Healthy Eating

www.paulcoia.com

As I sit here, bloated from the massacre of chocolate Easter bunnies and tired from undoing my trousers to let my expanding gut out to meet the neighbours, I’m reflecting on the fact that we live in health obsessed times.

I quite like living in this millennium because unlike when rickets, scurvy and the workhouse meant you were dead before your father had hitched up his baggy pants and returned with his flat cap from the fields, we will all live now to be one hundred and eighty, have skin that glows like a saint’s halo and our regular visitor, Mr Constipation, will be so yesterday. At least that’s if the diet devils are right.

No one can escape the all pervasive advice on what’s good and bad for health just now, and it’s made communal meals a nightmare. Host a dinner party and one friend will be avoiding red meat while another will be going cold turkey on starch – that’s cold, organic and corn fed, turkey of course. A further mate will want low carbs whilst yet another will be on some diet that means they can only eat buffalo that grazed on a west facing slope and must be washed down with Holy water bottled by Evian at Lourdes.

These supposedly good food days have spawned the likes of Gillian McKeith, the woman who definitely isn’t a doctor but is allowed to poke around on TV in other people’s poo. Funnily enough, when her name comes up I always think of back passages as I’d love to lure her to a dark one and send in the boys to sort her out. I can’t decide whether she really does get people to live longer or it just seems long because of her being so relentlessly annoying. Don’t you just want to smack her chops with a sackload of organic peaches, preferably still in the tins?

Even the less ghastly health witches in her coven make me feel life’s not worth the effort.

This week I read one of them giving some advice for how to tackle Athlete’s Foot. She wrote in a national newspaper, The Daily Mail since you ask, that we should crush cloves of garlic, smear them between our toes, and then wrap our foot in a cloth before going to bed. Now just stop for a moment and think about this. Can you imagine the smell or the comments from your bedmate? It would be a great form of contraception but just picture the dreams you’d have as giant Italian sausages, dressed as Dracula, chased you through town. Unless you work in a pizzeria might the pong hovering around you next day cause problems much worse than Athlete’s Foot? Perhaps it would clear a seat or three on the train to work, but what a completely useless, impractical, idea.

Another guy I interviewed on radio, after asking me to move our chairs closer to the window to let in good vibes, demanded to know what medical problems I had, saying he was going to use his powers of ancient herbal remedies to cure me. Despite knowing better and realising these happy clappy, dippy, hippies are a con, I mentioned my sinuses and, of course, he said he had already guessed that was the problem. His internet bought certificate presumably boasted a degree in Herbology, Feng Shui and Mind Reading.

He decided that my cure was contained in a jar of supermarket beetroot juice. I wasn’t to drink this red vinegar but, rather, gargle with it and instead of spitting the stuff out, I should expel it by forcing the gunk down my nose. Stupidly I tried and it not only blew my few brain cells to smithereens but for weeks I had a red tip to my nose that looked like I was on a permanent bender.

If you think it’s difficult to set yourself up as a health and fitness expert, think again because the papers can’t get enough of this rubbish. One of them printed this week the following tip. “When mixing ingredients in the kitchen, don’t use an electric blender but do it manually. This will use four calories per minute and give your wrist muscles a workout.” When I read that, I wanted to find the writer and give my wrist muscles a workout by making a well known gesture right under his nose.

But this modern day witch doctor stuff continues to gain momentum and take hold. My well meaning pal at the gym has been studying food intake and allergies and despairs at my belief that good food went down hill after school dinners. He reckons we are all either Protein or Carbohydrate people. Find out which type you are, he says, then stick to your food type and you’ll live forever, fly like Superman and all your kids will become beautiful millionaires.

I filled in his exhaustive questionnaire only to find I’m exactly half way between the two types. The last thing these people want is to be stuck without an answer so, after admitting he’d not come across this before and, after careful examination of his books, he advised that I should only eat porridge - for breakfast, lunch and dinner. So, if you’re thinking of inviting him and me over for dinner, don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Mind you, invite me on my own and I’ll eat any old shit you serve up. Unless, of course, Gillian McKeith’s been poking around in it first.