Tips for Healthy Eating

Vegetables and Fruits The Australian Dietary Guidelines recommend generous serves of vegetables daily. Use only occasionally – say, once a month – those main recipes which don’t include vegetables such as Meatballs and Mashed Potatoes and Beef Stroganoff. Better still, have them with added frozen vegetables such as peas, beans, corn and carrots. Each day, have a variety of: • fruit and vegetables • lean protein foods, including tofu, beans, lentils • dairy foods • and grains like oats, barley, pasta and rice. Sugar Consider adding fruit to sweets and desserts to allow a reduction in the use of sugar. Too much sugar not only affects your teeth but can also affect other aspects of your health. Although sugar can make you feel good and give you a quick burst of energy in the short term, over consumption is linked, among other things, to fatty liver, high insulin levels and joint pains. Salt Reducing salt in cooking is recommended generally, not only for people with high blood pressure or liver disease as salt is commonly included in processed foods such as ham and tomato paste. Practise reducing salt intake by avoiding or reducing addition of salt in cooking and at the dinner table. Allow time for taste buds to adapt by ensuring enough flavoursome tastes are added to the food, for example by using: • fresh or dried herbs • spices such as chilli, curry powder, cumin and turmeric • pepper, garlic and ginger • lemon juice and vinegar.

For tips on eating well for liver health, and on adapting to a reduced salt diet, call Hepatitis SA on 1800 HEP ABC or on the Freecall Prisonline #8 on the Common Access List from any prison telephone, to order our recipe books: Eat Well for Your Liver, and Eating Low Salt. We would also like to thank Wellbeing SA nutritionist, Jo Hartley for many of the tips provided here.

For 25 years, hepatitis C was a part of my life. I was diagnosed in 1991. Back then, I had not heard of hepatitis C and had very little knowledge of blood borne virus transmission. I was told by a liver specialist that treatment was very challenging with debilitating side-effects for many people and had varying success rates. Luckily my liver was healthy enough for me to wait for better treatment to be developed. I was very happy when the direct acting anti-viral treatment cured me of hepatitis C, 25 years after my initial diagnosis. Left untreated, hepatitis C may lead to liver cancer or serious liver damage which can result in liver failure. In Australia, one in five people living with hepatitis C don’t know they have it. A simple blood test can tell if you’ve been exposed to the hepatitis C virus and testing is getting simpler as new methods are developed. Hepatitis C exposure risks include sharing injecting equipment, non-sterile tattooing, medical, dental and cosmetic procedures with unsterilised equipment, sharing razors or other personal grooming items and blood transfusions before 1990. Other hepatitis C exposure risks can include fighting and even contact sports if the ‘blood rule’ is not followed. Hepatitis C is not a sexually transmitted virus, though there is an increased risk of hepatitis C being passed on for men when having sex with other men or during rough sex when blood is present. It was in 2016 that the Australian Government made new, highly effective hepatitis C treatments available to any Australian who needs it, including people in prison. The cure is just pills with little or no side effects. I lost no time getting on the new treatment. I had no side-effects and was cured after just 12 weeks of taking those pills. Many others need only one pill for 8 weeks to be cured! Hepatitis C is easy to test and easy to cure. For more information, call the Hepatitis Helpline on 1800 437 222 or on the Freecall Prisonline ring #8 on the Common Access List from any prison telephone.

Lisa

Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone who made the production of this recipe book possible. The valuable feedback from those who were ‘eating in’ at the Adelaide Pre-release Centre was so helpful. We really appreciate the guidance that they provided. We could not have produced this resource without the support and assistance of the ever helpful APC Social Worker, Sally Rees. Thank you Sally. Recipe contributions from members of the Adelaide Local Exchange Trading System (Adelaide LETS) were well thought out and delicious, as were the recipes provided by the staff and volunteers of Hepatitis SA. Thank you also to the Hepatitis SA staff and volunteers who tested the recipes and captured the results on camera. SA Health has contributed funds toward this program.

Credits

Recipe development by Lisa Carter Cutlery images on section heading pages designed by macrovector/Freepik p3 photo by Monicore from Pixabay Book design by James Morrison Project coordination by Rose Magdalene

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