Sugar Swaps // Carrot Cake Pancakes

This year Change 4 Life, a public health campaign by the NHS, are running Sugar Swaps again, encouraging people to reduce their daily sugar intake by giving them the knowledge and tools to enable them to do so. Over the last few years, sugar has loomed large on the agenda in terms of public health, with the high sugar content of modern diets playing a critical part in the explosion of obesity and type 2 diabetes in populations. This month the World Health Organization (WHO) has published new guidelines advising an even lower sugar intake - now the official line is that sugar should ideally comprise no more than 5% of your caloric intake (that's roughly 6 teaspoons a day). 

So Sugar Swaps is a very timely campaign, and I signed up a few weeks ago. I generally eat a balanced diet, but unfortunately I do have a real sweet tooth which I find difficult to ignore at times! I thought getting some advice on finding satisfying substitutes for cake and chocolate could only be helpful.

Once you sign up, you get a pack in the post to help you on your way. It's aimed at families so there's some kid-friendly stuff in there like stickers and flashcards, but also some useful bits for the grown ups too, like a notepad for your shopping list, a booklet with recipes, and some money off vouchers for low sugar and sugar free items. The flashcards in the pack highlight how much sugar can be in the foods you eat, and how easily the amount of sugar you consume adds up over the course of a day. For example, a box of sweet cereal has, on average, an eye-watering 34 sugar cubes in it! 

Sugar Swaps pack

In terms of suggestions for getting my own sweet tooth under control, Sugar Swaps recommends swapping puddings for fresh or tinned fruit or fruit salad, sugar free jelly and low sugar yoghurt. Although I am a big fan of Total Greek with fruit, sometimes you just need something a bit more substantial to stave off the sweet cravings. Luckily the booklet also features recipes for some more filling lower-sugar puddings, breakfasts and snacks you can make yourself.

Although I think the campaign is a great way to motivate people to transition to a lower sugar diet, I think one of the main reasons for the high levels of sugar consumption in the Western diet is actually the prevalence of 'hidden' sugar in foods. It's fairly obvious that ice cream and muffins are high in sugar, but not everyone realises that even savoury items, everything from your chicken sandwich to your microwave ready meal potentially has had sugar added to it. This includes products that are marketed as 'healthy' or 'low fat': they may even use fancy sounding words like 'raw cane sugar' to make it sound healthier, when in reality it's still just another form of added sugar. The only way to eliminate excessive sugar from your diet is to read labels very carefully, avoid processed foods, and cook from scratch as often as you can.

Speaking of cooking from scratch, I had to give one of the recipes in the booklet a go. One that caught my eye straight away was Lorraine Pascale's Carrot Cake Cinnamon Pancakes, which sounded like a winner to me. I made these for breakfast but you could happily make them for dessert too. I amended the recipe slightly as I didn't add protein powder (I hadn't trained that morning and so didn't need the extra protein, plus the eggs and greek yoghurt contain protein anyway) or the honey (as I knew I'd add sweet toppings).

These were really easy to make and turned out very much like American style pancakes, which surprised me as there's no flour or baking powder in them. I think part of the reason for this is because I made the batter by throwing all the ingredients in my Nutribullet, which must have beat more air into it than a regular blender, making the pancakes really light and fluffy. The batter can easily make four large pancakes. I made one large one to eat straight away, and then four smaller ones to put in the fridge/freezer and have later. I ate mine topped with a banana and maple syrup (sssh don't tell the sugar police!). I think next time I'll throw some raisins into the batter after blending it, to make the pancakes even more carrot cake-y.

Carrot Cake Pancake with banana & maple syrup

What healthy alternatives do you reach for when you have a craving for something sweet?

Foods of the World: Japan

I've been so lucky to have had the opportunity to go to Japan twice in the last couple of years. I've been fascinated by the culture for a long time, and knew before I went that I really liked the food, but of course, the Japanese food I'd tried in London (even though there are some great Japanese restaurants here) didn't compare to the real thing. In Japan I was pretty adventurous and expanded on my previously rather limited knowledge of Japanese food. I was really surprised by the breadth of dishes on offer. From shabu shabu to yakitori, from chankonabe to gyoza, I soon realised how varied the cuisine was, and that I could quite possibly eat Japanese food every day for the rest of my life and never get bored. There were so many culinary highlights during my time in Japan, but I'll outline just a few below.

Fresh Seafood

One of the things that I enjoyed most about Japanese food was how incredibly fresh everything tasted. The seafood is some of the best I've ever eaten, and fresh fish is highly prized in Japanese culture: perhaps unsurprisingly given that the country is an archipelago comprised of more than 6,000 islands. I visited Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, and Otaru fish market in Hokkaido, where I saw an incredible array of fresh and live seafood. With both markets full of restaurants serving the markets' offerings, you could try it with hardly any time wasted in the journey from sea to plate.

