Wednesday 4th April, 2018
Today, we touch on the Healthy Caribbean Coalition’s new childhood obesity prevention campaign, why this campaign is important, what policies the HCC is encouraging governments in the Caribbean to introduce to tackle childhood obesity and how you can get involved.
Wednesday 21st March, 2018
Today’s episode is inspired by the Black Women’s Health Imperative’s IndexUS report which looked at what healthy black women can teach us about black women’s health.
It is always wonderful coming across organisations in the health and wellbeing field who are making a significant impact in their community, and Fly Girls Fitness, Wellness and Mindfulness is one of those organisations.
Fly Girls Fitness, Wellness and Mindfulness is an award-winning organisation based in Wembley in the UK and founded by Amanda Epe who is a writer, coach and health promotion specialist. They aim to improve the health and wellbeing of their community through creativity and activity. Their work primarily focuses on girls, women and young people and centres around three activities:
With Fly Girls Fitness young girls are encouraged to get active using fun activities likes Box Fit and Dance Fit. Here young ladies from the age of 12-25 can come together for free to have fun, get fit and improve their health. The sessions are all about the participants with attendees being able to bring their own playlist of music, this greatly enhances the experience making sessions more enjoyable and giving everyone a sense of ownership of the class.
Classes take place every Saturday afternoon from 3:15pm to 4:15pm at the Chalkhill Centre in Wembley.
The Fly Girls Running Community is a group of local women mostly from the London Borough of Brent who meet every Sunday morning at 9am to run together at the national stadium, Wembley. Women of all ages and abilities assemble in the municipal offices at the civic centre before they move upstairs to the stadium for their warm up exercises. The run is for girls over 14 to senior women but particularly targeted at the older population and women from African, Caribbean and Asian heritages, who have higher rates of health inequalities.
This is a get-me-started, run-together group, which started initially as 3 women back in October 2016 and has grown to 30 registered members. By getting people started the group encourages people who are new to running and/or being active. New members feel welcome in their friendly group where members are non-competitive, and the individual decides whether they wish to run or walk. Those who are new to running take it step by step, gradually going from walking to slow jogging up to 2km, 5km or beyond.
The Fly Girls Running Community has been a massive success with the group winning Run Group of the Year at the London Region England Athletics Volunteer Awards 2017. This was an amazing achievement with finalists being selected from over 600 entries in various categories. In addition to this, Amanda Epe, founder of Fly Girls won Run Leader of the Year.
With Fly Girls Wellness, Amanda Epe being a writer herself, explores writing as social therapy. The benefits of writing as therapy has been widely studied and we’ve even written a blog about this here.
Fly Girls Wellness recognises that writing can help people clear their mind and make sense of their situation. They state that writing brings clarity and can bring about a remarkable transformation of feelings. With this in mind they aim to create an opportunity for people to share their true thoughts which can build confidence. Their Writing for Wellbeing sessions are very different to regular literary groups where members critic your writing style, instead it aims to connect people with each other as their true feelings are shared through writing.
This is a great initiative that provides attendees with a creative way to improve their wellbeing, express their feelings and address the challenges of life.
We love the creative way that Fly Girls is addressing the health and wellbeing challenges in their community and wish them every success with their work.
To find out more about their work you can visit their website or follow them on social media
Facebook: @MsRoseBlossom
Twitter: @MsRoseBlossom
Instagram: @flygirlsuk
We are so happy to announce the publication of our new fact sheet on fibroids and exercise. This is the first in our new series of fibroids fact sheets which aim to cover a range of topics that you have told us are important to you.
This fact sheet series is a direct result of the findings of our small research project where we explored the needs of women with fibroids. From this work we discovered that there were significant gaps in the information and support available to women and we are on a mission to fill those gaps. We have worked towards this by:
Our fibroids and exercise fact sheet discusses how exercise can help alleviate the symptoms of fibroids and provides readers with simple tips on how to get active without aggravating their current symptoms. We hope that this resource will provide women with useful information that empowers them to take control of their health and take positive steps towards improving their health and wellbeing. You can download the fact sheet in the download section below.
The next fact sheet in the series will be published soon and this will focus on fibroids and mental wellbeing. This fact sheet will aim to help women identify, understand and address the emotions that may be associated with having fibroids.
We’d like to thank Candice Bryan from Noire Wellness for contributing to this new fact sheet, Way Wive Wordz Publishing, Editing and Tuition for their editing services and FutureSoft for their design work.
