Sunday Supplement
The editor voices his views on Moray’s most topical events of the past week…..
Fair Game – or theft?We have all lived through some very tough years, a world-wide recession that was born from the greed of bankers that created suffering and hardship that has, in some way, touched us all.
Things are looking a little bit brighter in this first month of 2015 – just a little – but still there are people fighting to put food on the table and to keep their homes warm in a hard winter.
It is against such a background that most of us can understand the measures people will go to – including picking up logs from trees that nature has provided in the recent storms.
What troubles me, however, is when someone who can clearly afford an expensive truck and owns a chainsaw just drives up and slices a fallen tree into logs, carting them away for their own purposes.
That is not desperation, that is theft, pure and simple – and made all the worse by the fact that the tree in question had already (and very obviously) been stripped of its branches by council workers in preparation for use by a Forres childcare centre.
If the culprits were aware of their intended use or not is irrelevant – is there any difference in the greed of bankers that placed us all in such a difficult position in the first place any different from that of those people who think it OK to save themselves a few bob for their wood burners?
insideMoray has been made aware of key information about this particular incident and that has been passed on to Moray Council, who ultimately have the responsibility to decide what to do next.
I trust they will take that responsibility seriously.
Scourge of modern life
Unusually for my editorial this week I’m going to get personal!
Diabetes is a growing concern for us all in one way or another – we either suffer from the illness or if we don’t we pay in some way through the costs it brings to the National Health Service.
For the thousands who have Type II Diabetes the advice is that it can be controlled with a ‘healthy diet’ – but for many, no matter how they try, that is not nearly enough.
And with that goes the constant worry of complications that will occur if their blood sugar levels are not correctly maintained.
There are a plethora of medications to help them fight the condition of course, but for many even these are not the answer, as still they struggle.
I know this because I’ve had Type II diabetes for over 20 years – and in all that time, despite extensive efforts, I’ve failed miserably to maintain any sort of control.
Until, that is, just two weeks ago when a doctor I was seeing on another matter at Dr Gray’s pointed me in the direction of a web site – www.dietdoctor.com.
Her advice went against everything I’d been told in the past. While I’d always been urged to eat my ‘five a day’ from the fruit basket and avoid fatty foods as well, more obviously, the sweeter temptations put before us, the advice was leave fruit alone and have a fry-up.
This advice is not unknown to any of us – the Atkins diet method has been a matter of debate for years. But this was not about losing weight, it was about controlling the amount of sugar produced by the food being eaten by this diabetic.
So Carbohydrates became the rule of the day – an immediate halt to high-carb items such as bread, pasta, rice, cereals etc. In was eggs, cheese, bacon, steaks.
A previously ‘healthy’ breakfast of fruit, cereal and a slice or two of toast was replaced by one of sausage, bacon and eggs.
The result was remarkable – inside three days regular blood sugar tests were showing numbers that were, for the first time in over 20 years, inside the parameters we all need for a healthy life.
Now I’m not saying that this method is right for everyone, and I’m sure there are medical and dietary professionals reading this with growing horror.
But if you are one of the thousands who suffer from Type II Diabetes and, like me, have always had trouble controlling it, this surely is worth a look.