Hey Jen - Great video! I watched transfixed throughout (as always, my dear friend, you are a star!) I was a big fan of the salad sandwich in the early 1990s, as a devotee of the bestselling 'food combining' diet book 'Fit for Life' by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, first published in 1985. The history of 'food combining' (also known as the Hay Diet), goes back many centuries, but it took off in the UK in the early 1900s. To this day it's favoured by many for weight loss and general good health. The British actor Sir John Mills followed it for most of his adult life, and he swore by it for health, crediting it for his general excellent fitness and high energy levels. Sir John lived to be 97, so I reckon he was onto something! As you probably know, in a nutshell the rules of food combining are - never mix protein foods (meat, fish, cheese, eggs etc) with carbohydrate foods (potatoes, pasta, rice, bread etc), in the same meal. So for example, you cannot have fish (protein), and chips (carbohydrate) together, but instead could eat the fish with various non-carby vegetables or a mixed salad, or you could eat the chips with various veg or a mixed salad. The science argued is that the human digestive system digests proteins and carbohydrates very differently, and (if my memory serves), even claims that the human body produces two contrasting types of digestive enzymes to digest protein and carbs. Therefore (the argument goes), when you eat protein and carbs together ('Foods that Fight', as the book-blurb went), your body produced two types of digestive juices that battled with each other and neutralised each other, meaning your body took a long time to digest the meal, did so inefficiently, and was more prone to make you gain weight as a result. The 1985 book 'Fit for Life' also advocated eating fruit, despite its high sugar content, but ideally for breakfast and crucially, only ever on an empty stomach, not with other types of food. Fruit eaten with a meal would sit in your system and ferment, was the claim - eat it alone and clean, and it is efficiently and quickly digested. I think this is likely true - many, myself included, digest fruit better as a sole snack. Another rule of 'Fit for Life', was not to drink water with meals (only before or after eating), because water dilutes digestive juices and makes more work for your body to digest your food. Cynics would say food combining is just another fad diet, and that any kind of diet restriction, whatever it is, is likely to result in weight loss. Fair comment. But having tried food combining, I have to say I'm a fan. It not only works for weight loss, it''s a food regime that you feel good and energetic on - and you can eat a lot of good, delicious food on it too! The salad sandwich was a lunch I enjoyed often while food combining. I favoured lightly toasted pitta bread over sliced bread, as in my view pitta bread is robust and has less potential than soft, sliced bread to absorb the dampness inevitably associated with a salad filling. Nothing worse than a soggy salad sandwich! The genius of Angela Lansbury's salad sandwich recipe, is she recognises the risk of soggy bread inherent with a damp, salad filling, and she has solved it by 'sealing' each slice/side of bread with a water-resistant, 'fatty' coating - avocado on one side, and mayo/cottage/feta cheese on the other. Brilliant! Food combing embraces all natural fats including animal fats, so real butter in this and other 'food combined' sandwiches is absolutely fine. That's another aspect of food combining that I'm a big fan of, is its enthusiastic promotion of healthy fats. For example, the 'Fit for Life' book identified early the toxicity of artificial, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (also known as 'trans fats), once found in pretty much all fast food and processed supermarket foods like ready meals, and desserts, cakes and biscuits. 'Fit for Life' argued our bodies were not designed to eat such artificial, man-made Frankenstein fat, only natural vegetable and animal fats. Over subsequent years, they were proved 100% right! 'Fit For Life' was also an early proponent of the avocado - back in the 'eighties, when the received wisdom was that avocados were a wicked, high fat food, and therefore the enemy of the dieter/healthy eater. Total nonsense of course, as is now recognised. Dame Joan Collins has long been an avocado fan, and from the 1980s declared she ate at least half an avocado a day (while constantly weight-watching to maintain her trim figure), for its health and beauty benefits. Good on her! 'Fit for Life' was revolutionary in its day, because it challenged the 'low fat diet' craze that was huge throughout the 'eighties. At the time, people were obsessed with the fat content of food, and many wouldn't touch avocados or indeed any animal fat, and instead purchased and ate processed foods made with trans fats, and manufactured, 'low fat' foods by the ton, thinking them healthier. And guess what? Those anti fat and low fat fans became obese, because not only are avocados and animal fats good for you in moderation and easily processed by our bodies, we now know that manufactured low fat foods (eg low fat mayo, yoghurts, fake butter spreads etc), contain a load of added sugar, to make up for the flavour lost by the artificial removal of fat. The result was those manufactured foods may have been low fat, but they were high sugar/refined sugar to make them palatable, and therefore were high calorie and damned bad for the human body! Fat is not the enemy - over-eating fat is! And so is highly processed, man-made trans fat and low-fat foods. Sadly people over-ate foods manufactured with Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (step forward McDonalds - which abandoned trans fats in 2007 due to growing evidence of its toxicity), and became not only obese, but vulnerable to all kinds of resulting health issues including heart disease and cancer. Anyone curious about the potential health benefits of those eating a high fat diet should Google 'Inuit Cuisine' - Inuit people living in freezing climates, historically survived on a hunted and fished diet high in animal fat and protein. Around 50% of their diet came from fat alone, yet these people were fit, healthy and not overweight, with low rates of cancer and heart disease. They also had healthy attitudes and rituals around food, one of which was to eat only when hungry. By the 21st century when a Western diet had taken over, sadly Western diseases became prevalent in the previously healthy Inuit people. So I'm a big fan of the salad sandwich, and the variety of salad filling ingredients is huge - you can even use things like sauteed items (shallots/garlic/onion, mushrooms etc), steamed veggies (carrots, courgette, broccoli, asparagus etc), and pickled items (beetroot, onion, cauliflower, gherkins, okra, green beans) etc. The best salad sandwich in my opinion, can feature a combination of lightly cooked and raw veggies together, providing variety in temperature, texture and flavour. Spinach works both raw and lightly steamed, as do many other veg. Thank you so much for this video Jenny. You have taken me back to happy memories of delicious, warm, salad-stuffed pitta pockets, full of yummy, mashed avocado, crisp lettuce, ripe tomatoes and succulent cucumber, doused in delicious simple home-made salad dressing of fresh lemon juice, crushed garlic, dijon mustard, fresh chopped chives/parsley and olive oil - YUM! The beauty of this kind of food is it satisfies your hunger, without leaving you feeling stuffed and too lethargic to work after lunch (I don't think I've ever had a jacket potato with protein-filling lunch, usually tuna mayo, without craving a nap by 3pm!) Love ya Jenny, take very good care of yourself gorgeous woman. You are life enhancing! XXX
You are delightful!
One of favourite sandwiches is just round lettuce, an inch high, with butter salt and salad cream.
Ooh this looks really good! And healthy 💜
How fun!!
Ooh I can make these with the veggies that I harvest in any day ❤
Hey Jen - Great video! I watched transfixed throughout (as always, my dear friend, you are a star!) I was a big fan of the salad sandwich in the early 1990s, as a devotee of the bestselling 'food combining' diet book 'Fit for Life' by Harvey and Marilyn Diamond, first published in 1985.
The history of 'food combining' (also known as the Hay Diet), goes back many centuries, but it took off in the UK in the early 1900s. To this day it's favoured by many for weight loss and general good health. The British actor Sir John Mills followed it for most of his adult life, and he swore by it for health, crediting it for his general excellent fitness and high energy levels. Sir John lived to be 97, so I reckon he was onto something!
As you probably know, in a nutshell the rules of food combining are - never mix protein foods (meat, fish, cheese, eggs etc) with carbohydrate foods (potatoes, pasta, rice, bread etc), in the same meal. So for example, you cannot have fish (protein), and chips (carbohydrate) together, but instead could eat the fish with various non-carby vegetables or a mixed salad, or you could eat the chips with various veg or a mixed salad.
The science argued is that the human digestive system digests proteins and carbohydrates very differently, and (if my memory serves), even claims that the human body produces two contrasting types of digestive enzymes to digest protein and carbs. Therefore (the argument goes), when you eat protein and carbs together ('Foods that Fight', as the book-blurb went), your body produced two types of digestive juices that battled with each other and neutralised each other, meaning your body took a long time to digest the meal, did so inefficiently, and was more prone to make you gain weight as a result.
The 1985 book 'Fit for Life' also advocated eating fruit, despite its high sugar content, but ideally for breakfast and crucially, only ever on an empty stomach, not with other types of food. Fruit eaten with a meal would sit in your system and ferment, was the claim - eat it alone and clean, and it is efficiently and quickly digested. I think this is likely true - many, myself included, digest fruit better as a sole snack. Another rule of 'Fit for Life', was not to drink water with meals (only before or after eating), because water dilutes digestive juices and makes more work for your body to digest your food.
Cynics would say food combining is just another fad diet, and that any kind of diet restriction, whatever it is, is likely to result in weight loss. Fair comment. But having tried food combining, I have to say I'm a fan. It not only works for weight loss, it''s a food regime that you feel good and energetic on - and you can eat a lot of good, delicious food on it too!
The salad sandwich was a lunch I enjoyed often while food combining. I favoured lightly toasted pitta bread over sliced bread, as in my view pitta bread is robust and has less potential than soft, sliced bread to absorb the dampness inevitably associated with a salad filling. Nothing worse than a soggy salad sandwich!
