General interest

It was interesting to read Amanda Ursell's piece in the Times recently (‘Let's Hear it for the Bad Guys’) which was a slightly unorthodox approach to get us to rethink how we look at certain foods including ice cream, white bread and kebabs.

Of course, the central point is that we would all benefit from enjoying a balanced and varied diet with everything in moderation. The fact that Amanda can write a whole column telling us it is okay to actually eat meat and butter shows how easy it is to forget this.

Since the Second World War, British politics has principally been dominated by the debate about which politicians would make us more prosperous. But in recent years it has become increasingly clear that a key driving force is how we can maintain or improve our current lifestyles in the face of environmental change.

Sustainable development is cropping up more and more in conversations and meetings around the FSA, and like everybody else we have a duty to ensure this issue informs all of our activities and policies. Indeed, we have an action plan that ties in with the Agency’s current strategic plan to take our work forward.

As regular readers will know, I’ve previously blogged on the view that nutrition advice is always changing.  So here’s another example which doesn’t quite deliver what it says on the label.  An article in a recent Guardian, g2, asks if fruit really is good for us. Aida Edemariam investigated whether the rise in availability of pre-prepared fruit a good thing.  The article raised several points covering sustainability, health claims and food safety, but one aspect that particularly caught my eye was that fruit is not particularly nutritious.  It is true to say that most fruit, and indeed vegetables, mainly contain water.  But they also contain fibre and vitamins and minerals that help keep the body healthy.

Will Johnny Depp’s latest Hollywood incarnation as Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, give punters a taste for cannibalism, ponders a reader in today’s Guardian Notes and Queries. And if so, what nutrition information would Mrs Lovatt’s pies have on their packaging? That’s assuming she gets her novel food application through first, of course.

One of New Scientist’s editorials this week highlights that nanoparticles are the new ‘chemicals’, but not the new black, if you’re coming at this blog from a fashion standpoint. The Soil Association, which campaigns for organic food and farming, has announced that it is banning nanoparticles from its certified organic products. However, it’s only banning human-made nanoparticles. Natural ones are just fine apparently.

So last week I quoted Michael Pollan’s 'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants' as straightforward advice that I’d agree with – even if I worried that his comments might be construed as an anti-scientific stance. This week I note a piece in The Guardian that suggests that even the ‘eat food’ bit might not be the trouble-free advice you might suppose. According to Tim Dowling, 80% of people on the planet regularly consume insects.

I’m just catching up with some press cuttings after returning from a cross-country skiing trip to Austria (incidentally, the amount of energy you burn allows you to really enjoy the hearty Tyrollean fare of knödels and gröstls – dumplings and roast potatoes), and I see there was a story before Christmas about chocolate no longer being 'good for you'. Chocolate, like red wine, is one of those foods we keep hearing are good for us, and then bad for us. The stories that try to persuade us that chocolate is good are based on flavanoids potentially having a beneficial effect on circulation. But the current issue of The Lancet says that many of our dark chocolates might not contain them anyway because of their bitter taste.

The British Medical Journal (BMJ) tackles medical myths in its current issue, including one about the quantity of water we should be drinking.

It’s impossible to find an authority for the claim, says the BMJ article, but the evidence for the need for consumption of fluids has been documented in physiological textbooks for some time. 

Little has been added to the basic physiological information since the classic studies of Passmore in 1955.  Studies on sodium and thirst summarised in Fitzsimons’ monograph on the subject in 1979 draw the same conclusions. 

I couldn’t help noticing a headline in the Daily Express last week ‘Tomato ketchup each day cuts your cholesterol’. The story is about a study from Finland that was published in the British Journal of Nutrition.

This somewhat small study of 21 people looked at the effects of eating tomato products on their total cholesterol, including low density lipoprotein (LDL), sometimes referred to as ‘bad cholesterol’, for three weeks. An increase in these can lead to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. With a high tomato diet, the total cholesterol and LDL were reduced. So the researchers concluded that eating a lot of ‘tomato products’ protects you against hardening of the arteries.

My blog’s a year old today and I wanted to mark the occasion by thanking all of you for reading and responding to the comments we’ve posted over the past 12 months.

Since my first post went live in November 2006, more than 161,000 people have visited the blog. It’s proving to be a great way to get feedback from consumers, fellow scientists, industry, and others with a professional interest in food.

Some of my postings have triggered really useful debates on topics ranging from traffic light labelling, organic food to raw milk. One got me hailed in the press recently as the saviour of the bacon buttie, which was fun. Please keep your comments coming, on these and other issues.