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    Beans – Good for Your Health and for the Planet

    First, let’s talk about nutrition and its various benefits for our bodies. Have you ever heard of the blues zones? The blue zones are five areas of the world with the highest concentration of centenarians living longer and healthier lives. What we know from the research made by Gianni Pes and Michel Poula during the last decades is that the food secret of the world’s longest-lived people is a diet composed of 95-100% of plant-based food, and guess what? Beans are one of them, and they are served daily. Beans come in various shapes and textures (over 20 000 species), and they are packed with more nutrients than any other food. They are inexpensive sources of protein and fiber and provide the majority of vitamins and minerals our bodies need. And when eaten in a well-balanced diet, they can help prevent the development of various chronic diseases and support our heart and digestive health. 

    If you are reluctant to incorporate beans because you worry about digestion, here are 5 tips you might want to consider:

    1. Start with small portions 
    2. Soak beans before cooking
    3. Cook beans with a strip of Kombu seaweed. This seaweed will help break down the enzymes that can make beans hard to digest. 
    4. Don’t salt beans while cooking
    5. Add some spices. Spices improve the digestibility of legumes. You can use cumin, turmeric, ginger and fennel.

    One of the Planet’s Most Sustainable Protein Sources

    According to the Geneva Environment Network, our food system and consumption practices are not sustainable and aren’t good for our planet, and in fact, not good for our health either. So, it’s time for us to change instead of letting our planet change. Changing how we eat can help improve our planet’s resilience by reducing food-related emissions, wildlife loss and agricultural land use. 

    A Planet-based Recipe

    Flavourful, nourishing and hearty winter couscous full of colorful nutritious veggies. 

    Ingredients – 6 persons

    • 1 large yellow onion, diced
    • 200-250 g crushed tomatoes
    • 4-6 medium carrots, peeled and cut in half
    • 6 small yellow turnips (can be replaced by celeriac), cut in wedges
    • 1 small red kuri squash, cut into slices
    • 500 g cooked chickpeas
    • 4 tbsp olive oil
    • 2 tbsp ras el-hanout 
    • 1 bunch of freshly chopped parsley
    • 1 bush of freshly chopped coriander
    • salt to taste

    For raisins and onions confit

    • 1 small yellow onion, diced
    • 1 tbsp olive oil
    • 200 g raisins
    • 2 tsp cinnamon
    • 1 tbsp honey

    Instructions for the vegetables

    1. Heat the olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until tender. Add the crushed tomatoes and ras el-hanout and cook for 1 minute, until fragrant. 
    2. Add the carrots, chickpeas, yellow turnip, the red squash kuri and herbs in layers and cover half with water. Reduce the heat to low, cover, and simmer until the veggies are fork-tender and the flavors are well-developed. 
    3. Serve warm accompanied with couscous and garnished with raisins and onions confit and topped with fresh coriander.
    4. Store cooled leftovers covered in the refrigerator for up to 3-4 days or in the freezer for up to 1 month. 

    Instructions for the raisins and onions confit

    1. Heat the olive oil in a small pan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until tender. 
    2. Add the raisins, cinnamon, honey and a small glass of water and cook, stirring occasionally, until the water has evaporated. Then, set aside.

    Happy Legumes Day!

    Original Source: https://resiliencei.com/blog/beans-good-for-your-health-and-for-the-planet/

    What Our 2020 Data Got Right (and Wrong) About Crisis Resilience

    • In March to June 2020, RI’s own diagnostic data found average resilience had risen roughly 7% compared to the same period in 2019, a genuinely counterintuitive early-pandemic finding.
    • That finding makes complete sense in light of the well-established Phases of Disaster framework: the sample was captured during the heroic and honeymoon phases of the crisis, the period of mobilisation and community bonding that reliably comes before a longer, harder decline.
    • The transferable lesson matters more than the specific 2020 numbers: early positive resilience signals during any crisis, a downturn, a restructure, a market shock, often reflect a temporary mobilisation phase, not a resolved trend. Reading them as the final word is a real risk.