My favourite seafood dish was definitely the seafood bowl I had at Otaru fish market. With a base of sticky rice, you could then choose a topping of whatever seafood you wanted. I chose crab, salmon roe and salmon. The flavour of the bowl somehow managed to completely encapsulate the sea, and it was a bit of a revelation to me. This should have been pretty similar to sushi as the components are essentially the same, but I think the proportion of seafood to rice took it to another level: I mean, just look at the amount of seafood in that bowl! Plus, being able to mix different types of seafood in the same mouthful was divine.

Seafood bowl at Otaru fish market

For me, the delicate sweetness of fresh seafood is really best enjoyed raw - and this, of course, is something you can eat in copious amounts in Japan with their incredible sushi and sashimi, which I also ate plenty of!

A selection of sushi at Hanayoshi restaurant, Niseko

Sweets

Boy, do the Japanese love their sweets! Be it Royce Chocolate, daifuku, or delicate langue de chat biscuits, there is a veritable feast available to the sweet-toothed traveler in Japan.

Although it would be impossible for me to dislike chocolate, the Japanese chocolate certainly doesn't come close to its European counterparts, like those of Swiss chocolatiers in my opinion. The Japanese sweets that really stood out for me, however, were the dairy-based desserts. I spent most of my time in Hokkaido, which is well-known for the delicious milk produced by its cows! I sampled a number of milk desserts, including ice cream, milk pudding, cream puffs and cheesecake.

Clockwise from top: Milk pudding from Takahashi Ranch Milk Kobo, Niseko; milk flavour ice cream from Yamanaka Dairy Farm; a selection of cheescakes from LeTAO cafe in Otaru.

Their dairy desserts make the milk the star - they're not overly-flavoured with other ingredients or sickly sweet, so you can taste the milk really well. It's weird that I like these so much because I don't actually like milk a great deal in the UK (I always buy almond milk instead), but this milk tastes really good, so fresh, and I imagine it is much higher quality than the milk you buy down your local corner shop in the UK. I particularly loved the LeTAO Double Fromage cheesecake (the bottom left piece on the above plate), which somehow manages to have quite a subtle flavour whilst still being incredibly rich, and the two layers made for a lovely contrast of textures. They sold these at New Chitose airport, and I was really tempted to buy a whole cake to take on the plane back. Maybe next time!

I also really love the Japanese melon jellies, and these are something I do always bring back with me. They're bite-sized jellies with a really strong melon flavour, that you suck out of their plastic tubs in a more or less inelegant manner. The Japanese Yubari King melons after which they are flavoured are really expensive - the one pictured below was selling for 2680 Yen, the equivalent of about £15!

Yubari King melons at Otaru market

Ramen

More or less everything in Japan comes with either rice or noodles, so if you don't like either, you may have a bit of a problem! Luckily I happily devour both. Although ramen was originally an import from China, this noodle soup is now considered to be a quintessentially Japanese dish.

I realise I have been talking about Hokkaido specialities a lot (I really need to go back and try cuisines of different provinces/islands!), but when given the choice, I would always go for a ramen served with a dollop of Hokkaido butter and corn. The butter gives the broth such a rich and creamy taste, and I love how the sweetness of the corn cuts through the savouriness of the miso broth. My all-time favourite ramen is undoubtedly the snow crab and corn version I had at The Lookout Cafe. It was exactly what I needed on my last day of skiing. This despite the fact that I'd probably consumed more crab than most people do in a lifetime over the course of my last trip. There's no such thing as too much crab!

Ramen with snow crab, Hokkaido butter and sweetcorn

Final Thoughts

I love the variety of Japanese dishes, how fresh and good quality the produce is, and how beautifully the dishes are presented. However, Japanese cuisine is a little low on vegetables for me! They do have some incredible salads (with beautiful miso dressings), delicate pickles and vegetable tempura, but when it comes to main dishes, almost everything is comprised of fish or meat with rice or noodles, which doesn't leave much space on the plate for your five a day. Also, as most dishes have added soy sauce, I think my daily consumption of sodium was quite high when I was there. However, I'm sure Japanese people don't eat at home exactly what I was eating in restaurants: if I ate out in London every day for two weeks I'd probably be complaining about the lack of vegetables and high salt content of the foods too. And as Japanese men and women live longer than any other population on earth, I can only come to the conclusion that they must be doing something right when it comes to their food.

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