— Like Robert Haupt and Carla Zampatti, Paddy McGuinness did not fall for the latest (“latest” = “relatively untested”) dietetically correct foodfads.
— The Paddy McGuinness Diet for preventing senility and promoting quality (not quantity) of life in four evidence-based guilt-free serves:

1. “Health fascists make a meal of latest diet statistics,” The Australian, June 24, 1993, p. 9.
2. “New research indicates that a little of what is bad for you does you good,” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 29, 1995, p. 14. (My fav.)
3. “One fat lady who knew how to live,” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 19, 1999, p. 17.
4. “Boo to body beautiful: eat, drink and be merry,” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 21, 2000, p. 10.

1.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Health fascists make a meal of latest diet statistics,” The Australian, June 24, 1993, p. 9.

Food habits and eating habits are a fascinating subject, very much a matter of unconscious prejudices and fashion. No group of our society is more subject to irrational prejudices about food than the medical profession, with all its obsessions about longevity — the quantity, rather than the quality, of life.

But it is clear that modern fashions about food, which are treated as holy writ, are having a substantial impact on our eating habits. Unfortunately, as the history of the cholesterol scare shows, very little is in fact known about the precise links between diet and health. While the medicos constantly preach the virtues of scrawniness and undereating, it is clear that dietary obsession has grown into one of the most important causes of ill-health among teenage girls and young women.

The trouble with the medicos, of course, is that they are accustomed to dealing mainly with pathological cases — the minority who encounter serious health problems. Thus what is archly called these days “substance abuse” seems to them a much bigger threat than it is, simply because in their line of business they encounter chiefly sufferers rather than beneficiaries. They are largely unconscious of their own prejudice and bias of course, and unable to recognise the variety of human behaviour.

The degree of unconscious prejudice about eating habits is nowhere more evident than in the reactions to the ways people use eating utensils. This is a pretty trivial matter, provided it is not grossly sloppy, yet it is amazing how upset people get, and how hostile, when they encounter knife and fork work other than that which they were taught by their parents.

Of course it doesn’t matter — but it puts a lot of people off their food to see people with different presumptions. Much the same, I suspect, is the case with dietary composition. We are of course omnivores, and can stand quite a bit of variation in composition of diet.

These thoughts were prompted by the latest statistics on Apparent Consumption of Foodstuffs and Nutrients just released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (catalogue No.4306.0), which serve to show just how much our diet has changed since just before World War II. Of course our ethnic and cultural mix has changed enormously too in the period, and our material living standards have risen dramatically.

(For me the symbol of change is the humble “structural choko” — which grew on vines whose main purpose was to hold up the redbrick dunny in the backyard; anybody who was poor in childhood loathes and detests this vile vegetable, while some people now consider it an exotic delicacy.)

One of the most spectacular changes in our diet between 1938-39 and 1990-91 is in the consumption of meat, which has declined from 118.5kg to 84.4kg a person per year. What does this mean? First of all, that in those years when Australia was still emerging from the Great Depression we were, by world standards, eating extremely well — even if a lot of the meat was vulcanised rather than cooked. Did it cause an epidemic of bowel cancer, which is supposed to be related to a meat-rich diet? And are we really better off because we eat less meat today?

The composition of this meat intake is also interesting. The amount of lamb eaten was 6.8kg and of mutton 27.2kg then, whereas now it is 14.1kg and 7.7kg. Where did all the mutton go? Or are we just eating mutton dressed as lamb these days? Pig meat, which used to be considered a luxury, has jumped as part of our diet from 3.9kg to 18kg. Figures on poultry consumption are not available for the earlier date (partly I suspect because so much of it came out of the backyard chook yard), but that has been increasingly rapidly in our diets.

We’re eating about twice as much fresh and frozen fish as we used to, drinking less milk and eating more cheese, eating a lot more fruit and vegetables, including potatoes — while we eat less meat, the consumption of potatoes is now 63.5kg a head as compared to 47.1kg before the war.

