
Robyn Chuter

Time for an eco spring clean? Here are seven simple swaps for the conscious consumer
There’s a serum for every skin condition, but which active ingredients do what? This is the guide to vegan and sustainably sourced serums...
Some of the best nutrition is to be found in wholegrains (and pseudograins) that have been around for thousands of years.
Going vegan can be a life-changing experience, and it’s not without its challenges. The good news is you’re not alone. There are identifiable...
Eco period products have risen in popularity – they’re sustainable, affordable, healthy, and convenient. Here’s what you need to know so...
The science is in. Shifting to a plant-based food system is essential to avoid climate and ecological breakdown. And now we have a roadmap to...
Great food photos can have us drooling over dishes we’ve never even tasted. Here’s how to take your food photography to the next level.
Enjoy a little spice kick and the smoky flavour of chipotle chillies. Adding the chipotle sauce to the veggies before they roast creates a divine...
Bursting with goodness, this nutritious and ultra-satisfying green curry combines tofu, green split peas, luscious fresh greens and the...
Simple yet sophisticated, this rich blend of creamy Licor 43 Horchata with fresh espresso is the perfect spark to ignite your night.
Surround yourself with good friends, I say. This sticky date pudding would be nowhere near as epic without a bit of mentoring (and tough love)...
Japanese tempura is the best – crispy and crunchy, and definitely not oily. The wasabi dust gives this beautiful dish a nice little kick.
This plant-based take on a classic is guaranteed to get your mouth watering.
Made with fermented whole soybeans, tempeh is packed with protein, prebiotic fibre and isoflavones known to have metabolic and hormonal benefits....
Spraying sheets and pillows with calming scents can be a wonderful aid to slumber
The next time you go for a walk, discover the wonder of the everyday world around you
A skincare routine can be a way to nourish yourself inside and out
When the clouds converge, practise gratitude for the smallest of glimmers, and learn to dance in the rain.
Sleep tight without the fight! You'll be waking up on the right side of bed with these lifestyle hacks.
“The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to,” lamented F Scott Fitzgerald. Anyone who has spent restless nights frustrated about not being able to fall asleep, stay asleep, or sleep until their desired waking time, might be inclined to agree with the famous American writer.
According to a recent, comprehensive survey of sleep habits, the 2016 Sleep Health Survey of Australian Adults, between 33 and 45 percent of us either don’t get enough sleep or don’t get good quality sleep. The negative effects of this widespread sleep debt go way beyond fatigue, irritability, daytime drowsiness, an inability to concentrate, and impaired work and study performance. Consistently short-changing yourself on sleep can also threaten your health, and even your life, in two major ways.
Firstly, sleep deprivation is a major contributing factor in traffic accidents. Of the sleep survey respondents, 29 percent reported being drowsy while driving at least once every month, while a startling 20 percent admitted to previously dozing off while driving, and five percent had been involved in an accident in the past year because they fell asleep at the wheel. Secondly, studies show that sleeping less than six or seven hours on average per night may increase your risk for obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and dementia, while also suppressing immune function, which in turn heightens the risk of infections and possibly cancer.
The good news is that making some simple tweaks to your daily food and lifestyle habits can ease your nightly passage to dreamland. Let’s take a look at some key dos and don’ts.
To fall asleep, your core temperature needs to drop, and your body has a clever mechanism for achieving this. The tiny blood vessels just under your skin dilate, bringing more blood flow to the skin, which allows heat loss to the surrounding environment. But dehydration from insufficient fluid intake throughout the day prevents this vasodilation, and the resulting core temperature drop. Dehydration can also cause nocturnal leg cramps and snoring, both of which disrupt sleep. Of course, drinking too much fluid just before bedtime leads to excessive nocturnal bathroom trips, so aim to drink most of your water intake in the morning and early afternoon. It’s also a good idea to sleep in a cool room to aid a core temperature drop.
Regular caffeine intake is associated with disturbed sleep and associated daytime sleepiness in children, adolescents, and adults. Since it can take your body up to 24 hours to eliminate the amount of caffeine found in a single cup of coffee, even your early morning heart-starter may still be messing with your sleep that night. If you can’t do without your daily coffee, try to stick to one and have it early in the day. The same goes for other caffeinated drinks.
Drinking alcohol at night decreases the time that it takes to get to sleep – hence the idea of having a nightcap before bed – but increases sleep disruption and degrades sleep quality in the second half of sleep. So, more of a night trap. In particular, alcohol throttles rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the sleep phase during which your brain consolidates what was learned that day. Getting enough REM sleep is crucial for preventing cognitive decline and dementia. Skip the nightcap and if you’ve had a few drinks, make sure to match each alcoholic drink with a drink of water.
A high-carbohydrate meal raises core body temperature and heart rate, and reduces secretion of the ‘sleep hormone’ melatonin, which is just what you need in the morning to help you feel alert and awake. But it’s definitely not what you need at night! Dinners should be vegetable-based and relatively low in carbohydrate and protein. Eating a generous, carbohydrate-rich breakfast within an hour of waking up, consuming at least two-thirds of your total energy intake between breakfast and lunch, and ensuring that you finish dinner at least three hours before going to bed will help you get to sleep more easily and minimise sleep disturbances during the night.
Obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA) is a major cause of impaired sleep quality and daytime sleepiness. Research points to a link between dietary fat intake and OSA. In particular, among overweight people with OSA, sleep apnoea symptoms are twice as severe in people who eat more than 35 percent of their daily energy intake from fat compared to those who eat less fat. Higher intakes of processed meat and eating more than two serves of dairy products per day have also been associated with more severe OSA. It’s just one more reason to eat a healthy plant-based diet!
Dietary salt intake causes blood vessel walls to stiffen, reducing the vasodilation that needs to take place in order for your core temperature to drop so you can fall asleep. Aim to keep your diet low in salt. Try using herbs and spices instead of salt to make your food tastier, and especially avoid salty meals and snacks at night.
The normal drop in body temperature during the late afternoon is one of the cues for secretion of the ‘sleep hormone’ melatonin. If you raise your core temperature through exercise, the drop in body temperature is more dramatic, triggering more melatonin release. To raise your core temperature, you’ll need to work out hard enough to feel warm and raise a sweat.
You get bonus points if you exercise outdoors at this time, as you’ll be stacking the benefits of exercise on top of the synchronisation of your circadian rhythm to the 24-hour light and dark cycle – the other major cue for melatonin secretion. While morning sunlight is enriched with blue spectrum light, which suppresses melatonin and promotes alertness, the sun’s rays shift to a redder light spectrum in the late afternoon and evening, boosting melatonin and helping us to unwind and feel sleepy at bedtime.
The optimal time to exercise if you’re using it to help you sleep better is around four hours before bedtime. Don’t do vigorous exercise any later than this, or the adrenaline from your workout will still be circulating when you’re trying to wind down. Gentle exercise, such as the slower forms of yoga, is okay close to bedtime.
If you can’t exercise four hours before bedtime or aren’t inclined to, a warm – not hot! – bath two hours before bedtime has a similar effect on body temperature. That is, it encourages a rise in core temperature which, when it falls post-bath, induces greater secretion of melatonin. You might even use some magnesium salts or a few drops of a calming essential oil, such as lavender, for a gloriously sleep-inducing bath.
As mentioned previously, blue-enriched light – such as we experience when we go outdoors in the morning – suppresses melatonin and promotes alertness. Unfortunately, this same melatonin-suppressing blue light is emitted by the screens of our televisions, smartphones, computers, and tablets. For optimal sleep, it’s best to turn off those devices at least three hours before bedtime. If you genuinely can’t avoid screen time at night, use blue light-blocking glasses or amber filters on screens.
Sleep is one of the most neglected pillars of health, and the consequences of this neglect are wide-ranging and serious. Fortunately, simple changes to your eating and drinking habits, mindfully choosing your ‘light diet’, and timing your exercise, can solve most common sleep problems and pave the way to a well-rested, healthier, and happier you.
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You can’t go wrong with a crumble, and this beautiful berry-licious version by plant-based chef Cynthia Louise is no exception.
Burgs are life! We love all the classics, and they are tastier and better for you when filled with plants.
This is the perfect plant-based brownie for the brownie connoisseur. Years in the making, and now captured for you to enjoy. It’s as much for...
The trick to this super-vibrant green curry is to add a bunch of blitzed leafy greens into the paste to ensure a lovely, bright-green colour. I...
Light, citrusy, and super refreshing, this cocktail starring Licor 43 Horchata and limoncello tastes like Mediterranean summer in a glass.
Burgs are life! We love all the classics, and they are tastier and better for you when filled with plants.
Surround yourself with good friends, I say. This sticky date pudding would be nowhere near as epic without a bit of mentoring (and tough love)...
Spraying sheets and pillows with calming scents can be a wonderful aid to slumber
The next time you go for a walk, discover the wonder of the everyday world around you
A skincare routine can be a way to nourish yourself inside and out
When the clouds converge, practise gratitude for the smallest of glimmers, and learn to dance in the rain.
You are what you eat, and so is your immune system. Here we learn about the effect of good nutrition on viral infections.
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, many of my clients asked me if there was anything they could do to boost their immunity against the virus. It’s important to understand that there can be no specific immunity against a virus that has been newly introduced into the human population, like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. It’s only after people have contracted the virus that they can become immune to reinfection, and it’s not clear at this point how long that immunity may last. However, if we are in excellent health, our immune systems can effectively combat viral infections with minimal ‘collateral damage’ to our bodies. Research clearly shows that our state of health, and specifically our nutritional status, is the key determining factor as to whether we will develop any symptoms when we contract a viral infection, and how severe those symptoms will be. There is no true immunity without health.