Wednesday 28th February, 2018
In this episode we speak to 82 year old Joan Ajose, a retired HR Regional Manager for a leading oil company in the Caribbean. We explore how she has stayed healthy over the years. We discuss what her diet was like as a child, her happiest moments and learn that the hurricanes of last year were the most challenging experiences of her life.
Welcome back to our gardening and health blog series where we’ve been taking you on a personal journey as we explore the health and wellbeing benefits of gardening for ourselves.
Today, Abi Begho is back and this time she’s sharing her experience of growing tomatoes. She discusses the ups and downs, the need for patience and the joy of harvesting your first fruits.
We absolutely love tomatoes in my house. We eat them almost every day – in salads, we make Nigerian stew with them, we use them in omelettes, stir fries, sandwiches and much more. You name the dish and we’ll put a tomato in it!
When it came to deciding what to grow in our vegetable garden, tomatoes were first on our list and the first thing we tried.
When I started looking into tomatoes, I must be honest, I soon realised I really didn’t know a thing about them even though I eat them every day.
I was shocked at the variety of tomatoes out there, I was just aware of cherry, plum and what I call “normal” tomatoes, but this is just the tip of the ice berg. I was shocked to learn that there are over 700 varieties of tomatoes, they come in quite a few colours, not just red – yellow, orange, pink, purple and black, and they have some very interesting names – Beefsteak, Big Boy, Pink Brandywine, Pink Girl, Lemon Boy, Golden Jubliee and Better Boy.
When it came to deciding which tomato variety to grow, because there were so many to choose from, I decided the best thing to do would be to extract the seeds from a local variety that we buy in our super market all the time. This means that I have no idea what variety it is (as it’s not listed on the package), but I knew it tasted nice and as it’s grown locally then that suggested to me that it would grow well in our garden (I hoped!).
Although this is how I selected which tomato variety to grow, the advice from experts is to base your decision on more scientific factors – how disease resistant a variety is, how it grows (is it determinate or indeterminate) and the time it takes to mature.
Once I had decided on what tomatoes to grow, then it was planting time.
My seedlings about a week after planting the tomato seeds
In my last blog I explained that I simply sliced up a tomato making sure each of the slices had seeds in them, buried the slices in soil and watered them and in less than a week my seeds had germinated and I had about ten seedlings growing happily in my container. I was so excited and just couldn’t wait to see the seedlings develop.
I kept an eye on the seedlings and watered them regularly and one week later their true leaves (second set of leaves) had developed, a sign that the seedlings were developing well. At this point I pretty much left them alone, under a tree that got a lot of sunlight (but protected them from the intense afternoon sun here in St Kitts) and watered them regularly.
Tomato Flower
When they had outgrown the container, I put some of the young tomato plants in a large pot and the others I planted into my newly created vegetable bed. Then came the test of patience. One thing gardening teaches you is patience. Every morning I would go out into the garden and will them to grow, I was so excited every time I saw them develop just a little bit more, it was fascinating.
Two months after planting my tomato seeds I noticed flower buds developing (the very first sign that tomatoes are coming soon) and a few days after that a lovely yellow tomato flower had developed. I thought: ‘yes! I’ll have tomatoes in a couple of weeks.’ What did I say about patience? There was more waiting. It took another 6 weeks to get my first ripe tomato and as I type I have 51 green tomatoes growing nicely and waiting to ripen ( ah-mazing!)
Check out the video below to see me picking my second ripe tomato.
Another important thing to mention is that I had to create a support system for my tomato plants. Due to the weight of tomatoes most plants need some form of support to prevent the fruit from weighing them down. There are many options out there and I chose to create a tomato trellis (see picture on the right), I created this using stakes and string. As the plants grew I would tie the main stem loosely to the trellis and weave the leaves horizontally along the string. This, so far (it is still early days), has given the plants some support and training them to grow along the trellis, as well as pruning the plants, has kept them neat and contained.
The four main challenges I have encountered thus far are:
Insects – Living in the Caribbean means there are a lot of bugs and insects to contend with and they all seem to love tomatoes as much as I do! To date, they haven’t caused any major problems, but I did lose two tomatoes to caterpillars who ate them for lunch one day. I was so sad, it felt like all my hard work had gone to waste, at least it was only two tomatoes . I’ve been keeping an eye out for tomato-eating insects and have flicked a few caterpillars off the plants before they made a meal of the tomatoes.
