November 2008

It’s National Curry Week from 23 to 29 November and this year is the 11th anniversary of the celebrations. But most importantly it is also the 60th anniversary of the invention of the chicken tikka masala, one of the nation’s favourite dishes according to several ‘best of’ lists. The first appearance of curry on a menu was at the Coffee House in Norris Street, Haymarket, London in 1773, according to The Epicure’s Almanack written by Benson E. Hill in 1841. 

Like all other football fans I pick up the morning paper, scan the headlines and promptly turn to the back pages for the today’s news.

With all the usual big money transfer rumours, stories of soccer bad boys and the managerial merry-go-round, it is easy to overlook the important work football clubs do within their local communities.  This is why I’m particularly thrilled to tell you about projects we are undertaking with the charitable foundations at Spurs and Manchester United.

Our work with the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation will see them pilot ‘What’s Cooking? Kick and Cook’, which will get young people from five secondary schools in Haringey cooking and learning about food. The great thing about this programme is that not only do the education sessions take place in the club’s learning zone, but the kids get to cook some of the player’s favourite healthy meals in the club stadium kitchens.

You may have seen some of the coverage in today's news about an unusual form of the food poisoning bug E. coli that's appeared on a cattle farm in northern England and has been shown to be resistant to a particular family of antibiotics, which includes penicillin.  Quite a few papers referred to it as a ‘superbug’.  The term ‘superbug’ is generally used for bacteria that are resistant to a range of antibiotics, such as MRSA.  Resistance to antibiotics is important because it can make bacterial infections caused by these ‘superbugs’ more difficult to treat.  However, antibiotics aren't generally used to treat food poisoning caused by E. coli so this organism doesn't represent more of a risk to the public than other food poisoning E. coli strains.

Times columnist Alex Renton last week wrote about a personal experiment he undertook to see what would happen if he let his son eat as much sugar as he wanted for a day. This, he maintained in an earlier article, was ‘for the sake of science’. 

Today the Agency has published new advice for pregnant women on the amount of caffeine they should drink, or eat, during pregnancy. Previously, our advice was that 300mg a day was a sensible limit ­– in other words around three mugs of coffee. But in light of new research, we are recommending that 200mg a day, about two mugs of coffee, is a better limit. Our research actually showed that the pregnant women who took part in the study had an average daily caffeine intake already below 200mg, so for many pregnant women this change in advice will not affect them.