The genius of Angela Lansbury's salad sandwich recipe, is she recognises the risk of soggy bread inherent with a damp, salad filling, and she has solved it by 'sealing' each slice/side of bread with a water-resistant, 'fatty' coating - avocado on one side, and mayo/cottage/feta cheese on the other. Brilliant! Food combing embraces all natural fats including animal fats, so real butter in this and other 'food combined' sandwiches is absolutely fine.
That's another aspect of food combining that I'm a big fan of, is its enthusiastic promotion of healthy fats. For example, the 'Fit for Life' book identified early the toxicity of artificial, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (also known as 'trans fats), once found in pretty much all fast food and processed supermarket foods like ready meals, and desserts, cakes and biscuits. 'Fit for Life' argued our bodies were not designed to eat such artificial, man-made Frankenstein fat, only natural vegetable and animal fats. Over subsequent years, they were proved 100% right!
'Fit For Life' was also an early proponent of the avocado - back in the 'eighties, when the received wisdom was that avocados were a wicked, high fat food, and therefore the enemy of the dieter/healthy eater. Total nonsense of course, as is now recognised. Dame Joan Collins has long been an avocado fan, and from the 1980s declared she ate at least half an avocado a day (while constantly weight-watching to maintain her trim figure), for its health and beauty benefits. Good on her!
'Fit for Life' was revolutionary in its day, because it challenged the 'low fat diet' craze that was huge throughout the 'eighties. At the time, people were obsessed with the fat content of food, and many wouldn't touch avocados or indeed any animal fat, and instead purchased and ate processed foods made with trans fats, and manufactured, 'low fat' foods by the ton, thinking them healthier.
And guess what? Those anti fat and low fat fans became obese, because not only are avocados and animal fats good for you in moderation and easily processed by our bodies, we now know that manufactured low fat foods (eg low fat mayo, yoghurts, fake butter spreads etc), contain a load of added sugar, to make up for the flavour lost by the artificial removal of fat. The result was those manufactured foods may have been low fat, but they were high sugar/refined sugar to make them palatable, and therefore were high calorie and damned bad for the human body!
Fat is not the enemy - over-eating fat is! And so is highly processed, man-made trans fat and low-fat foods. Sadly people over-ate foods manufactured with Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (step forward McDonalds - which abandoned trans fats in 2007 due to growing evidence of its toxicity), and became not only obese, but vulnerable to all kinds of resulting health issues including heart disease and cancer.
Anyone curious about the potential health benefits of those eating a high fat diet should Google 'Inuit Cuisine' - Inuit people living in freezing climates, historically survived on a hunted and fished diet high in animal fat and protein. Around 50% of their diet came from fat alone, yet these people were fit, healthy and not overweight, with low rates of cancer and heart disease. They also had healthy attitudes and rituals around food, one of which was to eat only when hungry. By the 21st century when a Western diet had taken over, sadly Western diseases became prevalent in the previously healthy Inuit people.
So I'm a big fan of the salad sandwich, and the variety of salad filling ingredients is huge - you can even use things like sauteed items (shallots/garlic/onion, mushrooms etc), steamed veggies (carrots, courgette, broccoli, asparagus etc), and pickled items (beetroot, onion, cauliflower, gherkins, okra, green beans) etc. The best salad sandwich in my opinion, can feature a combination of lightly cooked and raw veggies together, providing variety in temperature, texture and flavour. Spinach works both raw and lightly steamed, as do many other veg.
Thank you so much for this video Jenny. You have taken me back to happy memories of delicious, warm, salad-stuffed pitta pockets, full of yummy, mashed avocado, crisp lettuce, ripe tomatoes and succulent cucumber, doused in delicious simple home-made salad dressing of fresh lemon juice, crushed garlic, dijon mustard, fresh chopped chives/parsley and olive oil - YUM! The beauty of this kind of food is it satisfies your hunger, without leaving you feeling stuffed and too lethargic to work after lunch (I don't think I've ever had a jacket potato with protein-filling lunch, usually tuna mayo, without craving a nap by 3pm!)
Love ya Jenny, take very good care of yourself gorgeous woman. You are life enhancing! XXX
Wow - what an informative comment! SOOOO interesting, thanks for all that. Mind you, it has made me SO HUNGRY 😂 Love to you too you smart cookie xx
@@Fritzyritz Just re-read what I wrote - Blimey, I do go on! 🤣🤣🤣 Happy Sunday gorgeous. XXX
This is a video, right? So why is bottom half, where all the action is, cut off?