One of the great mysteries of Australian food consumption is the virtual constancy of ingestion of cane sugar over the years. This has fallen only slightly since the end of the 1930s, from 50.8kg to 47.2kg a head (yes, nearly a kilo a week per person), but most of it is now consumed loaded into manufactured foods rather than as refined sugar. Just about every packaged or tinned foodstuff you buy which is made in Australia, as well as the fast foods, soft drinks and confectionery, are crammed full of sugar. Perhaps we should consider closing down the sugar industry — it would be a great contribution to Queensland political life.

Butter, which is a much maligned substance, has declined in quantity consumed from 14.9kg to 2.8kg a head, while table margarine, no doubt on account of the anti-cholesterol fad, has risen from 0.4kg to 6.7kg.

As for grain products, we’re eating less flour (including that used for bread making), much more rice (from 1.8kg to 6kg a head) and a lot more of the rubbish described as breakfast food (from 4.8kg to 12.2kg).

While our elders just before the war ate much more meat and butter than we do, they drank a lot less. They drank 53.2 litres a head of beer, and 2.7 litres a head of wine compared with our most recent 108.4 litres of beer and 17.8 litres of alcohol. The high point of boozing in Australia seems to have been 1978-79, when the consumption was 133.2 litres of beer and 14.7 litres of wine. Over the next decade beer consumption fell to 111.7 litres while wine rose to 20.2; since then both have fallen. The excesses of the 80s were clearly more the work of yuppie baby-boomers than of the working class; and since then health faddism has spread.

The period 1978-79, when people were still recovering from the Whitlam government, was also the high point of alcohol consumption in all forms. Again, the pre-war generation was much more abstemious than we are, with a per capita consumption of 3.4 litres of alcohol compared with 8.04 most recently. Why weren’t they healthier? Perhaps our problem is not that we drink too much beer and wine, but that we drink too much lollywater — 96.7 litres a head.

We do not have figures for nutrients available for consumption as compared with recommended dietary intake (RDI) for the pre-war year, but in recent years despite the barrage of dietary propaganda the excess over RDI has been increasing. It is not at all clear that this is any kind of health problem, despite the scrawny brigade, and the ABS in its notes warns about the difficulty of interpretation: “No conclusion regarding the nutritional status of the community should be drawn from these comparisons.”

This has not prevent the ABS release being greeted with the usual chorus of claims that we are eating too much, overnourished, using too much sugar or meat, or whatever. All that we can see is that we now have a better, more varied and rather less meat-rich diet than did the pre-war generation. Hardly a cause for alarm, still less for medical health fascism.

***
2.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “New research indicates that a little of what is bad for you does you good,” The Sydney Morning Herald, September 29, 1995, p. 14.

Forgive me a little Schadenfreude, the taking of pleasure in the misfortunes of others, but it was impossible to suppress a guffaw at the report just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that the phenomenon of chronic fatigue syndrome, often described as “yuppie flu”, may be associated with excessively low blood pressure as a result of inadequate salt intake in fad dieting. This is just the latest in the long series of food fads which have infected the world, and especially the home of food faddism, the United States, for a generation or more.

To buy a packaged and processed food item in a New York supermarket is to be presented with a detailed listing of what it is supposed to contain and not to contain. No fat, no salt, no sugar, no cholesterol, and if possible no calories (kilojoules for the relentlessly metricated). All these substances have been determinedly avoided by the dietetically correct for years now, until it is being unsurprisingly, though gradually, discovered that all of them are essential elements in any diet. That is, those who have spent most time obsessed with their food intake and their bowels have probably done themselves more harm than lesser mortals who have simply eaten to enjoy themselves.

It even appears now that the wonder drug of the 20th century is aspirin.

For some time it seems to have been clear that regular ingestion of small quantities of aspirin, say half a standard tablet a day, is an excellent specific against heart and vascular problems. There is now evidence that it is also a specific if taken regularly against bowel cancer. It can have problems — some people experience gastric bleeding, and it may raise the risks of brain haemorrhage — but in general it is better to take it than not.

