Why I hate the food Nazis

The other day I was driven to rant on Twitter. 

OK, "yet again", I hear you say. Yes I do rant now and then. But this one was special. 

It was about some stupid ‘news’ that some American scientists had reported a link between eating red meat and dying. Or words to that effect.

Now if there’s one thing that never fails to get me ranting it is the latest food scare.

Some ‘scientist’, or ‘doctor’, or ‘random person with a vested interest in something’, makes an announcement that some food we’ve always known and loved is suddenly deadly. Mothers everywhere fear for their kiddies’ lives. Health freaks panic and stockpile yet more tofu and soya milk. And half the population wonders what on Earth there is left that is safe to eat.

Personally, I’d have all these people (who make rash pronouncements about the safety of everyday foods) taken outside and horsewhipped in front of their families.

OK, that may sound just a tad harsh, but in fact it’s no worse than what they are collectively doing to millions of vulnerable people. They may think they are doing good, saving animals from fulfilling their place in the food-chain. But in using scaremongering, causing mass public fear and anxiety to put people off meat, they are no better than the Nazis in my book.

Let’s examine the facts.

First, almost every food there is has been accused of being deadly at some time. Fat, especially the dreaded ‘saturated fat’, is accused of being utterly lethal, causing obesity, heart disease and all manner of other problems. Salt is another arch-culprit in the dock for causing high blood pressure, heart attacks and other lethal effects. And of course carbohydrates are universally the cause of excess weight, lethargy and ill health. Those three alone eliminate most foods from being edible, unless you are a fruit bat.

At various times we’ve been told to avoid eggs (too much Salmonella), fish (too much mercury and dioxin), red meat (too much fat), any barbecued food (more dioxins, plus chemicals called acrylamides), coffee, sugar, and of course alcohol. To name but a few. Even our daily bread is, we are told, full of fat and salt (actually without them bread would taste, and in fact be, just like cardboard).

Secondly, it’s the way they ‘test’ these dangers that is stupid. There are only two ways. One is by a statistical method, called ‘epidemiology’. Basically they survey hundreds of people for random facts about their lives, and if they can make a bit of a statistical link between, say, eating red meat and getting heart attacks, then they assume the two are connected. They largely ignore most of the millions of other reasons why those people may have had heart attacks (including what they worry about, or just the fact that they may have been genetically likely to get a heart attack anyway).

The other way they test is by some very dubious experiments. Usually with animals like rats, or sometimes even with cells in a glass dish. They expose these unfortunates to thousands of times the amount of the test food or chemical extract than you could possibly eat in a thousand years. And then see if the test animals or cells get cancer or whatever. The results usually prove that everything causes cancer. Or, in fact, almost nothing does unless you eat it by the truckload every day for decades.

And based on all this nonsense, and keen to make a name for themselves before someone else comes up with their stupid ideas, these peddlers of doom, these food Nazis, trot off and talk to the media. Headlines appear, and a food scare runs away with itself. Shopping parents go hysterical. Supermarkets go into panic mode. Newspapers go into frenzy mode. Forests go into newspaper pulp mode.

And all because some 'scientist' made a speculative and spectacular leap of an assumption. Or more often because some pressure group loony made a wild and sensational claim designed to shock the public into backing their own particular nutty obsession.

The reality of all this is so obvious you don’t need science. Just a measure of common sense. The answer? Eat what you like, but a bit less of it. Or as mum told us “A little of what you fancy does you good”. “Everything in moderation”. Eat a bit of everything, just cut down a bit on how much and how often.

And apart from that plain common sense, we also have another sense to help us too.

Throughout evolution we developed the sense of taste. Taste told us what was good to eat long before we had science, text books, web sites, the BB bloody C or indeed well-fed, bunny-hugging, foodie do-gooders.

When our ancestors were struggling to survive, they had basic needs for all the main food groups and nutrients. But in the absence of the BBC News (nowadays almost as sensational as the ‘Daily bloody Mail’) or the animal-liberation-front-RSPCA-vegan-mothers-against-eating-meat blackshirts, our forefathers and mothers chose what to eat based on their sense of taste.

Our cave dwelling forebears knew through their instinct that a good meal was one that tasted good. Through experience and instinct they knew what kept them alive and healthy. Those foods had fat and salt in them, and important nutrients. Those foods helped them feel well and sustained them.

The big difference now is just that most of us can satisfy that taste to excess.  So we have to use our intelligence to control our portion size. Simples!