    In the middle of 2020, a few months into the pandemic, we looked at our own diagnostic data and found something that surprised us. Resilience hadn’t fallen. On average, across a sample of over 1,600 professionals and executives, it had gone up. Six years on, that finding is still worth revisiting, not as current data, but as a genuinely useful case study in how resilience actually behaves during the early phase of a major disruption, and why reading that phase correctly matters.

    What the 2020 Data Actually Showed

    We compared Resilience Diagnostic results from March to June 2019 (1,599 participants) against the same window in 2020 (1,659 participants), drawn from a similar pool of professionals and executives across comparable organisations. The average resilience ratio rose from 1.51 to 1.61, a roughly 7% increase during the acute early phase of a global crisis, not the decline anyone would have predicted going in.

    The pattern wasn’t uniform. Male participants improved more clearly, from an average of 1.57 to 1.70, with the proportion at risk actually falling slightly. Female participants showed no change in the average ratio, but the proportion at risk rose by 15%, with increases specifically in anhedonia, self-doubt, and depressive symptoms. This tracks with separately well-documented research from the same period on the disproportionate caregiving and domestic burden many women carried during pandemic-era lockdowns and school closures, a genuine and important asymmetry inside an otherwise positive headline number.

    At a category level, mental strength, physical energy, stress mastery, and related risk categories were slightly better during the crisis window. Emotional engagement, disengagement, and depressive symptoms were slightly worse. Specific strength factors that improved included purpose, integrity, fulfilment, compassion, situational agility, optimism, and sleep quality. Factors that declined included trust, flow, decisiveness, emotional agility, and empathy.

    Why This Isn’t as Strange as It Sounds

    Psychologists Leonard Zunin and Diane Myers developed a framework, widely used in disaster psychology, describing the emotional phases most communities move through during a prolonged crisis: warning, impact, heroic, honeymoon, disillusionment, and reconstruction. The heroic phase is marked by altruism and mobilisation, first responders, healthcare workers, and communities pulling together with real intensity. The honeymoon phase that often follows brings a genuine, if short-lived, sense of optimism and community bonding, along with a belief that things will return to normal reasonably quickly.

    March to June 2020 sits squarely inside that window for most of the world. Our data wasn’t capturing a crisis that had resolved well. It was capturing a population still inside the heroic and honeymoon phases, genuinely mobilised, purposeful, and pulling together, before the far longer disillusionment phase that followed. That later phase, well documented separately across 2020 to 2022, brought the more severe and prolonged mental health decline most people actually associate with the pandemic: rising burnout, anxiety, and depression as the crisis stretched on far longer than the initial mobilisation could sustain.

    Seen through that lens, the 2020 finding isn’t really a story about resilience being immune to crisis. It’s a story about which phase of a crisis a snapshot happens to catch, and how easy it is to mistake a heroic-phase mobilisation for a resolved, stable new normal.

    The Transferable Lesson

    This matters well beyond one pandemic. Any organisation moving through a major disruption, a restructuring, a market downturn, a leadership change, a merger, will likely see something similar in its early resilience or engagement data: a genuine, real mobilisation effect in the first weeks or months, purpose and cohesion measurably up, as people pull together around the immediate challenge. Reading that early signal as evidence the disruption has been successfully absorbed is a real risk. The honest interpretation is closer to: the team is currently in its heroic or honeymoon phase, and the real test comes later, when the mobilisation naturally fades and the underlying, unresolved strain has had time to surface.

    Two practical implications follow. First, treat early positive signals during any crisis with appropriate caution rather than as confirmation the hard part is over. Second, plan deliberately for the later phase, the point where disillusionment risk peaks, rather than being caught off guard by a decline that the Phases of Disaster framework would have predicted from the outset.

    A crisis rarely announces which phase it’s in. Knowing the shape of the curve in advance is what turns a surprising early number into a useful one.