Archive News
Hearty meals that help you eat your way to good health
Date Published: 28-Mar-2013
A beautifully produced cookbook and lifestyle guide offering 100 tasty recipes, which are designed to help reduce weight, cholesterol, diabetes and blood pressure has just been published by the West of Ireland Cardiology Foundation, Croí.
The Healthy Ways Cookbook and Lifestyle Guide, compiled and edited by Croí’s Specialist Cardiac Dietician, Claire Kerins, also contains a myriad of information on what to do to avoid heart and other health problems.
Healthy Ways evolved from the Croí My Action programme, which helps prevent cardiovascular disease in people who are classified as high risk, explains Claire for whom this two-year project has been a labour of love.
“People on the course were asking ‘do you have a cookbook?’ or ‘can you recommend a cookbook?’,” she says. But while there were some cookbooks designed to help people lose weight, very few focused on heart health, and until now, there was nothing at all from Ireland.
This book has filled that gap. Its tasty recipes – 30 of them from leading restaurants – are for people who are trying to manage cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes and weight. All have been adapted by Claire to ensure that they fit the criteria for a healthy heart diet.
But there’s more to this book than cooking.
“All the talk about nutrition will not help unless you talk about lifestyle,” says Claire. So she has used the book as an opportunity to provide practical advice, encouraging people to make changes in a supportive way.
“Whatever goals people are setting, it’s about maintaining those changes,” she says. Healthy Ways begins by recommending that people list the reasons why they want their lives to change, as an incentive to keep going. And it advises people, when adopting a healthy lifestyle, not to try to change everything at once.
“Changing the eating habits of a lifetime takes time and a little effort. If you try to do too much at once you will struggle and probably give up. . . just set your goals and when you have achieved them, set some more and work on those. . .”
The first chapter outlines the risk factors for heart disease and stroke, explaining how up to 80 per cent of the incidence of heart disease can be prevented by reducing cholesterol and blood pressure. That’s why diet and exercise matter, as does reducing stress. And for those who smoke, quitting cigarettes is crucial.
Healthy Ways gives advice on all these areas. It also explains that much of what we eat isn’t necessarily unhealthy – the problem is that our portions are too big, resulting in weight gain. So it outlines what constitutes a healthy serving of different types of food such as protein, carbohydrates, fruit and vegetables, and it takes people through the different types of fats that fill our supermarket shelves.
Importantly, it also has advice on how to read and decipher food labels, so you know exactly what you are buying and eating.
The attractively presented recipes follow, and constitute the major part of the book. These start with breakfast – most important meal of the day, says Claire, adding that if you are eating cereal, the most important thing to do is eat high fibre, because that slows down the release of sugar into the bloodstream and prevents energy slumps.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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