 100g". Now cast your eye down the list to 'total carbohydrates' and 'sugars'. This will give you an indication of the sweetness of what's in the jar. For example a jar of jam may say "64g sugar per 100g" – that's 64% sugar. A jar of fruit spread may say "54g sugars per 100g" – that's still 54% sugar, even though the type of sugar is different.

No matter which sweetener the maker has chosen, your body will still process that spread as 'sugar'. So the better alternative for you may be to choose the jam, sugar-free jam or fruit spread with the lowest proportion of sugar per 100g.

You might be tempted to reach for a 'sugar-free jam' or 'spreadable fruit' next time you're replenishing the pantry supply. But take a little time to read the labels so that you're fully informed about whether its worthwhile for you.

It seems that the traditional south American peoples knew a thing or two about the health benefits of chocolate (or more specifically cocoa beans).  Scientists visited the Kuna Indians living on islands off the Panama coast and noted that they suffered almost no hypertension(high blood pressure). Cocoa was a part of their daily diet. Its enough to make you reach for the chocolate right now. But when the islanders migrated to the mainland and began drinking the commercial cocoa blends their health deteriorated. Yes, there's a story behind this!

Cocoa in its natural form, and when used traditionally, is actually bitter in taste – and that's the therapeutic part of the bean. Modern processing strips away this bitterness and adds sugar to make it more palatable (but far less valuable for your health). To experience the difference, try some chocolate containing 85% cocoa, and notice how bitter it tastes compared to standard milk chocolate which might contain only 30% cocoa. Its important to know the difference, because if you try to use milk chocolate therapeutically, you're unlikely to improve your blood pressure, but your waistline will certainly get bigger!

Scientists keen to discover whether cocoa can help reduce blood pressure have done a multitude of research studies. Unfortunately most of the testing was on small sample sizes, which reduces the validity of their findings. (I'm still baffled as to why they would have difficulty in recruiting volunteers to test chocolate). Earlier this year a meta-analysis of the many studies done was published in the American Journal of Hypertension (you can read the entire paper here). They concluded that chocolate could indeed lower blood pressure, providing it was processed in a way that retained the original ingredients. That created chocolate rich in flavonols.

So it seems that eating chocolate is really good for you – providing you eat it as close as possible to the way it grows, and not in excessive quantities:

-          choose dark chocolate with 85% cocoa. If you live in the UK or western Europe you are likely to be able to purchase flavonol-rich chocolate in the stores.

-          if you find this too bitter, create a hot drink by gently melting the chocolate and stirring in hot water or milk and a little sugar.

-          mind your portion size!  The truly dark chocolate is just too much to eat lots of; the so-called chocolate with little cocoa, and lots of additives like sugar, should stay on the supermarket shelf.

-          remember that you don't have to eat chocolate every day. There are a huge range of valuable foods available to us that can also help lower your blood pressure (hint: they're high in fibre and minerals, like legumes, fruit and oats)

How do you like to eat your chocolate? Care to share your special recipe with us? 

What's the mineral that pre-school children are most likely to become deficient in? Full marks if you chose 'iron'. There are other very important minerals too, including zinc, calcium and iodine; but children between one and three are most at risk of developing iron deficiency anemia. Why? Because during the huge growth spurt in their first year of life, your child used up a vast amount of their iron stores to create more haemoglobin (that's the red part of blood cells that carries oxygen around your body).

In a perfect world, your child's diet would easily fulfil this extra need for iron. But there's a problem. Pre-school children rapidly develop firmly held concepts of what food they like and dislike, to the immense frustration of their concerned parents! To compound the situation, the relatively slower growth rate of the pre-schooler often reduces their appetite as well. Parents often shake their heads, baffled about how their child is continuing to thrive on what seems to be a small selection of tiny quantities of specific foods.

The most easily absorbed sources of iron come from animal sources, especially red meat, but your child probably isn't interested in chewing through that carefully cooked steak or stew; instead, present easily eaten foods like rissoles, eggs or fish cakes. (When you're preparing the rissole mix, add some finely chopped spinach, as leafy green vegetables are also a good source of iron.)

To ensure your pre-schooler has a better chance of obtaining the nutrients they need, offer smaller quantities more often, in finger-food sizes, and with a variety of textures and colours. A general rule of thumb is to offer one tablespoon of each food for every year of age. For example, you could offer your two year old a small rissole with a little pumpkin mash, plus green beans. Or for lunch, a fish cake accompanied by a selection of raw carrot, capsicum and zucchini in easy-to-handle pieces. For breakfast, try scrambled eggs, or a soft-boiled egg with toast 'soldiers' to dip into the nutrient-dense yolk. For snacks, try small fruit serves like strawberries, grapes or apple wedges.

There are lots of great books out there to give you recipes and ideas to create meals your pre-schooler is more likely to eat.

Conflict with your pre-schooler over food may achieve little more than increasing your personal stress levels! Just keep offering a wide variety of healthy foods, small quantities, and leave those lollies, soft drinks and biscuits on the supermarket shelf.

If you're concerned that your child may have become malnourished from their fussy food choices, don't just reach for the vitamin supplement – talk to your health practitioner for an assessment, support, and ideas to improve your child's nutrition.