As a biologist by education and a longish career (yes I even did research a long time ago) I know quite a lot about the scientific process, and about the science behind food and also health. At least more than the average person. And even with all my scientific training and knowledge, there are certain common-sense rules which we should all heed.

Human beings thrive best on a varied, balanced diet, with lots of different foods. If we eat such a varied diet, and get plenty of exercise, we stand the best chance of a long and healthy life. Back in the 1950s diets included such delicacies as beef dripping on toast, yet people of that generation are living longer than any previous generation of humans.

So forget the food scares. Treat them all with a large pinch of salt.

Remember: You are what you eat. Therefore if you eat what you like, you will like what you are.

Ordeal by eye test

In days of yore, people were used to some pretty harsh treatment.

Like for example, the medieval system of law, which involved subjecting the hapless accused to various heinous ordeals. There was ordeal by water (chuck you in, see if you float) or ordeal by fire (carry a red hot metal bar for three paces to prove your innocence) being among the favourites meted out to the general populus. On the other hand, noblemen accused of some misdemeanour would be subjected to the more ‘civilised’, but equally deadly, ordeal by combat.

Of course these days our legal system may seem a bit pussy by comparison. Indeed were it not for the ingenuity of modern medical science we might well have grown soft. But thanks to advances in technology to ‘improve our lives’, we have developed modern equivalents; chief among which, in my humble view, are ‘ordeal by dentist’ and, as I have just experienced, ‘ordeal by eye test’.

Faced by the inevitability of my ageing visual decline, oft I recently trotted to take my medicine, seduced by the reassuring adverts of visual heaven that awaits us all, thanks to the generous offerings of the corporate opticians.

And so I arrive for my appointment at the building in question, which is suitably located on busy cross-roads in central York. There’s little doubt in my mind that the site was chosen to remove any lingering doubt that an eye test is needed. Merely surviving the jostling along the crowded pavements and the dash across the traffic-laden street was a feat in itself.

I find my way through the heavily-laden showroom of designer frames to the receptionist’s desk and am promptly dispatched again, to find my way up a narrow stairway next door to the chamber of eye-testing horrors.

My allotted time arrives and I am called into a small alcove, cluttered with suspicious-looking instruments of torture, for what is clearly to be a softening up, or pre-test process. A formidable, white-coated lady commands me to sit in a mechanical chair, surrounded by an enormous assemblage of ominous gadgetry that would impress the henchmen of Spectre as they prepared James Bond for his final interrogation and slow dispatch.

The first part of the process is merely a physical ordeal. Designed to stimulate your pain threshold and assess, I surmise, whether you have any sight worth saving. So there sit, hunched forward, my head immobilised in a metallic clamp reminiscent of a Scold’s bridle. My captor approaches closely, and stares into my left eye with a kind of strap-on microscope. My curiosity turns to anxiety as she swings an ominous probe to within millimetres of my eye, and before I can think of how I might defend myself against the coming unknown, a short, sharp pulse of compressed air strikes my eye like a small kick in the brain. My reflex head jerk is immediate, and I am only prevented from suffering whiplash by the restraining harness clamped tightly around my skull. She moves on to repeat with the other eye.

Having pummelled my eyeballs with these gas guns she next turns to a second robotic arm, whose bright bean of light she trains directly at my first eye. I am just acclimatising to the beam in this darkened room when, with the flick of a button, she causes a flash of light of incredible brilliance to pierce my eye, in a way that renders me immediately and completely blind in that eye, as if hit by a thousand camera flash guns simultaneously. Again the process is repeated with the other eye before I am sent back to the waiting room, stumbling against chairs as I go, to wait for the next part of my ordeal.

This time what I assume to be a deceptively charming young lady, also clad in laboratory white, leads me into a second chamber. My eyes are slowly recovering from the assault by air and lightening , and I now appear to face the mental torture of the reading test. Now years ago we just had to cover up one eye with a card and read off a chart on a wall. Nowadays they have another contraption that you stare into, first to count dots of light or blurry letters that are thrown out of focus and distorted by an array of lenses. Then you are made to look through the same lens machine at a modern version of the letters on the wall chart. Eye strain is starting to hurt. I am wondering if I could make it to the door before my attractive captor can sound the alarm. She is already tapping a series of encoded data into her computer. Maybe she’s alerted the guards... I sit and wait.