This is what blossom end rot looks like
Blossom End Rot – I woke up one morning shocked to see two of my tomatoes with dark patches on their bottoms, like they were rotting. I promptly discarded them hoping that they wouldn’t affect the tomatoes next to them. Then, a few days later, the same thing happened to two more tomatoes on the same plant but in a different location. I was dejected, first insects now some horrible looking disease. After a Google search I learnt that is was blossom end rot and not as bad as it looked.
Blossom end rot occurs due to a calcium deficiency where the plant, for various reasons, is unable to absorb enough calcium for its development. The advice from Gardening Know How is not to worry, it usually clears up on its own, just pick off the affected tomatoes and discard them and make sure the plants get adequate water (not too much though). So, for the moment I am going to just wait it out and see what happens. I’ll keep you posted.
Blossom drop – Last week I noticed that my new tomato flowers weren’t looking healthy at all. They seem drier than the previous set which really thrived and developed into 51 healthy tomatoes. These new tomato flowers are shrivelling up and some have already fallen off the plant without developing into fruit (Nooooo!). I couldn’t believe it. I had so many new flowers which I had hoped would form tomatoes, but alas, it was not meant to be. I hope the next set do better.
After doing some research, I found that blossom drop is common and looking at all the possible causes I have narrowed it down to two which I think could be the culprit:
Playing the waiting game – In this blog, I have mentioned patience and waiting several times and that has been one of my biggest challenges: waiting for something significant to happen. In the whole scheme of things it hasn’t been that long (3 months) to get my first ripe tomato, but at times it has felt like a life-time. Each step does take a while – it took two months from seed to the first sign of a blossom, then from flower to pea-sized tomato took a week, that got me excited, but then it took over a month for that pea-sized tomato to develop into a fully ripened red tomato, but it was so worth the wait – it was delicious!
Tomatoes are a great fruit to grow because they are packed with nutrients. They are known for their fairly high lycopene content which has been linked to a reduction in our risk of developing heart disease and cancer. Tomatoes are also rich in vitamin C, folate, vitamin K and fibre, and they contain iron, potassium, vitamin A and vitamin E.
All these nutrients and minerals are excellent for your overall health and by growing tomatoes in your garden you’ll get an ample supply so you’ll get a good dose of nutrients.
Well….that was a fairly long blog post (sorry!), but I hope that it gave you an idea of what it’s like to grow tomatoes and some of the challenges you may encounter along the way. Despite the challenges, it has been a lot of fun and very rewarding. I am looking forwarding to harvesting more tomatoes, so far I have only harvested two so there are many more to come. I’ll keep you all updated.
In my next blog I will move on to my okras – the stars of the show!
See you next time and happy gardening!
If you missed our previous blogs you can read them using the links below
Today’s blog is the second in our gardening and health blog series. We hear from Abi Begho who discusses what motivated her to set up her backyard vegetable garden and how she got started.
I’ve never been a huge fan of gardening, in fact gardening never really entered into my thoughts until recently. There has been a lot of change in my life with my husband and I moving from the UK to the Caribbean. We moved for many reasons with the main reasons being to improve our quality of life, escape the city where everything is so fast-paced and to get back to what is really important – fulfilling our purpose in life and having a positive impact on the world around us.
As we planned our move the idea of being sustainable and self-sufficient appealed to us – we’re going to have the space so why not try growing all our fruits and vegetables? I liked the idea of it, but in my mind I thought: this is going to be a chore and a lot of work, and I really don’t know where to start.
Once we moved I turned to my trusty friend, YouTube, and started exploring how to start a vegetable garden and there was so much useful advice.
I focused on fruits and vegetables that we eat already (tomatoes, okras, peppers, onions, broccoli etc.) and read up on how to grow these from seeds, but also consulted with my brother-in-law who is working on his PhD in agricultural economics.
My research was really eye-opening and highlighted just how much I didn’t know about the food we eat and where it comes from – who knew that okra actually starts its life as a beautiful flower and this flower turns into an okra pod ? Amazing!
