I’m burning my boats!

 

Not literally, obviously.

For so many months or years I have been dipping my toe into various diets and ways of eating, but now my husband has Parkinson’s disease my main focus is to feed him nutritious food, cutting out the crisps he so loves and the chocolate and the cider.

And I've made a decision...

Of all the diets that I have researched, I am leaning towards a high fat/ low carbohydrate diet. Not keto, where you eliminate all carbs, but almost paleo, where you eat starchy root veg and fatty meat. The brain likes fat, apparently. And all the membranes of every cell in your body contains fat, and many hormones need some sort of fat contribution to be produced.

One of the mainstays of this way of eating is bone broths. These are described by the Wahls Protocol, by Dr Sarah Myhill in any of her books or Youtube clips, and by Dr Chris Masterjohn on his Youtube channel. You boil up the bones in hot water we will get a gelatin-rich liquid from the breakdown of the cartilage, tendons and ligaments and this will provide what the body needs to form new connective tissue. Connective tissue supports skin and internal organs, and in the form of twisted cables helps to cushion joints, strengthens tendons and ligament; collagen may also play a role in preventing and treating auto-immune diseases.

Bone broth is also said to build healthy teeth, hair and nails and keep some elasticity in the skin. We get the marrow too, and that should contain phospholipids, choline and lecithin, phosphatidyl-ethanolamine [PE] and phosphatidylserine [PS]. PE and PS are vital to nervous system function and are found in the white matter of the brain, nerves and neural tissue. PS is known to improve brain function and mental acuity, so you can see why I want to get it down my husband.

Of course, you can get all this from supplements, and people avoid fatty meats now because they are scared of cholesterol. But supplements only provide glucosamine and chondroitin which are just two of the many raw ingredients the body needs for collagen repair and production. And cholesterol is part of every cell in your body too – part of the lipid bi-layer of the membranes. It should only be those who have familial hypercholesteraemia that need to avoid fat.

So here we go. My bones are in hot water on the Aga and I aim to have a bone broth bubbling away most of the time to make nourishing soups and stocks.