How can we trust ‘research’ by the food industry?
How much crap do we read about food every single day? People of a nervous disposition must dread picking up a newspaper in case another hot news story means they have to rethink their daily diet from scratch. Dear readers, we are cannon fodder in the food wars being fought by rival PR men, marketing groups and supermarket chains. And the icing on the cake is a whole lot of dubious “research” by scientists published in an arcane publication, probably funded by - you’ve guessed it - the people who grow, sell or package food.
Remember when low-fat spreads were just brilliant for lowering your blood pressure and warding off heart disease? I know that secretly you thought; “How come no one in Sardinia is offering me Flora when I sit in a gorgeous fish cafe in Porto Cervo” - and didn’t you wonder why all the good people of the Greek islands weren’t keeling over with coronary embolisms? Funny that. Then we were told that butter was even better than these light whippy spreads. A little while later we were told olive oil was better than dairy. Mind you, there’s still Udo’s Oil, avocado oil, “light” olive oil - all with massive claims on a shopping list of healthy eating.
I’ve just spent 10 days in Sri Lanka and the Maldives, where the idea of eating a low-fat spread is plainly ludicrous. The locals live on noodles, curries, fruit and veg, and you rarely see a fat person. In fact, most of the people I spoke to every day had shiny hair, a smiley disposition and gorgeous skin. How did they manage this without the benefit of all the food advice we have rammed at us morning, noon and night? Take the “traffic lights” system which uses red, amber and green marks on foods in the supermarkets run by Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer, Asda and Waitrose to denote levels of fat, sugar and salt. If I shop at Tesco or Morrisons, there’s a different load of information slapped across every packet of Pringles, Coco Pops and cheese straws about recommended daily guidelines, expressed as a percentage.
Soon we’ll be slowly making our way up and down the aisles on the weekly shop clutching calculators and trying to work out if stir- fried chicken legs with peanuts and bean sprouts is a death row meal or a healthy option. Plus, no self-respecting healthy eater can leave the premises without a basket loaded with this week’s de rigueur “super-foods”. Remember when we just ate apples, bananas and the odd kiwi fruit? How weird and deprived that now seems. How on earth did our parents even reach full maturity living on tinned grapefruit segments, maraschino cherries and peaches in thick gloopy syrup? I have spent the past year religiously consuming the following each day: oats, blueberries, raspberries, broccoli and pomegranate pips. I look exactly the same as I did the year before on the outside. Inside, my body is a super-food temple. I have not lost any weight, it’s true, but I feel I have temporarily halted the ageing process.
This week, on returning from 10 days without super-foods (I was stopped from taking porridge to the tropics), I discovered that I have to eat a whole bunch of watercress every single day to fight cancer. After eight weeks my cells will be fighting fit. It’s just a matter of getting an uninterrupted supply of the stuff in the depths of winter. By the way, this new “research” was funded by the people who actually produce watercress. Suspicious or what? And if I’d used tea tree oil to soothe the mosquito bites I got while travelling, I’d be in big trouble. While one lot of boffins told us to start munching cress, another lot produced “research” claiming to prove that tea tree oil, which is used in dozens of beauty products, can increase our chances of being vulnerable to the MRSA super-bug. In case you’re confused - and I don’t blame you - a super-food is something you eat, and a super-bug is something that eats you. In the meantime, stick to a daily diet of Pringles. Sooner or later scientists are bound to declare them an excellent way of avoiding athlete’s foot and warts.