But a final surprise awaits me. She now swings her chair around in front of me and places her own head into the other side of my restraining helmet, so that I am now gazing straight into her eyes. she asks me to keep looking straight ahead into their deep pools (my words not hers). She has nice eyes, and I find her direct, returned gaze most engaging, in a weird way. But then the best bit of all. She now asks me to look, first up, and then down. Up was fine, was OK, the ceiling was plain, white and featureless. But when I looked down I found I was staring right into her most appealing cleavage.

I have to say it was a first for me. Being actually commanded by a pretty female to fix my stare at her chest in this way. So what could I do? I didn’t question it, and willingly obeyed. It was a little less easy to return to looking her in the eye as she switched from my left to my right, but fortunately she was soon asking me once again to look briefly up, and then down again, and I was rewarded with a second irresistible command to peer through the low-buttoned lab coat into the ravine beneath.

Alas all too soon this part of the process was over and I was released to go about my way. Admittedly the rest is all a bit of a haze to me, but certainly that last element of my ‘ordeal’ was clearly well designed to make me forget all about the earlier discomforts, and I shall be raring to go next time my screening date arises.

 I wonder if they have male opticians for the lady eye-test incumbents. If not ladies, remember this catchy reminder: “Should have gone to Chippendales”.

As part of a healthy diet and lifestyle

As a seasoned microblogger through the medium of Twitter I gradually came to a staggering decision that I should try and release myself from the 140 character restriction, and start a blog.
Incidentally, or coincidentally, I made the decision to come here on the advice of a friend, who also blogs here, my twitter friend Malcolm Holt. (Thanks Mal). (I think).


Next came the need to decide on what to choose for my first blog subject. It came over the radio:


As we enter a new year, and are all obsessed (or not) with resolutions, and the need to shed the excesses of Christmas over-feasting, I thought a little rant on diet and health may be timely.


It so happens I was moved to Tweet on the subject just a couple of days ago, after hearing a vaguely irritating ad on Classic FM, promoting the supposedly cholesterol-reducing powers of healthy drinking yoghurts (in this case an ad for the unfortunate makers of Benecol happened to be the source of my irritation).


Now of course, I'm sure that company has funded, and/or benefited from, a raft of research tests from which they have extracted sufficient 'indications' of a statistical nature to back up the claims they make for their product. Of that I have no cross to bear, or indeed interest.
What bugs me is the way almost all marketing, advertising and promotion of products supposedly offering some dietary health benefit is made a mockery, by the inevitable phrase "as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle".


I mean, think about it. The sentence "[This yoghurt] can help lower your cholesterol level  as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle" is about as Earth-shattering and useless as a chocolate fireplace. Probably less so.


I'm constantly amused at all the foods, supplements, exercise machines, prosthetic fashion accessories and pretty much any of a million or more products which are sold on claims of making you fit, healthy, beautiful,  protected from disease and so on, provided they are eaten, taken, used or worn "as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle".


One can only hope that the great British, and global, population who consume these products, or at least the advertising bullshit promoting them, are wise enough to realise that it is the "healthy diet and lifestyle" itself that is the key to a healthy, beautiful and fulfilling life.


I'd even go so far as to say that almost any product is good for you, providing they are eaten, taken, used or worn "as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle". Yes, including chocolate, potato crisps, hamburgers, scotch whisky, and most classes of drug. The key is right there in that thinly-disguised, catch-all phrase that accompanies all these attempts to trick the vulnerable into unwanted purchases. We all really know what makes a healthy diet and lifestyle. Eat less bad stuff, do a lot more exercise, sleep well, drink plenty of water, and all the things your mother (or at least your grandmother) told you. IT'S THE HEALTHY DIET AND LIFESTYLE, DUMMY. THAT's what we all have to do. We know it! We just wallow in denial. We really want our fairy Godmother to wave a wand so we can be lazy couch potatoes, watch TV, eat and drink too much of all that we know is bad for us. It's not too much to ask. Is it?


So next time you hear, or read, an ad which proclaims wonderful results "as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle", pause a while, reflect on their sinister deception, resist the temptation to cling onto the promise of eternal salvation by spending your hard-earned cash on their miracle product, take it all with a (recommendedly small) pinch of salt, and simply get on with the job you know you have to do. Eat well, but in moderation and wisely, and do a lot more exercise than you do.


And have a very happy and healthy, Olympic New Year! (and roll on next Christmas!)