As I smugly lathered my toast in perfectly-ripe avocado the other morning, I found myself smiling to myself reassuringly, safe in the knowledge that what I was about to put in my mouth was a super-food.
Or was it?
It’s amazing how these days I get my kicks out of eating virtuously rather than being the ‘bad girl’ I prided myself on being up until my forties.
I knocked together this broccoli and potato soup yesterday. Just sayin…
I MADE this!
The problem with middle age is that we all suddenly get fixated on our health. It correlates with when our mortality begins to stare us boldly in the face, and friends start dying. In the old days, a good night out was determined by getting as trashed as possible; these days a good night out is finding a main course with less than 400 calories and being in bed before midnight.
We fall for all that garbage about what to eat and what not to eat, because we’re scared.
Because we don’t really know what we’re doing anymore, do we? Food has become as controversial as politics. We look down at people in the McDonalds queue, check out people’s trollies in the supermarkets and make surreptitious judgment calls. Even the chefs we looked up to once upon a time aren’t beyond reproach – we’ve taken to witch-hunting them now, if they don’t say what we want to hear.
Due to the minor issue of premature death caused by hypercholesterolaemia in my genetic history, eggs and butter became as scary as ISIS to our family in my teens; to the point that we created a bunker in the cellar in case the milkman stopped by and tried to sell us his coagulated, full-fat milk.
That was until the nutrition gods did a complete fucking u-turn and decided that there were in fact two types of cholesterol, one good and one bad; which really confused us, because none of us had the faintest idea what ‘saturated’ and ‘unsaturated’ meant.
Now we’ve been told that (Surprise!), there’s nothing actually wrong with eggs, and that what we eat, in fact, has very little effect on the amount of cholesterol in our blood stream after all. So I’d like to thank those doctors for forcing me into a miserable adult existence of fatty food denial for the last twenty-five years of my life.
It’s not difficult to understand that modern food technology, with its scary fertilisers, additives and suspect preparations to ensure a longer shelf life for its products can be harmful, but surely if you eat a diet of fresh, unprocessed food, there can’t be too much risk to your health?
Yesterday we were told that the cases of breast cancer will double by 2030.
Joy!
TBH, these new-wave, new-fangled diets and super-food guides get on my tits. I blame the hipsters and this incessant pressure on social media for women to be thin.
Surely, good nutrition is about common sense? We all know that:
If you eat too much you get fat.
Red meat is hard to digest, which is why it makes you fart.
Additives have scary names made up of a confusion of letters and numbers so it’s obvious that we should avoid them at all costs.
Sweet corn does not digest and makes your poo look really surreal.
These days ‘low-fat’ means you’ll get fat.
Sugar is the best invention EVER but not a good idea if you want to lose weight or desire flawless skin.
Super-foods disguise themselves as healthier choices, but no-one can seriously survive on, (or afford), a diet of avocado, red fruit and seeds and we all know that avocado is a super-bitch food anyway, like pears, because it only has a two second window of perfect ripeness.
And does anyone really care about Pete Evans Paleo diet or Thermomixes, anyway? In my humble opinion, Pete is definitely not as hot as he was before he stopped eating properly.
If you cut carbs out of your diet, it CAN help you lose weight; that is until you put it all back on again.
In fact, the only great news to come out of this wealth of nutrition advice is that apparently alcohol is bordering on super-food status… this week.
Or was that a dream?
#Health #middleaged #Food #superfoods #Humor #Eating #nutrition
Louisa Simmonds 
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