The Nutrition Nightmare

If you tried to follow every single bit of healthy eating advice you came across, there’s a good chance you'd end up getting thoroughly fed up with it all and becoming a Breatharian, a person who believes that they can thrive on nothing but fresh air and spiritual energy. For the record, I don't recommend this as a dietary choice; breatharianism has often resulted in the less than healthy outcome of a premature death from starvation for many of its proponents.

Who’s responsible for all this confusion about what we should and shouldn’t eat? Here’s an overly simplified list of the primary guilty parties:

First up, we have the food, farming and pharmaceutical industries, backed by their teams of 'sympathetic' nutritionists, food scientists and doctors, who try to maximise their profits by highlighting the healthy aspects of the stuff they produce whilst keeping very quiet about the bad. I'm including the retailers in this category too, by the way, especially the major supermarket chains, who tempt and tease you with their BOGOFs, 3 for 2s and other offers and schemes.

Next, there are the established scientific and medical professions and the government food agencies, all of whom would like to give clear and unambiguous advice about not eating rubbish, but generally can't agree on an official stance which won't bite the hand of the first bunch. This institutionalised reticence, I think, played a big part in allowing, if not causing, major health scares such as the BSE/vCJD crisis in the 1990s - did you have the slightest idea before that story broke that beef cattle were routinely fed on meat and bone meal made from the carcasses of other animals, including other cows? No? Neither did I.

Then there's the fad diet brigade, generally comprising impossibly fit and trim OR ‘were-obese-and-probably-will-be-again’ celebrities and sports personalities, self-appointed food and health experts, as well as good old fashioned quacks and con artists. Oh, and the food and pharmaceutical industries: they often like to have a crack at this themselves - ‘simply replace regular meals with a bowl of our nutritious cereal / our fat-melting energy bar / a can of our wonder drink / a small capsule of something we concocted in the lab’.

Last, but by no means least, there are the popular press and the advertisers who spend inordinate amounts of time, energy and money reporting and sensationalising the mixed messages, the pseudo science, the conflicting guidelines, the latest fads, the blatant marketing spin. There’s a lot of advertising revenue to be gained from such reporting and programming, especially if your show or campaign is fronted by one of the celebs or ‘experts’ I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

It’s no wonder we’re all confused and quite touchy about the subject. I’ve learned - the hard way - that most of us are quite defensive about how and what we eat. Criticising someone’s dietary choices is tantamount to criticising their driving skills and is something you should be careful about doing in a heavy-handed, dogmatic way.

In the follow-up to this article, I’ll outline some guidelines for improving your diet with some tried and tested advice that I’m fairly sure your grandparents would approve of. Your grandma wouldn’t want you living off thin air now, would she?

To be continued…