The Blurb
With The Pure Package Brain Food programme, you can expect plenty of delicious brain-boosting foods such as oily fish, fresh fruits and vegetables, pulses, nuts and seeds. Their brain-boosting meals are designed to provide you with the right balance of lean proteins, slow-release carbohydrates and essential brain supporting fats.
In addition to the nutritious food in the programme, they provide you with Holford’s Advanced Optimum Nutrition with Brainfood supplement for maximum benefits and absorption. This powerful combination contains unique essential omega fats, antioxidants, phospholipids and B vitamins that gives comprehensive nutritional support for your brain and body.
The Process
Pure Package is the gold standard when it comes to delivery diets. Better value and better quality than a live-in chef – the food is incredible, but that doesn’t quite mean it comes cheap. Renowned nutritionist, and founder of the Brain Bio Centre, Patrick Holford has teamed up with Pure Package to create the perfect diet to protect your brain from degenerative diseases and improve emotional wellbeing. Delivered to your door, every morning, his expertly formulated meal plans taking you from breakfast, to elevenses, to lunch, to mid-afternoon perk-me-up, to supper. All exquisite, and accompanied with two strips of pre-prepped supplements to take alongside breakfast and lunch.
A typical day might include a Mediterranean courgette frittata or walnut and banana bircher with live yoghurt for breakfast, a fruit and nut based snack, lunch of a shredded duck salad with Asian dressing. Crudités and a dip would be a typical afternoon snack and dinner would be something like spiced coconut and tomato tiger prawns or green nori chicken.
I trialled the plan for several days. And not only was the quality insane but, unusually for most delivery diets, the portions were super-generous. It isn’t specifically a weight-loss plan, and as someone who’s out-eaten every boyfriend I’ve ever had, this is the first time I’ve felt sated by the portions in a delivery diet. But, analysing its nutritional content/ raw constituents I actually doubt any day’s food matched my typical diet in terms of calorie intake. And it definitely flagged up how few vegetables and fruit I typically consume on a daily basis.
Holford is the ultimate early-adopter, outlier, genuine truth-seeker; one of the first challengers to Big-Pharma’s status quo. His empirical approach to nutrition and psychiatry was unheard of before he came along, and the field, sadly, hasn’t seen anyone quite like him since. Nutrition is underemphasised in psychiatric training and underrepresented by impartial researchers and scientists. It attracts a disproportionate constituent of house-wives armed with a poorly-researched evening course, motivated primarily by a desire to Lord it over Sally next-door, and tell her with authority that she’s eating too many chips.
Pure Package, however, have been around for 17 years, follow the most up-to-date, credible research, and base all their principles on well-documented science. Whether you’re looking for healthy weight-loss, increased energy, or improved immune function, they offer a package for it. The guys at Pure Package definitely don’t belong in the category of under-qualified nutritionists I’m rallying against. Nowhere near. But there is a general dearth of properly intelligent scientists doing properly funded research into the interaction between neuro-endocrinology, metabolism, nutrition, cognitive health and psychiatry, which is what makes Holford so remarkable, and his collaboration with Pure Package seminal.
The Results
I looked and felt exponentially better after just five days on the plan. And now, a month on, I’ve maintained a similar diet and am still eating considerably healthier. The food is so delicious it inspires you to stay on a similar track – ultimately giving yourself the best chance to stave off Alzheimer’s, depression, insomnia, anxiety and mood-swings, with the happy side-effect of looking and becoming a whole lot healthier in general.
If a long-term plan isn’t feasible, a few days can totally reset your habits, inspire you, and remind you what you should be eating. I’ve lost half a stone in the month since, and feel generally healthier, calmer and more resilient.
Three or four days’ food is varied enough to provide a snapshot of the ideal diet for emotional balance and cognitive support. If you were to hang on to the menus and recreate them at leisure, you’d be taking one of the best steps towards improved health I can think of. And if nothing else, you’d eat amazingly whilst on the plan, resetting your brain-gut-neuro-endocrine-immune system, and your habits, with chef-quality, genuinely delicious, impeccably healthy and nutritionally balanced food.
