Food for thought

FOOD is what keeps us going and there’s a ferocious appetite for information on how it can make us smarter, stronger, leaner and healthier.
But it seems we’re not just wasting hundreds of tonnes of actual food each year, there’s an increasing tendency to throw away the basic facts of what food is and how it is used by the body.
Social media pages, online shopping and celebrity diets bombard us with endless listicles on how to shape up, slim down or solve so-called food intolerances.
Food is big business and the obsession with labels such as fat-free, sugar-free, gluten-free or lactose-free is coming at a high price. It’s not just hitting shoppers’ pockets but they may find the quest for healthy eating can be anything but healthy.
Head of the Department of Natural Sciences at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology Dr Lisa Ryan is concerned at mis-information regarding nutrition that the public are consuming.
On her return from working in Australia she was “heartbroken” to see a fast-growing industry of nutritionists in Ireland, many of whom she contends aren’t suitably qualified to offer advice on what people should or shouldn’t eat.

Read the full feature in this week's edition