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The top 8 foods to make dairy-free easier!
By our Naturopath Kelly Horne
When you need to go dairy free it can be hard if you are missing your favourite foods. If you want to be successful with this way of eating, you need to embrace some new foods or use old foods a different way. I have put together a list of 8 whole foods that taste yummy and can satisfy your dairy desires!
Coconut – Coconut is your new best friend! It will do pretty much everything that dairy will do. You can use it for milk or cream. You can make ice cream or yoghurt out of it. It can be used both sweet and savoury.
Almonds – nut milks are your best alternative for milk and almond milk is top of that list!
Cauliflower – Bear with me! Cauliflower is a great option to make creamy white sauce and sauce for pasta. I could make you an alfredo pasta sauce that you wouldn’t even guess I had use cauliflower in!
Cashews – Soaking and blending this nut (which is actually the seed of a drupe) can form the base of many delicious foods – anything from cheese and creamy sauces to decadent cheesecake!
Canned fish – Alright, so it’s not a substitute for dairy but what it does do is provide one of the best sources of calcium and minerals to keep bones strong!
Sesame seeds and tahini – Tahini is a paste made from sesame seeds. It can add creaminess and a nutty flavour to foods but one of the best benefits is its calcium content! Sesame seeds and tahini is a plant-based way to get your calcium if you are worried about going dairy free.
Savoury yeast flakes – It is also known as nutritional yeast. This is one of my favourite dairy substitutes because it’s so tasty and it contains B vitamins.
Macadamias – This little healthy fat bomb can be used in a similar way to almonds and cashews but I can do you one better! Try grating it over the top of your spaghetti bolognaise or caesar salad the way you would parmesan and prepared to be surprised!
*Bonus food* Soy – I haven’t put this in the top 8 but it deserves a mention for both positive and negative reasons. I left it out is because it is a food that is almost always genetically modified. If you eat soy, you should buy only organic sources to avoid that. Soy is also best to be fermented to help minimise the phytic acid and lectins that can stop absorption of minerals and cause damage to your gut. The fermented sources you will most easily come by is soy sauce, tamari, tempeh and miso – obviously not great as dairy substitutes! Soy milk and tofu do substitute well for dairy and provides a complete plant-based protein but they should only be used occasionally – definitely don’t use them as a staple in your diet.
Chiropractic and falls prevention
By Dr. Graham
We know that falling (called “a fall”) is a major risk for injury in older adults and is a significant cause of death. Life can be very difficult for those who experience a fall. In my own case, my dear Nan was very fit and healthy in her eighties when she heard a car crash outside her house in northern NSW some years ago. She got up quickly and began to race outside to help. But she tripped, broke her leg and never returned home again. Instead she suffered multiple complications, had a long hospital stay and ended her life in aged care. She went from being very independent and functional to totally dependent on the medical and aged care system in one fateful second. This was indeed a sad thing to witness. Nan had been a very independent person, so much so that she would not I imagine have even dreamed of going to see a chiropractor. Even when in aged care when the physio came around to offer exercises for her “dicky” knee, Nan would send the physio away to “someone who needed it more”!!
There are some studies that show how receiving chiropractic adjustments can help our brain “know” where our arms and legs are in space, without looking. That scientifically known mechanism has been understood for a long time and is called “proprioception”. Remember from my last article, we talked about the brain-body connection and chiropractic. Our brain needs to know where the rest of our body is – so that we are well co-ordinated and we move without stumbling.
Researcher Dr Kelly Holt in New Zealand conducted a scientific study involving two groups of older age participants. One group received chiropractic care and the other did not. The researchers measured how quickly each person could move their foot in response to a light that flashed on the ground. They also measured a thing called ankle “joint position sense”. The ability to move the foot in this way has previously been shown to be a factor in how well a person recovers after they trip on something or if another unexpected change happens – in order to get the foot down and avoid falling. The researchers found improvements in both parameters for those who had chiropractic care – but also importantly, there were no such beneficial changes for the group that did not receive the chiropractic treatment. This suggests that chiropractic may translate to less risk of falls in older people. The research adds to that already done investigating how chiropractic and other manual therapies may reduce the risk of falls in the elderly.
Reference: Haavik, Heidi. 2019. “The Reality Check. A quest to understand chiropractic from the inside out”. Haavik Research, Auckland, NZ.
Yeah, I feel better, but how does chiropractic actually work?
By Dr. Graham
Chiropractic was founded in 1895 in Iowa, the USA by Dr Daniel David Palmer. But in fact, spinal manipulation had been used in several other countries for a long time prior to then. Since those days, chiropractic has developed into an increasingly sophisticated health care profession backed in Australia now by a 5 years science based university Masters degree. For many decades, chiropractors have observed and their patients have experienced better body balance, after they have come in saying, “ My back feels out”. How does that happen? Well chiropractors and other professionals have theorized about how adjustments can restore alignment and function after a chiropractic adjustment – now, the science is in!!
What controls everything in our amazing body? The Brain!
I have been catching up on some chiropractic research that identifies clearly what happens in our nervous system immediately after an adjustment. In her book, “The Reality Check”, Chiropractor and researcher, Dr Heidi Haavik has summarized many aspects of 15 years of research on the human nervous system and how key parts of that system communicate strongly when we move and live life – but also how a misaligned vertebra can result in poor messaging to the brain resulting in poor commands to the muscles, thus our body feels – and is – “out”.
You may have noticed that your chiropractor touches or palpates your spine. This is to assess where particular problems may be. So, what problems could there be? What we are looking for is to identify which vertebra or vertebrae feel stuck or misaligned or out. The term chiropractors have used over the years to describe that is “vertebral subluxation”. This term is not used by all chiropractors but if you have heard it before, hopefully that explains some concepts. So, what do after we assess – we “adjust” the spine, or the spinal segment so that normal range of motion is returned to the spinal segment, thus restoring more global spinal motion. The adjustment has been scientifically shown to restore crucial messaging from the spine to the brain. We will look at that interesting topic in more detail in the next newsletter.