It is also being admitted that red wine is an excellent protection against cardiovascular problems, and is good for you even in quite substantial quantities. So perhaps the occasional red wine hangover treated with aspirin is better than all the fad diets.

This ought to be accompanied with rich, adequately spiced and reasonably salted food, with lots of garlic and cooked or dressed in olive oil. Butter is much better for you than margarine, but olive oil is better than either. That is, the obvious is once again being discovered even in New York. Unhappily for New Yorkers, they live at the same time surrounded by possibly the unhealthiest diet ever devised — along with the faddists there is a culture of salty/sugary/fatty instant and takeaway foods.

Thus obesity in New York, unlike that in countries where wine and oil are staples, tends to strike the young and is not merely the result of a lifetime’s eating for pleasure. The typical American diet seems to be dominated by cloyingly sweet foods, and notably deficient in light and savoury foods.

So one tends to find in a mixed neighbourhood like that in which I am staying (near Columbia University, on the Upper West Side) a poultice of restaurants, take-out shops and specialty providers which are dominated by foods which seem to be designed for oral gratification of the emotionally immature and deprived, side by side with ordinary fresh foods which are favoured mostly by recent immigrants from Europe. The typical American urban attitude to food is possibly best summarised by the common cliché describing high-sugar and high chocolate foods as “sinful” — a bit of real sin is a great substitute for such nursery food.

The deep ambiguity of American attitudes to food was recently demonstrated by the New York Post (a sadly diminished paper in its second Murdoch incarnation — no longer does one encounter great headlines like the immortal “Headless Body in Topless Bar”) which has decided to campaign against a scheme to feed schoolchildren good food instead of junkfood. Lentils, chick peas, grated carrot, skinless chicken cooked with lemon, black pepper and fresh thyme, have all aroused protests as somehow too fancy for the schoolchildren, who in New York State this year are to have $US344 million spent on school lunches.

But the Post might have a point. It was common in earlier days in England for sandal-wearing social reformers to preach to the poor on how cheap it was to survive on a diet of wholemeal bread and milk — until it was pointed out that many of the urban poor had digestions so weakened that they could not adequately digest such food and needed the stimulating strong tea and the white bread which were their staples.

This is a similar tendency among the food obsessives of the American middle-classes, who have built the relatively inoffensive McDonald’s hamburger chain, which sells food which few people of sophisticated palates would want to experience more than once but which nevertheless feeds millions an adequate diet fairly cheaply, into a special devil figure.

Too much fat, they say. Too much sugar, too much salt. All probably true.

But you can have too little of a bad thing as well as too much of it. The Japanese have one of the highest salt-content diets in the world, and yet enjoy an enviable degree of longevity, probably on account of the high fish and soybean content in their diets. And while salt may promote high blood pressure and hypertension, it now seems that its absence might be conducive to other ills.

About the only firm result of all the dietary research is that if you half-starve yourself you might live an extra couple of years — probably with Alzheimer’s, so you won’t even know it.

***
3.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “One fat lady who knew how to live,” The Sydney Morning Herald, August 19, 1999, p. 17.

The death of Jennifer Paterson, one of the “Two Fat Ladies” of TV fame, was not tragic but cause for reflection and admiration. Anyone’s death diminishes us, but there are those whose lives and manner of dying can teach us a great deal about humanity at its best.

Paterson sprang to fame in her last years, in partnership with Clarissa Dickson Wright who was even larger in scale than herself and a reformed alcoholic. But she shared Paterson’s warming attitudes to life and eating — that both are to be enjoyed.

They became popular partly because of their witty and spontaneous repartee while working together, and partly because their cooking was so resolutely unfashionable. They were cooking for people who enjoy good food, not for “foodies” — who seem to use cooking and restaurants as yet another exercise in snobbery and pretentiousness — or for those who think that eating is a branch of medical practice.

They drew on the best of the English tradition of cooking, using lard in a manner that only the older among us remember, particularly those who grew up, not hungry, but with restricted means. My mother adored good beef lard, saved from a Sunday roast, spread on bread as she had it as a girl.

