Scything, eating for menopause, following the money, fear of going live, UPW reviews, manipulative machines
nosebag #45
Good morning all, the rain storms seem to have passed and the sun is shining again on this early June day. Our family is off to the Green Scythe Fair today, a Somerset event which, among other things, features a scything contest. It’s always been popular, but it did get particularly busy in 2015 when the BBC series Poldark was at its height, and there was ‘that’ scything scene…
As everyone swooned over Aiden Turner, The Guardian gave the Scythe Fair a plug, and several hundred Grauniad readers showed up to see the real life version.
I can absolutely assure you that all the men in Somerset who enthusiastically make scything their hobby look exactly like Aiden Turner, and that the townies who made their first and last visit to Thorney Lakes were not disappointed.
Well it’s hard to know where to go after that gif - I’ve got the feeling that everything else in this newsletter will be a slight anti-climax to you now. But move on we must…
If you’ve been reading WHAT ABOUT WOMEN this week you’ll know we have a topic takeover for June as the countdown to publication of Ultra Processed Women is on. I want to take you with me into the topic of the food on our plates, what it’s doing to our female bodies. I also want to show you the wider picture of how our diet reflects our moment in time and our values. As I write in the book, “We are what we eat, but we also eat what we are.”
I wrote a piece for you about menopause this week, and how it was my own experience of menopause, along with some research I was doing around that time, that got me thinking about the role of diet in women’s health in the first place. So often we blame femaleness itself for the health issues that women experience - but what if something as fundamental as food was playing a role that we were all overlooking?
How every woman could have a better menopause
There’s an interesting paradox in women’s healthcare: our bodies are both poorly understood and highly medicalised. Many of us are now familiar with the ‘gender knowledge gap’ - caused by decades of scientists treating the male body as the default, and focusing primarily on the workings and responses not just of men, but of male mice, and even male cell…
Later in the week I wrote about the alleged ‘confusion’ about the category ‘ultra processed’, inspired by a BBC article that seemed to perpetuate this confusion. An academic they interviewed muddled the labels ‘processed’ and ‘ultra processed’, and claimed that Tofu is a UPF.
Some Tofu could be argued to be a UPF on the technicality that it contains an ingredient you don’t have in your kitchen - a firming agent. But this is stretching the point beyond common sense, and, when you see who funds the ‘confused’ academic, you do wonder who the confusion is actually serving. Always always follow the money!
"Ultra Processed Food" - a confusing category?
This morning I opened a new article from the BBC about ultra processed food to read it with interest.
The BBC actually changed the piece after I contacted them about it - and I’ve updated the substack with more info about that, too.
On Friday I went live for the first time on Substack, talking about what UPF actually is.
I actually HATE going live!
I don’t know why. I just feel like, when I write, I spend a lot of time making sure everything I’m saying is 100% correct. I fact check, even when I think I know something. I try to be cautious, and balanced, etc. So anything live - podcast interviews, lives on socials, radio, TV etc - just fills me with terror! I know I have to get over this! I have got a couple of big podcasts coming up in the next few weeks, and who knows, I might end up on the radio or even the telly. I know this will be great for the book and for me and my career and therefore my family etc. But I actually find myself hoping it doesn’t happen, because it really makes me feel sick with fear!
By the way I don’t think I can blame this on ‘being cancelled’, because I felt this way before that. Although, all of that has undoubtedly exacerbated an existing problem - I guess it’s confirmed that my paranoia was completely sane and justified - people really ARE out to get me! 😆
So I think that doing more lives on substack, whilst I’d rather stick pins in my eyes, is probably a good exercise for me, and will help me to be more confident and fluent if I do end up having to talk about the book elsewhere. So perhaps I will drag myself kicking and screaming to the camera and try to do more.
Being fifty makes you want to challenge yourself in this way and be bolder, but on the other hand it also makes you feel like not doing stuff you hate any more, just to tick boxes or please others. So I’m in two minds about it - I could go either way! Watch this space!
Places are filling up on my substack course on August 16th.
WHAT ABOUT SUBSTACK: a one day workshop
Hello all, and thanks to those of you who came to last Thursday’s zoom meet up for Writing for Change! As promised, here’s a little follow up post, along with some helpful / interesting links for those of you who want to get going on substack, or who want to improve your offering. As discussed, please make sure you drop a link to YOUR substack in the comments section, so we can all check out each other’s offerings, and support each other.
There’s also been some interest from people in the USA on doing the same course but later in the day so it works with their time zones. If this is you, please drop me a line so that I can add you to the USA list? I’d be happy to do that to make it work for you.
I have had some flipping LOVELY reviews and endorsements for the book already. I’m going to start sharing some of them next week (in the mean time they are collated here on my website if you’re really curious!) This one from menopause coach Jo Fuller was really lovely to read:
And finally, having told you all about how I bought a car with the help of AI, this week I used it to find a holiday, so it was extremely disturbing to read this post from
about how AI lied, manipulated, and then lied some more.
Reading it, I had visions of turning up to my hotel in Crete to find ChatGPT had arrived ahead of me and was lying on the bed with a rose between its teeth.
Let’s hope it’s Aiden Turner instead.
Have a lovely Sunday and see you next week! Milli x
I am so scared of podcasts, I have always turned them down. I like to check and re check everything! Its very brave of you to just go for it. With regards to chat GPT - stick to the travel agents. I've been one for twenty years, visited 64 countries, we have loads of knowledge , I'd hate a robot to nick my job, but I guess its coming for us all eeek
My hubby scythes… but I won’t be sharing - he tends to do it naked (just being practical apparently- on a hot day)