Acorns are the new superfood

close contact with someone diagnosed with meningococcal disease.

This funding has been in a place for a while, so hopefully most people it applies to are already protected.

If you have a child who falls into the new funding category, or you are heading off to university next year, I’d recommend you make a booking sooner rather than later.

There isn’t anticipated to be a lack of vaccine, but you never know quite what the demand will be, so don’t leave it too late.

Only one dose is required and there are few side effects, other than perhaps a headache or an achy arm for a day or two.

Immunity in this age group will persist for five

Naseby Water Race, in Naseby, and, this month, the Krayzie Ks, near Christchurch.

Bisley gets a lot of time to think about why he does what he does. For him, the competition is a large part of it. years, so after that time, a booster might be required if the ‘‘close living’’ situation is continuing.

As great as it is to hear about expanded access to this vaccine, the sad reality is that if cost weren’t an issue, we would be immunising all our kids, no matter what their age or living situation, with both types of vaccine – Menactra and Bexsero.

So if your finances allow, this is definitely something worth considering. Hopefully for those for whom that isn’t an option, there will be more good news about the Bexsero funding soon.

For more information about Menactra and other vaccines, visit the Immunisation Advisory Centre on immune.org.nz, or talk to your GP team.

‘‘To run the fastest time, or get the highest placing, and you can compare yourself to others who’ve done it in the past. That’s one driver that gets me out of bed at 3.15 in the morning.’’

That’s dedication.

Eugene Bingham and Matt Rayment are hosts of the trail running podcast Dirt Church Radio. Learn more at dirtchurch radio.com or get in touch via email dirtchurchradio@gmail. com

Mighty oaks grow from little acorns. So too, apparently, do weird trends. The squirrels of South Korea can testify, because they are being forced to compete for their winter staple, acorns, by an unusual rival: humans.

So greedy are the humans, that the squirrels are in danger of starving. According to The Wall Street Journal, the newly formed Acorn Rangers of Seoul’s Yonsei University are now protecting the local oaks from would-be acorn pickers.

The consequence of the media furore, is that ever more people around the world have become alerted to the nutritional value of acorns.

Earlier this year, a study published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry showed that carbohydrate molecules isolated from acorns seemed to have promising effects on mice.

The researchers, who work at the Wake Forest School of Medicine, North Carolina, reported that feeding the fibres to the mice seemed to improve the relationship between the creatures’ guts and brains, ‘‘and hence could be useful in preventing/treating diet-induced obesity and T2D’’, meaning Type 2 diabetes.

As human and mouse gut microbiota digest these fibres, they produce the short-chain fatty acids that have, in other research, been linked to good heart health and lower rates of cancer.

Acorns, it seems, are the scourge of obesity, the enemy of diabetes, the mortal foe of cancer. No wonder acorns have undergone the cultural equivalent of dashing into a phone box and putting on a cape. They have gone from food to superfood.

But what do you do with them? Do you eat them raw? Do you get on your hands and knees and snuffle them up like a boar?

Miles Irving, author of The Forager Handbook, presenter of the WorldWild podcast and supplier of wild food to top UK restaurants, says acorns ‘‘are a very nutritious food, and madly, they’re a food that goes to waste’’.

He explains that acorns have a small amount of ‘‘quality oil’’, ‘‘a good lot of protein and lots of polyphenols, which we don’t get enough of, and minerals’’.

Their good nutrition and their easy availability, Irving adds, prompted pre-agricultural societies across the world to make them a staple of their diets. We started farming, and acorns became a food for lean times, then a food for pigs, and then barely a food at all, until the recent craze.

Irving doesn’t recommend eating them raw. They’re not poisonous, but ‘‘you’d probably have a sore tummy if you ate loads of them’’.

Your discomfort would probably be caused by tannins, which are biomolecules that bind themselves to nutrients and thus usher those nutrients out of the body without our getting their benefit.

An easy way to get rid of tannins is to roast them. Irving has chopped roasted acorns into bits and put them in rice pudding with some raisins. They introduce ‘‘a sort of almost smoky , almost toffee flavour’’. He got the idea, he says, from the chef David Everitt-Mathias, who had learnt about acorn coffee – in which you roast acorns, grind them, and make a hot drink – and subsequently experimented with acorns in desserts.

The other way to get the tannins out is by leaching. Simply put your shelled, chopped acorns in a bowl of water or hot water if they are whole, leave them to settle for 12 hours, and repeat the process two or three times until the water is clear.

Dry them out, says Irving, and ‘‘you’ve got a meal or flour that you can use for baking’’.

He added some wheat flour to give the mixture some gluten, and made some pancakes. ‘‘They are more like a flatbread than a pancake, really. Quite a solid texture, but really delicious.’’

As for the South Koreans, they mash the acorns and boil the starch into a dense brown jelly, called dotori muk, which is served with soy sauce and scallions.

You can even buy acorn noodles. In fact, taking Irving’s recipes into account, you could make a perfectly edible threecourse meal with acorns. Think of the health benefit.

One of the most interesting elements is that oaks provide a very high yield of acorns, which, per acre, compares well with grains, without depleting the soil of nutrients in the way that arable farming does.

Perhaps acorns really could be a food of the future, then, provided we leave enough for the squirrels and enough for the oaks to keep reproducing. It might not be so nuts after all.

– The Telegraph, London

Acorns have undergone the cultural equivalent of dashing into a phone box and putting on a cape.