Related Stories
Over twenty years ago, Richard Ingrams, the founding editor of the satirical magazine 'Private Eye', published an anthology of health scares with the grimly amusing title of 'You Might As Well Be Dead'. Nowadays the scope is way beyond the capacity of a single book. And our appetite for scary stories about diet is now insatiable.
In many ways, this reflects the increasing infantilisation of society. It seems that a lot of us like to be treated like children, to be lectured and nannied, to avoid, for as long as possible, taking responsibility for our own lives and actions.
The fear business has spawned a considerable industry. There are the academic boffins whose university departments depend on research grants – and research grants for projects based on fear seem to be more accessible than for projects which are likely to lead to reassuring conclusions.
Health 'advocates' and 'educators' – jobs that were invented over the past 30 years and whose arrival has made not a jot of difference to our collective health and happiness – are a self-perpetuating species with a well-paid mission to wag a massive but utterly redundant finger at the population.
And, of course, there are the manufacturers of foods which are processed to match the ideals espoused by the health scare industry. Funding of health research by this sector has muddied the waters for decades. For example, it is only very recently that orthodox medical opinion has come around to the view that saturated fat is no longer the bête noire; the villain of the piece is now increasingly recognized to be refined carbohydrates (like sugar and refined flour. As a typical can of soft drink contains about 40 grams of sugar, it seems just as likely to lead to diabetes as heart disease). If manufacturers of polyunsaturated and monosaturated fat margarines had not been giving huge financial support to research into cardiovascular disease for decades, we might have heard about this a lot sooner.
The so-called 'food pyramid' was considerably influenced by the wheat lobby: the original version would have us believe that you can’t eat too much bread - hardly good nutritional advice.
The advice to eat five portions of different fruit and vegetables every day seems, at first glance, to be sound. But why five? Why not four? Or six? In fact, the campaign was originally launched under the slogan 'Strive for Five'. So, it’s five because it rhymes.
We really don’t need to be patronized like this, even if we sometimes deserve it. We all know that eating plenty of fruit and vegetables is good for us. (It might be helpful to be reminded that whole fruit is better than juice because it contains dietary fibre and is a lot less likely to attack our teeth).
Vested interests, massaged figures, skewed results: all of these are as inevitable as night following day. What is really depressing, however, is our pathetic need to be told what to do, what to eat, what to avoid, how much to exercise, how to live.
Actually, it simply involves growing up and taking responsibility for our own lives, being reasonably well informed and reasonably sceptical. It involves accepting that good living is about balance, about eating food, wherever possible, that has not gone through a factory, taking a reasonable amount of exercise and not smoking cigarettes. It involves drinking alcohol, if you must have it, like an Italian or a Spaniard.
Various people have their own mantra. The American food writer Michael Pollan advises us to avoid eating anything that our grandparents would not recognise. Others maintain that any food advertised on television should be eschewed. But what’s wrong with Kerrygold?
Constant questioning is required. It should be obvious that correlation doesn’t always mean causation. For example, most people who suffer a heart attack in Ireland drink tea. This does not mean that tea causes heart attacks.
See? Common sense is actually really useful.