Of course, at its worst the English (and Irish) style of cooking could be pretty awful. I still recall with horror a country breakfast, cooked by an aunt for her large family, which consisted mainly of fatty mutton chops and tomatoes swimming in a deep frying pan. But none of them was really fat — they worked too hard.

It is commonsense that, whatever the genetic factors, one is going to become fat if one enjoys good food, especially “comfort” food in more than minimal quantities. That is a personal choice, and no more to be condemned than enjoying the equally unhealthy habit of jogging.

The aesthetic considerations of youth, when no-one wants to be obese, become steadily less relevant with age. One might even argue that sexual promiscuity in middle age is far more to be frowned on than good eating, which is compatible with a moral life and a steady relationship.

Being fat worried neither of the two cooking ladies. They had led full lives and enjoyed themselves, and obviously found cooking and eating the kind of food they prepared a great and ongoing enjoyment.

They had a similar attitude to other aspects of their lives. Paterson died at 71 from lung cancer, undoubtedly aggravated by her heavy smoking. Now 71 is a pretty good age; if I lived that long in good health I would consider it a good innings. She knew perfectly well the risks of smoking — everyone has known for many years it is not good for you — and she accepted them.

She enjoyed smoking, and was quite prepared to accept the likelihood of a shorter life. Whatever other discomforts her smoking caused her, she felt the benefits outweighed the costs, as with her tastes in eating and her enthusiasm for red wine, vodka and whisky.

Like most good cooks, she had a glass of wine beside her while working. Larousse Gastronomique even has an entry for la consolante, the glass of wine, cider or beer served to cooks as they work.

When Paterson’s doctor diagnosed terminal cancer and suggested she stop smoking, she laughed and said there was no point. And she demanded caviar, not flowers, from her visitors in hospital; and not for the sake of her heart.

Accepting responsibility for one’s actions in that way is creditable and perhaps requires more character than whingeing about the unfairness of life and the wrongs inflicted on you.

It is interesting that Paterson had a firm, traditional Catholic faith, and was celibate all her life by choice. Perhaps her God might have disapproved of the harm she did her body by smoking, but would consider it a small failing in the light of her many virtues. Like G. K. Chesterton, she saw no contradiction between a good life and an enjoyable one.

Perhaps she should be called as a posthumous witness, if that were possible, in the pending class action in the Federal Court against the tobacco companies. While I have the deepest sympathy for those who suffer from smoking-related illnesses (the case against “passive smoking” is, however, not established), nobody forces anyone to smoke. Nor could anyone observing a smoker coughing and hawking have thought that it was harmless.

While the tobacco companies did set out to sell cigarettes, the evidence does not exist that they did so as a knowing conspiracy to addict, harm and kill people.

The results of the US class actions in this matter are more evidence of the failings of the US legal system than anything else. In Minnesota, for example, there is a demand that the resulting windfall be spent not on hospitals and health care, but on tax cuts. So much for the grounds of the claims by State governments.

The risks of smoking have been adequately conveyed to the public for quite a few years. indeed sometimes oversold, so that anyone who has not given up has no real excuse.

When governments, the Red Cross and others supplied cigarettes for the consolation of soldiers during wartime they were for good, not harm, in a highly risky situation, regardless of long-term outcomes.

The US Supreme Court has, for the most part, dodged responsibility for dealing with the disastrous and absurd product-liability laws of that country.

Our High Court, where the case will certainly end up, is unlikely to be able to do the same.

***
4.
Padraic P. McGuinness, “Boo to body beautiful: eat, drink and be merry,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, September 21, 2000, p. 10.

There is nothing wrong with being fat, writes Padraic P. McGuinness. In fact, a new book shows that it can be good for you.

Everybody, Australian or not, is enjoying the current celebration of youth, health and general goodwill in Sydney — whatever minor glitches might occur, it has to be said that the event is a triumph for its organisers and participants. There are many lessons which can and should be drawn from it. But perhaps the one lesson which will be flogged hard by the health professionals is the one we ought not to learn.

