Nutritional nuggets

Thought I might periodically share some nuggets of useful dietary info with you, as I discover them on my course.
As you know by now, I have excluded quite a few things from diet, and sugar is one of them. Sugar is bad, bad, bad! Just don't eat it!
The WHO (World Health Organisation) guidelines for RDA (recommended daily amount) of refined sugar is....zero. We just don't need to add it to our diet, as we obtain our energy from so many other sources.
Unfortunately, most of us have a sweet tooth, and there is an alternative! It's called Xylitol, and you may also have heard of it as Sorbitol. It has none of the negative effects on blood sugar and teeth that normal sugar does, and you need to eat far less, as it is very sweet. This link will take you a site that tells you all about its positive benefits, http://www.xlear.com/xylitol/ but the great thing about it is that it's perfectly natural.
Even better, you can now buy it in Tescos! As with everything remotely healthy, it is quite expensive (around £2,75 for 225g -eek!). The good news is that as you cut down on sugar, you will need to eat less and less, and 225g will last you ages. I bake my legendary breakfast muffins with it, and it tastes great.
Try it and let me know what you think.

American Graffiti? You were never in the running...

The entrance to Juliet's balcony in Verona, where you will find the most pointless notice in Italy - if you look closely on the left, you'll see that the entire wall is covered!

Here's a close up of the wall.










American Graffiti may be the name of a famous film, but when it comes to the real thing, the Italians have cornered the market.
I went to Italy in the summer, and was staggered to find a rash of graffiti almost everywhere I went. I was re-visiting places I had previously been to, and didn't remember graffiti being quite so ubiquitous, but maybe it has always been there. The disappointing thing for me was that it was so indiscriminate - even the Doge's Palace in Venice had been scrawled on. Obviously, so many tourists visit Venice that it could have been German or English graffiti, but having seen five or six Italian cities all similarly daubed, my bet is that it was homegrown stuff.


I did a bit of research, and the very Italian-sounding word 'graffiti' is actually an Italian word! Though the first daubings were found in Turkey, the Romans were huge graffiti artists, so no wonder the Italians are such prolific vandals - it's part of their culture. Now I am part Italian, and don't feel the need to immortalise myself by scribbling on city walls, but maybe my need to blog comes from some latent graffitic tendency!

I know some people consider it to be an art form, and maybe that does work in very urban settings, but please, you Italians - keep your marker pens off the marble!!