A beautiful okra flower from my backyard vegetable garden
Armed with videos, information and lots of advice, I began. My first project was tomatoes. I literally just sliced up a tomato, making sure each of the slices had seeds in them and buried the slices in soil – a very simple tip I picked up from YouTube. I have to admit I was extremely skeptical – can I really grow tomato plants from these slices buried in a bit of soil? Well, to my surprise, less than a week later the seeds in the slices had germinated and I had the cutest little tomato seedlings growing happily in my container. That was towards the end of October and as I type I have nine tomato plants that are over a foot tall with 23 little green tomatoes developing and two huge green tomatoes which look like they’re ready to turn red any day now – great results! I am so proud and feel a huge sense of accomplishment that I have made such significant progress in growing my tomato plants from seeds.
So far, I have to say, I absolutely LOVE gardening. I have found it to be extremely relaxing, I wake up early every morning and spend some quiet time in the garden with my vegetables (that sounds a bit creepy, I know!). My surroundings are beautiful, the weather is great and the plants look like they develop a bit more every day, which I find really fascinating. It’s nice starting the day with the peace and tranquillity of engaging with nature and I now truly appreciate the beauty of God’s creation.
Oh, and let’s not forget that gardening is actually hard work so I do get some serious exercise, particularly when I am creating the vegetable beds – I have to do a lot of digging, weeding and raking . You won’t believe how much weight I’ve lost since I started gardening, I can hardly believe it myself.
My gardening journey has just started and in my next few blog posts I’ll share my experience until I hopefully get some produce (how exciting!). I’ll also share the health benefits of what I am growing, what I have learnt and the dishes I make from the vegetables I have grown – it may just inspire you to grow your own fruits and vegetables too.
Next time I’ll be discussing my lovely tomatoes and giving you an update on their growth.
See you in the next blog and happy gardening!
If you missed the first blog post in this series, you can read it here to find out more about the health benefits of gardening – there are many!
Welcome to this blog series on gardening and our health and well-being. Over the next couple of months we’ll be taking you on a personal journey as we explore the health and well-being benefits of gardening for ourselves. We’ll tell you how we started, show you our garden, what we’re growing and share some of what we’ve learnt along the way. Today we start off with a quick introduction. Enjoy!
When many of us think of gardening, we think of it as hard manual labour and a chore. We wonder why anyone would spend a weekend in the garden when they could be doing something else. Well, research (and personal experience) has shown that gardening is not only fun but can play an important role in improving our physical and mental health. The benefits are so effective that a whole industry of therapeutic horticulture exists and has been in existence, in some form or another, since the early 19th century.
Thrive, a charity that was founded 35 years ago, uses gardening to bring about positive changes in the lives of people with a disability, who are experiencing ill-health, are isolated, disadvantaged or vulnerable. They describe the health benefits of gardening as:
Gardening is no joke! It can be really hard work. Mowing the lawn, digging, weeding and raking can leave you feeling physically exhausted. This is a really good thing as it means you’re getting some serious exercise.
A research study published in 2014 showed that digging and raking equated to high-intensity exercise whilst other activities such as weeding, sowing seeds, harvesting, watering and planting transplants were found to be equivalent to moderate-intensity exercise. This means that spending time working on your garden every day could enable you to achieve the government’s recommended amount of physical activity (150 minutes a week), and because of the variety of tasks performed in the garden you’ll be getting both a cardiovascular and muscle strengthening workout.
Regular gardening has an impact on our physical health as the exercise we achieve from it can improve the health of our heart, help with weight loss and reduce our risk of developing heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer, fibroids and a number of other health conditions.
Gardening makes you feel good. The excitement of seeing your seeds sprout , the peace and tranquillity of having some quiet time in your garden, the accomplishment you feel when you harvest your first-fruits and gaining a new-found appreciation for nature all contribute to improving your emotions and state of mind. This is backed up by research too.
In 2013, researchers published a review of ten high-quality studies on garden-based mental health interventions. These studies all explored the benefits of gardening on people with mental health difficulties. All of them showed an improvement in the symptoms of depression and anxiety as well as a range of benefits including emotional, social, vocational, physical and spiritual.
Many people who delve into the world of gardening explore growing their own fruits and vegetables. Growing your own produce is a fun and rewarding way of introducing more fruits and vegetables into your diet; it can be a way to introduce a lot of these into your diet as one, say, tomato plant can provide an abundance of tomatoes, meaning your diet can be more plant-based. This type of diet has a number of health benefits including reducing the risk of cancer, diabetes and heart disease.
