Zoë's Food Blog

Hello  I made this delicious salad for lunch the other day, with red quinoa which I hadn't tried before and it's great because it has a really nutty flavour compared to standard white quinoa. Quinoa is quite high in protein, for a grain anyway! With about 16% of the calories in quinoa coming from protein, meaning the percentage of protein quality for this type of product is quite high. We are quite obsessed with protein generally as a nation but there is so much discussion about how we are actually consuming far too much of it (mainly meat and dairy based protein). Consuming excess protein is often stored as fat, with the extra amino acids excreted. It's known that we also have a limited amount we can absorb at one time meaning it is so much more efficient to spread out our protein intake rather than consuming a super protein rich meal all at once or a shake (speaking generally, obviously this differs between person to person especially if training or an athlete). I ...

Hey there,  So last week I graduated! Can't quite believe University is over, but it was such a great experience.  I ended up doing my dissertation on the effect of Instagram as a platform for a health intervention, looking at how it could change the knowledge of the link between diet and cancer, in 18-30 year olds. It was a tough project as there wasn't loads of previous studies that were similar so I had to role with it!  I used a public survey with true and false statements (similar to the Cancer Awareness Measure) by which people had to rate the certainty of their answer, as an indication of how confident they were of their response. I had different dietary sections to the survey including Alcohol; Fibre, fruit, vegetables and processed food; Red and processed meat; and Food preparation and salt. The responses to the first survey were interesting and generally positive, however it was also interesting to see some people commented some doubts about my statemen...