Dale Pinnock - Dale Pinnock Fakeaways: Healthy, budget-friendly takeaways for everyday homecooking

CHAPTER ONE
Indian CHAPTER TWO
Chinese CHAPTER THREE
Italian CHAPTER FOUR
Japanese CHAPTER FIVE
MiddleEastern CHAPTER SIX
Thai CHAPTER SEVEN
Grills & Classics Select one of the chapters from the and you will be taken straight to that chapter. Alternatively, jump to the to browse recipes by ingredient. Look out for linked text (which is blue) throughout the ebook that you can select to help you navigate between related sections. You can double tap images to increase their size. To return to the original view, just tap the cross in the top left-hand corner of the screen. Takeaways.

We all love them, and I am certainly no exception. They are a great treat, something to have when friends visit or for a special occasion. Generally, getting the odd takeaway is enjoyable and having one now and again doesnt present any kind of problem. The issue is that so many of us are now reaching for a takeaway over a home-cooked meal most days of the week. A lot of us are even doing this for two or three meals a day. This is when we begin to have a problem.

This is where the occasional treat turns into something that can have a profoundly damaging effect on our health. I know this may sound a little dramatic, but as you will soon see, the danger is very real when we consume takeaways to this extreme level. Enter Fakeaways! This book is full of recipes for your favourite takeaways that you can make at home. All of them are quick and use cheap and accessible ingredients. Once you have your theyll be a complete doddle. My versions are also tonnes healthier and therefore you can enjoy them regularly! Ive done some super-simple swaps, such as substituting regular white pasta for wholegrain, and white rice with brown, but Ive also massively upped the nutrient content as well as drastically cut the sugar and other nasties.

Get the kids involved theyll love making my Pizza with a Punch, Baked Spring Rolls and the Tex-mex Beef Burgers. These really are recipes for the whole family. But whats the problem with takeaways exactly? It is the cumulative effect of these calorie-dense meals and the undesirable ingredients that begins to cause damage? Lets take a look in more detail at some of the nasties that can be found in your average takeaway.

Most of the common takeaways that we are likely to choose on a regular basis will be full of refined and simple carbohydrates, which are essentially sources of sugar. They take little effort to digest and the sugars enter our blood stream very rapidly. When our blood sugar levels rise, the body responds by releasing the hormone insulin.

This hormone then binds to an insulin receptor on our cells and lets cells know there is an influx of sugar available for it to take up and use as an energy source. This causes the cells to open up a doorway known as a glucose transporter so that the sugar can enter the cell. Once the cells have taken in their fair share, any left over will be stored in the liver and skeletal muscles in the form of glycogen, which is an easily accessed stored sugar. All well and good. The problem we face with large doses of simple carbohydrates is that they deliver more glucose in a single sitting than we are designed to cope with. Our cells get full quickly and close the doors to more glucose entering because an excess of glucose within the cell can cause damage.

Then our glycogen stores get full. After a large dose of refined and simple carbs, however, blood sugar will still often be very high even after the two usual mechanisms are saturated. The body still needs to bring blood glucose back into normal range so it sends it to the liver where it is converted into a fatty substance called triacylglycerol or triglycerides. These fatty substances are the second storage means employed by the body and they get stored directly in... our fat cells! And we gain weight. This is energy that is squirrelled away for a rainy day.

The problem for many of us is that the rainy day never comes. So, problem number 1 is we put on weight. Problem number 2 is that these fatty substances are sent to the fat cells via our circulation. When in circulation they are susceptible to oxidative damage which then in turn can damage the blood vessel walls and set the stage for heart disease. Problem 3 is that raised triglycerides can in turn cause an elevation of the bad LDL cholesterol. Pretty gruesome stuff.

If this set of events continues then yet another problem arises. If our blood sugar gets too high too often, we end up releasing higher and higher levels of insulin. After a while our cells become less responsive to the insulin signal. Soon we become insulin resistant and this can set the stage for type 2 diabetes. So what do we need to look out for? White bread, white rice, white pasta, sugary sauces. These are the worst contenders.

Think of the high-street pizzas that have a base of stodgy white bread an inch thick. Or the dishes at the popular Asian food outlet that are essentially a box of white rice with a tickle of protein. Cheap pasta dishes. The restaurant sauces that have a sticky or gloopy texture to them such as sweet and sour sauce, sticky wings and the like... they are full of sugar.

The next group of problematic substances that we find in most takeaways are the refined oils and trans fats. The next group of problematic substances that we find in most takeaways are the refined oils and trans fats.

Refined oils include your everyday vegetable oil, sunflower oil, corn oil, soy bean oil and the like. We are not talking about olive oil here. We are talking the cheap bulk oils, and also ironically the oils we were told were better for our hearts in comparison to saturated fats. But why are these such an issue? Well, it is all down to the fatty acids they contain. Fatty acids are a group of fats that are biologically active and absolutely vital to our health and the health of every single cell in the body. They are called essential because we have to get them from our diet.

Our body cannot manufacture them. There are two types of essential fatty acids omega 3 and omega 6. These fatty acids play such a vast and varied role in human physiology, it is really rather mind-blowing. They are involved in maintaining the structure of cell membranes, the myelin sheath (a specialized fatty coating on the outside of nerve cells), and even the eyes. They are also metabolic building blocks that the body uses to create several important substances, one of the most important being a group of communication compounds called prostaglandins, that regulate things like the pain response and inflammation. It is the impact on inflammation that we are going to focus on here, as the effect on health can be profound.

There are three types of prostaglandin Series 1, Series 2, and Series 3. Series 1 and Series 3 prostaglandins reduce inflammation and tone down the inflammatory response. Series 2 on the other hand switch on and ramp up inflammation. Different fatty acids give rise to different prostaglandins. Remember that as we go through. So why does this even matter? Well, inflammation is a very, very important reaction in the body and is necessary to our defences fighting infection and assisting in the repair of damaged tissue.

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