In addition to this, as you’ll be growing these yourselves you can avoid some of the harmful pesticides that are commonly used in commercially grown fruits and vegetables, avoid genetically modified products and you’ll get very fresh fruit and veg which many have said are tastier than store-bought products.
To grow anything requires you to develop and utilise a number of skills. These include problem solving (coming up with solutions when your plants don’t look right), patience, discipline, time-management, research (understanding the plant you’re growing), perseverance and a basic understanding of plant biology. Gaining these skills improves confidence and there is the added benefit that some of these skills are transferable to other areas of your life. Being empowered with these skills improves a person’s overall well-being, improving their outlook on life and leading to significant personal development.
Whilst at first glance gardening may not seem that inspiring, when you explore it further you can see the huge benefits it can have on your well-being. So… if you’re looking for a fun, yet practical way to get fit, active and healthy why not try a bit of gardening. We’re trying it and we love it!
See you next time and happy gardening!
Let us know your thoughts on gardening for health benefits in the comments section below.
The government of St Lucia has announced that they will be starting a campaign aimed at banning the sale of soft drinks in schools across the island.
This is part of a global public health effort to reduce the amount of sugar consumed by children. This worldwide effort has seen many countries explore various options to reduce sugar consumption such as taxing sugar sweetened drinks, clear front-of-package labelling, restrictions on unhealthy foods in schools and hospitals, tighter regulation of marketing of unhealthy foods to children, reformulation of foods by companies to make them healthier and increasing the availability of healthy foods.
Reducing sugar consumption, particularly in children, is extremely important as most people are consuming too much sugar which is linked to weight gain and obesity which increases risk of diabetes, cancer and a number of other non-communicable diseases.
This move by St Lucia follows that of Barbados and Jamaica who have both banned the sale of soft drinks in schools. The Ministry of Health and Wellness in St Lucia has met with principals of schools to discuss the best way forward in implementing the soft drinks ban. They stressed that their intention is not to affect the success of local drinks manufacturers, but to build a healthier nation. They want to encourage children to drink more water and turn away from soft drinks and juices.
Chief Nutritionist, Lisa Hunt Mitchell said:
“Sweetened beverages are bad for the health in general, but soft drinks have added ingredients such as caffeine, phosphoric acid, and colourings that are far worse. These ingredients have very negative effects on the health.”
You can find out more about St Lucia’s Ministry of Health and Wellness here
Climate change has been a controversial topic since Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, an Inconvenient Truth, with people passionately defending both sides of the debate – climate change deniers and climate change believers. Over the past year climate change has become very topical due to the United States pulling out of the Paris Agreement. This is an agreement that aims to facilitate a global response to climate change by “keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” Countries throughout the world have committed to working towards this aim and will report regularly on their emissions.
Why are we so concerned about climate change? Researchers have been able to demonstrate that climate change will have a significant impact on the weather, agriculture and a range of other areas. This week, The Lancet Countdown report has demonstrated the impact of climate change on our health.
The Lancet Countdown is an international research collaboration consisting of 26 institutions tracking the world’s response to climate change and in so doing have been able to reveal the impact that climate change has on the public’s health.
In this week’s report, researchers stated that climate change is “already a significant public health issue and a looming global health emergency.”
Some of their key findings were:
The report highlights the progress that has been made to tackle climate change and this includes:
Prof. Anthony Costello, Co-Chair of the Lancet Countdown and a Director at the World Health Organization concluded that:
“Climate change is happening and it’s a health issue today for millions worldwide. The outlook is challenging, but we still have an opportunity to turn a looming medical emergency into the most significant advance for public health this century.”
The Lancet Countdown will continue to report on climate change annually with the aim of ensuring that governments continue to pursue efforts to prevent climate change.
The Lake Foundation was happy to see this report published which provided an update on the progress being made to tackle climate change and clearly explained the impact on our health. It was sad to read that climate change is disproportionately affecting communities least responsible for climate change and those most vulnerable in society. We need to understand how we can encourage those that are most responsible for climate change to take responsibility and act now. There is work to be done to discuss climate change with those who believe it doesn’t exist, many people with this view are very influential and there needs to be some form of compromise so that progress can be made. The take home message should be that regardless of your view, we need to respect and take care of the planet. Reducing pollution and preserving our wildlife is the right thing to do, you can’t really argue with that.
For more information on the Lancet Countdown report please visit their website here