A new book on health argues that our health professionals have got the wrong end of the stick when they talk about the healthy lifestyle and body image. Dale Atrens, a reader in psychology at Sydney University, considers that most of the obsession with ideal body types which is the stock in trade of medicos, dietitians, and newspaper moralists is both misplaced and harmful. In The Power of Pleasure (Duffy and Snellgrove) his fundamental thesis is the old saw that a little bit of what you fancy does you good. But the only criterion of what and how much of it is good for you is your own feelings. And he demolishes the enormous edifice of nonsense which surrounds the weight-loss industry.

One of our current obsessions is with body weight and fat. Everybody and her dog will tell you that we are generally overweight, don’t get enough exercise, and eat and drink too much of the wrong kind of things. There is a hysterical concern with, and hatred of, fatness which becomes virtually a moral crusade — a moral panic, one might say. Consider how often one reads silly phrases about “sinful” chocolate. It is not just a hatred of fat, but of fat people.

“The pervasiveness of the fear and loathing of fatness is frightening,” Atrens writes. “Simply on the basis of being told that someone is fat, young children assume that the person is stupid, lazy and dirty. Children make this assumption at an age when they can’t even tell someone who is fat from someone who isn’t. They don’t know what fatness is, but they do know it’s evil.” In fact, most of the problems ascribed to fatness are the result of this societal psychosis rather than any ill effects of fatness, which he shows have been greatly exaggerated. The adverse health effects of obesity are mainly non-existent. The causes of obesity are complex, and have little or nothing to do with character defects or even overeating.

Most of the faddish diet talk of the newspapers, and even the medical journals, is ill-founded. The idea that animal fats are bad for you, or that the intake of them must be strictly limited, is totally erroneous and unsupported by the extensive studies of the effects of diet which have been undertaken in numerous countries. Atrens, being a scholar rather than a propagandist, documents his assertions carefully and fully. Being fat is not in itself bad for you.

Eight thousand German construction workers were subject to detailed medical examinations for 4.5 years. Those who were fattest were least likely to die. Mortality progressively decreased from the lowest to the highest weight category. This effect was particularly strong in the men with diabetes, hypertension, or heart disease. Once again, it is this group of men that is most strongly urged to lose weight. Such findings show that prescription of weight loss for these men is absurd and dangerous.

Dieting doesn’t work and is bad for you. Exercise is fine if you enjoy it, but a waste of time as a means of weight control. Again, Atrens writes: “Given the undeniable fact that we are eating less overall, and less fat in particular, there is a seemingly irresistible tendency to blame the spread of fat on lack of exercise. Television viewing and other forms of relaxation are seen as symbolic of the growth of sloth and general moral decay. There is a concerted drive to make the couch potato an endangered species.

“As with so many other aspects of healthism, the mythology of the couch potato has little factual basis. The large and steady increases in fatness have taken place while exercise has generally been increasing, not decreasing.”

The dietary “pyramid”, which says you should eat a lot of bread, cereals and potatoes and very little fat has been discredited already. Like the cholesterol fad, it is false and misleading. Atrens argues that the biggest problems in diet come from puritanism and faddism — we should eat the best we can afford, and learn to discriminate between good and bad food in terms of pleasure alone. Throw out the chocolate bars, and buy good chocolate; throw out the muesli and eat good bread and fruit; throw out the margarine and eat good butter and olive oil. Throw out the vitamins and supplements — period. Eat for taste and pleasure. Drink as much as you like — the only indicator that you might be drinking too much is if it makes you feel bad.

The National Heart Foundation of Australia recommends we limit our consumption to two drinks a day; a recent Japanese study, according to Atrens, shows that “the benefits of alcohol were unchanged even at the very highest levels of consumption. This is surprising since this category began at 69g/day, which is about eight standard Australian drinks. The upper limit was not specified, but it must have been frightening.”

If you want to live a long and happy life, eat, drink and be merry. The fat lady will sing at the wowser’s funeral.
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[Click here for more by Paddy McGuinness on healthcare and more.]