Category: general posts

We Zcers are only human. Most of us have wanted, or still want, to lose a little or a lot of the excess baggage. Many of us have tried the conventional CICO (calories in, calories out) approach, as espoused by WeightWatchers TM, most doctors, some academics, many reality TV shows, and my mum.

Then people try ‘keto’, or IF (intermittent fasting), or a combination of both or even, gasp, ZC, and as their eyes fall upon their scales, the scales fall from their eyes. I’ll give you a moment to appreciate the pyrotechnic brilliance of that last bit of wordplay.

OK, back to it. Reducing or eliminating carbohydrate from your diet is what will bring about long term weight loss. It’s ironic that many, many people desirous of fighting the flab use exercise as their first port of call, when it is more likely to have the wrong…

Third in this occasional series on vegan pork pies (lies) is this: soy consumption equals longevity. This is still commonly found around the Internetz: a website about super-aging has a section on the Okinawans. ‘Eat more soy,’ it says, as a key to longevity. And it is via the Japanese island of Okinawa that this vegan myth, helped along by the pro-vegan food writer John Robbins, emanates. Centenarians run, or used to run, at 34 per 100,000 people there. In the far less sub-tropical, far more stressful, post-industrial hellhole that is the UK, the current rate of centenarians is, by my calculation, around 23 per 100,000. Okinawans, it is said – mainly by vegans, of course – eat lots of soy products, and this is why they tend to live so long. Robbins has asserted that Okinawans eat 12% of their calories as soy, but it turns…