About time we stopped playing with our food

Sep 4 2003 By Peter Jackson, The Journal

Those of us who have been religiously eating our five portions of fruit and veg a day to protect against heart disease may have been overdoing it, it seems.

At least it does according to a new study by doctors in Greece, whose findings suggest three portions might be more than enough.

The medics, from the University of Athens, who carried out their study on some 1,900 people, found that those who ate more than 2.5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day reduced their risk of heart disease by about 70pc.

But they also found that eating more than three portions a day didn't seem to lead to any lower risk.

I found this interesting, not so much for the findings in themselves, for I always think such things ought to be taken with a pinch of salt (also injurious to the health now apparently), but for what it tells us about our obsession with food and drink.

In fact, the point will soon come where studying the effects of food and drink and writing about it will become a bigger industry than the production of food and drink itself.

And it's something the food and drink industries have to devote more and more attention to. For they now face the prospect of health warnings on bottles of alcohol and maybe on the menus of fast food restaurants - maybe something on the lines of "Eating too much food makes you fat."

Incidentally I don't know whether that five portions figure was plucked out of the air like the safe limits of 21 units of alcohol per week for men and 14 for women (although the idea of a "portion" does seem unscientifically imprecise).

A marvellous book Drink: A Social History by Andrew Barr describes how the 21 units and 14 units were a recommendation in 1987 of a working party of the medical Royal Colleges, the Health Education Authority and Alcohol Concern.

But only five years earlier, the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the British Medical Journal's ABC of Alcohol had put forward 56 units as the safe upper limit for men and yet, according to Mr Barr, no reasons for the change were given and there was no substantive new research to back it up.

In fact, a 1994 survey of 12,000 male doctors found those who drank between 25 and 35 units a week suffered least from heart disease.

This is not meant to be an attack on the nanny state or the grim puritans who have seized control of public health policy - although I'm sorely tempted - but merely an attempt to point out that in the affluent West we now have so much to eat and drink we can afford the luxury of talking about it non-stop.

And in final support of this I only need point to the phenomenal success of Dr Atkins' books and the Dr Atkins industry that has grown up around them.

It can only lead me to think One NorthEast missed a trick when it set up its five centres of excellence for the region.

There should have been a sixth on food research as I'm convinced this is going to be the economic powerhouse of the future.

And if it isn't, I'll eat my hat.