So, let’s take a closer look at the impact of nutrition on our immune system. If we suffer from protein-energy malnutrition, this has a devastating effect on immunity. This is not only an issue in the developing world, but also right here in Australia among many of our elderly as well as in sufferers of anorexia nervosa and many debilitating diseases, such as cancer. The various functions of the immune system are all significantly impaired in people suffering from this kind of malnourishment. However, the more common type of malnourishment in affluent Western countries is what we call high-calorie malnutrition. This refers to the overconsumption of foods that are deficient in micronutrients such as vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals – including highly processed foods and many animal products. Even relatively mild deficiencies of these micronutrients handicap our immune defences. For example:
In addition to vitamins and minerals, a host of other plant-derived micronutrients known as phytochemicals (such as lutein, lycopene, bioflavonoids, and polyphenols) also affect both our susceptibility to infectious disease, and the severity of such diseases. Many of these phytochemicals are produced by plants to defend against being eaten by insects or attacked by pathogens.
For example, the powerful polyphenol called resveratrol, found in red grapes, mulberries, peanut skins, rhubarb, and several other plants, is essentially part of the immune system of the plants that produce it. Grapes under stress from poor soil and challenging climatic conditions or those under attack by fungal disease produce this in much higher amounts. The same compound, at the low concentrations found naturally in our diet, activates immune cells that defend us against viruses, bacteria and other invaders. (But be warned – in high doses, such as those delivered by supplements, resveratrol may actually suppress immunity, which is the opposite of what you want.)
While nutritional deficiency has long been known to depress our immune function, there is an even more intriguing twist. Nutritional deficiencies directly interact with the genomes (DNA sequences) of pathogens themselves, making them more dangerous to us.
If our diet is deficient in antioxidant vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals, we will experience oxidative stress. This oxidative stress alters the genome of invading viruses, causing them to mutate into potentially more dangerous forms that can result in more prolonged and serious infections. For example, a virus called coxsackievirus B3 is normally quite benign and only causes symptoms of the common cold. However, oxidative stress due to a deficiency of either vitamin E or selenium causes this virus to alter its DNA sequence to more closely resemble that of a strain of coxsackievirus that is capable of causing heart damage. Viruses can only replicate, and therefore can only mutate, when they are inside the cells of a living host. This is why our state of nutrition when we become infected is the main factor determining whether the virus remains fairly benign or becomes much more dangerous.
Unfortunately, a large proportion of our population is at increased risk of complications from viral infections because they are micronutrient-malnourished. Remember, micronutrients are found in their highest concentrations in whole plant foods. Yet 95 percent of Australian adults fall short of the recommended daily intake of fruits and vegetables, 73 percent fail to meet the recommended daily target for whole grain consumption, 92 percent rarely eat legumes, and 94 percent don’t eat the recommended amount of nuts.
In addition, older people are more susceptible to complications because chronic low-grade inflammation, known as ‘inflammaging’, naturally occurs as people get older. Inflammation generates increased pro-oxidant compounds. Cigarette smokers also have higher risk due to the oxidative stress and chronic inflammation caused by smoking.
This is why COVID-19 and other respiratory pathogens pose a greater threat to elderly people and those who have cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory disease or cancer. All these conditions are associated with chronic inflammation and oxidative stress, which impair immune responses and increase the likelihood of complications of infection.
Most of the unpleasant symptoms of an infection, such as fever, sore throat and fatigue, are not directly due to the virus, but to our own immune system’s response to it. Specifically, they are caused by the release of inflammatory chemicals by our immune system. It’s important to understand that these acute inflammatory responses are crucial for overcoming infection. Fever, for example, dramatically slows down the rate at which viruses reproduce inside our cells, and boosts the effectiveness of the immune response to invading pathogens. An increase of 1 to 4°C in core body temperature speeds up recovery from infection, while the use of drugs to reduce fever, such as Panadol and Nurofen, correlates with a 5 percent increase in the death rate of people infected with influenza virus.
The symptoms of disease are actually part of an organised effort to restore health. That is, the symptoms are part of the cure. However, dietary antioxidant deficiency ramps up the inflammatory response in a way that causes much greater damage than would occur in a well-nourished person. Put simply, when we are deprived of antioxidant nutrients, viral infections can cause serious, even fatal diseases, that don’t occur when a deficiency is not present. These include the serious complications of COVID-19 infection, such as respiratory distress, shock, and multiorgan dysfunction, which have unfortunately led to well over 200,000 deaths globally.
The best way to protect ourselves against serious complications from SARS-CoV-2, or any other virus, is to support our immune systems through cultivating good health. And foundational to good health is good nutrition. The diet I personally adhere to, and advocate to all my clients, emphasises a very high intake of fresh, raw or conservatively cooked fruits and vegetables, along with other antioxidant rich plant foods. Isn’t it wonderful that the same diet that prevents and often reverses chronic disease, also protects you against acute viral infections? That’s the power of plants!
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Mountains stretch down to coastal plains, which hug the curves of over 100 pristine beaches, all gazing out towards the stunning waters of the...
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As the weather cools, we let the kitchen warm us. We’re roasting, we’re baking, we’re making pies and tarts and pizza. Yum!
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Spraying sheets and pillows with calming scents can be a wonderful aid to slumber
The next time you go for a walk, discover the wonder of the everyday world around you
A skincare routine can be a way to nourish yourself inside and out
When the clouds converge, practise gratitude for the smallest of glimmers, and learn to dance in the rain.