Groundhog Day has relocated

Breaking news: ultra-processed-food is bad for you. Breaking news: ultra-processed-food is bad for you. Breaking news ...

As we approach Easter – when Mars, Nestle, Cadbury et al get to rub their hands with glee and diabetes clinics get put on red alert – I thought it was a good time to talk about Groundhog Day and its 21st century incarnation: news that ultra-processed-food is bad for you.  There was another one a week or two ago, and this time the news was that there are 32 different ways it can be bad for you, which is quite a record, even for the Groundhog.

Although it’s important to stress, only some of them are lethal, and many of them have nothing to do with Easter eggs.  Some just shorten your health-span rather than life – limbs and eyesight lost to diabetes; joint pain; gasping for breath with heart disease or asthma. Others ruin it with anxiety and depression.  And  then there’s all the fat: so much of it in so much of the population. It doesn’t even wait for the children to leave school.

And obviously it must all be taken with a pinch of salt, otherwise groundhog will be out of a job. Along with all the food giants’ CEOs.

But pinches of salt are easy to find: deconstructing cheap ingredients molecule by molecule; subjecting them to divers and sundry processes to remove unwanted taste, texture and colour; making them look like food again with thickeners, emulsifiers, stabilisers, colourings – and a  pinch of bacterial slime for that extra little something – and then re-rendering them palatable with the help of copious amounts of salt, fat, sugar and ‘natural flavourings’. 

Who is going to believe that any of that could possibly be bad for you.

And besides, a further pinch of salt is needed: the data only related to 10 million people.

N.b. As that is the second pinch in as many minutes, the government is at pains to emphasise that it should be a small one.  The government takes its duties to the health of the nation very seriously. Also its pinches of salt: not even for a moment does it contemplate measures more taxing than removing the odd gram of salt or sugar and banning in utero advertising before 9.00pm. And then for no longer than it takes to eat a Big Mac.

I think the groundhog can be fairly confident of its immortality.   And even if the government did finally decide to take the issue seriously, by the time it acts, it’s unlikely there will be anyone left with the strength, the stamina, the mental acuity, and the mental stability to find a gun, load it, point it in the right direction, and shoot the groundhog dead.

There’s a second groundhog doing the rounds (I think it’s a franchise): it’s to do with discovering diets eaten by populations around the world that will make you immortal and thin: the French – lots of double cream, butter, cheese, foie gras and red wine; the Japanese – lots of fish, no dairy; the Mediterraneans – fish, pasta, olive oil and lots of vegetables; the Innuit: seal, polar bear liver, something green twice a year.

The latest one is something called the Atlantic diet – eaten by people in Northwestern Spain and Portugal – and it appears to be as good for you as the Mediterranean. There is some consternation on the subject, because it involves eating red meat  and cheese.. bread.. wine.   Also lots of eggs and fresh local fruit and vegetables, whole grains, beans, and of course, olive oil.

And then there are all the groundhoglets: every week, sometimes every day, there’s news of this food or that which will make you as strong as Hercules, genius as Einstein, or plain old immortal-and-thin.

Could we not save an enormous amount of everyone’s time, money, and a lot of lives, by just saying, ‘populations that live almost entirely on unprocessed or minimally processed foods are healthy and thinnish, and populations that don’t, are not’.

What matters about all of them, is not some magic ingredient, but the apparently incomprehensible reality that we were designed to run on food, rather than a motley collection of highly-processed ingredients and chemicals, got up to look like food.

I think that that is one of my bug bears with the whole Zoe App thing:

At a time when the population is eating 60% of their calories in ultra-processed-food, they should be using every shouty capital at their disposal to persuade people to throw down their nuggets and their kentucky-frieds and their Coco Pops, and eat real food – any food. Instead, they are trying to put the fear of god into me about eating a baked potato – they rate it as worse than than an iced ring doughnut, chicken nuggets, and fast-food fried chicken, and much worse than Walkers KFC flavour crisps.  And they want  me to worry that lemon juice might cause my blood sugar to spike and damage  my gut flora – they give it the same carb rating and ‘once in a while’ category as coca cola – even though you would go quite a long way to find something more closely associated with traditional, healthy diets.

So to save printing and paper, for the rest of this 10-volume tract on the secrets of healthy eating, please take as read that on each page will be written, floor to ceiling, the message: Eat Food.

It will look something like this:

Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food. Eat Food.

Happy Easter.