Berry Nice & Beware of the Chair

Taken from Lynne’s weekly column ‘Green Scene’ for the Western Mail
26^th August 2023

Berry Nice

I love this time of year.  The urgency has gone out of gardening, and everything in the garden seems happy with its lot – happy simply to go to seed or to yield lots of fabulous fruit and veg.  I love the misty mornings and warm evenings and the days where there is just enough enjoyable heat in the sunshine and even useful warm rain.

And I am having the best suppers of the year – runner beans, peas and courgettes from my garden and carrots and Pink Fir Apple potatoes from generous (and rabbit-proofed) neighbour.  I have had runner beans with every evening meal for the last 10 days and will probably have them for the next 10 days too.  They are just delicious.  My dad would just eat a bowl full of runner beans and bread and butter for late summer suppers and I always remember the cartoonist Bill Tidy telling me that his runner beans were shamelessly used as currency at this time of year. He would use his bumper crops to barter for all sorts of other produce and even trade skills.

And blackberry season has begun!  As I’ve written before, I am always reminded of blackberrying trips with my nan – always productive, usually humorous and never dull.  Inevitably someone would end up in a bramble-covered ditch, rubbing stingy nettle lumps with a dock leaf and tweezering thorns out of purple-stained fingers for a few days afterwards.  It was always worth it.  The blackberry bounty would be swiftly turned into jam, jelly and tarts and the stings and thorns forgotten about.

Today there are more decadent recipes for the little berries on the Internet. Try blackberry and vanilla Vodka, chocolate and blackberry jam, fermented blackberry soda, blackberry and cheese Danish Braid, blackberry BBQ sauce, blackberry and lavender or rosemary jelly, blackberry cream cheese spread and blackberry butter.

Technically the blackberry, despite what its name suggests, is not actually a berry but an aggregate fruit – formed of individual drupelets held together by fine hairs. But that doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so well.

You can buy thornless varieties of blackberry bushes with a good yield for your garden. ‘Helen’ is relatively compact, with attractive, small black berries and obviously makes a great present for someone with the same name! ‘Loch Tay‘ is also thornless, with semi-upright canes, and relatively compact growth making it suitable for smaller gardens.  ‘Natchez’ is another thornless (but vigorous) variety, with bold ornamental foliage.  It will reward you with heavy yields of large fruit with a pleasant flavour. And ‘Karaka Black’ is a thorny variety, but it’s compact with large tasty fruit and great autumn foliage colour.

And don’t forget to put a few blackberries in the freezer as a treat for the birds in the depths of winter.

Beware of the Chair

One of my favourite sayings (from the great philosopher Winnie the Pooh) is, “Sometimes I sit and think, sometimes I just sit.” But it seems that the wise old bear didn’t realise the risk he was taking.  When you think of something that could be life-threatening, the last thing you will think about is your chair.  But recent studies prove that it is actually one of the biggest potential threats to your health.

Experts have found that simply reducing the time we spend sitting down can reduce our chances of cancer, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, depression, neck and back pain, and even Alzheimer’s and dementia, and that’s as well as poor posture, muscle stiffness, and decreased circulation.

Some of the relevant campaigns are now claiming that ‘sitting is the new smoking’, and carry the warning that ‘we are sitting ourselves to death’.  In a recent interview one professor even warned, “The chair is out to kill us.”

In the book ‘Sitting Kills, Moving heals’, author Dr Joan Vernikos explains that “We weren’t designed to sit, the body is a perpetual-motion machine.”  She estimates that we spend more than half of our waking hours sitting down – either watching TV, driving, or sitting at a desk or table at work or home.

And the alarming part – if you are not already alarmed – is that linked research shows that although exercise is good for you, it doesn’t negate the damage done by extended periods of sitting.  One professor warns, “The cure for too much sitting isn’t more exercise. Exercise is good, of course, but the average person could never do enough to counteract the effect of hours and hours of chair time.”  Another scientist agrees adding, “You can’t offset 10 hours of stillness with one hour of exercise.”

And the reason is that apparently sitting sessions actually change your body’s metabolism, with it slowing down by a whopping 90% after just 30 minutes of sitting. The enzymes that move the bad fat from your arteries to your muscles, where it can get burned off, slow down. The muscles in your lower body are turned off. And after two hours, good cholesterol drops 20%. Sitting also shuts down electrical activity in the legs, adding to all sorts of health problems.

But the good news is that just getting up and moving for five minutes is enough get things going again. Even just standing up for five minutes will help.

The scientific – and fascinating – facts are that we burn an average of 50 calories more per hour by standing. Just standing – not even moving. If you stand for 3 hours per day, 5 days per week, it adds up to 750 calories burned. In a year that adds up to 30,000 calories – the equivalent of running around 10 marathons per year – and a weight-loss of around 9 lbs.

A fella called Dan Kois tested the ‘standing theory’ by standing instead of sitting wherever and whenever he could for one month.  He used a standing desk at work, watched movies standing up, ate at restaurants standing up and even watching a movie in a movie theatre standing up – and diarised the painful parts from aching calves and feet to a sore back.  But his conclusion was, “My month has been an ordeal, but it’s clearly succeeded. I’ve lost almost five pounds and gained muscle in my legs, especially my calves. I’ve cut my time-wasting drastically, editing and writing more than in any month I can remember. I’ve walked 92.5 miles, basically without trying.”

You don’t have to be quite as extreme as Dan to reap the benefits.  Professionals recommend getting up every 20 to 30 minutes to do any kind of activity can prevent all of the problems that can come from extended periods of sitting.  The simplest way is to just include walking, or even standing, breaks in your day.  These ‘professionals’ are not even recommending the gym – it’s staggeringly simple.

There is a saying, ‘If more designers had bad backs, we would have more comfortable chairs’ but I think if more people were health conscious perhaps we would have fewer chairs.  Now if you’ll excuse me I need to get moving.