Health and safety

I know a man... I'd better say I knew a man, I haven't seen him for at least 20 years but at one time I saw a lot of him, he's my age and I thought about him for the first time in many years the other day when I was watching the nightly television news and beginning to count up, with a sagging feeling, the number of foods that may be dangerous to eat, the number of medicines that may be dangerous to take, the number of materials that may be dangerous to wear.

Mothers are now being warned off children's pyjamas and such that are treated for fireproofing and thereby, some people say, may cause your child to have to be treated for cancer of the kidney. In fact, in this case, there's no need to put it gingerly ‘some people say’, the United States Food and Drug Administration has identified the fireproofing agent, has a chemical called Tris, and have banned it outright for the shivery reason I've mentioned. 

Well, why should all this recall the long-forgotten friend? I thought back to him with a kind of wonder, envy, at least, because he practically didn't eat. Now this wasn't a crusade on his part, he wasn't the type likely to write a book on 'Health Through Starvation' or 'The Glories of a 10-Day Fast'. He didn't eat by inclination. He simply wasn't interested. 

I don't mean he went about proclaiming this abstinence, he was at one time in an important executive position, he took lunch and he gave lunch. He had a calendar chock-full of business meals. But, whether at home or out of town, he would say when you handed him a menu, ‘Oh, anything really! It doesn't matter much what.’ And, for several years, he had a girl, a beautiful girl, comely and ripe, and her figure suggested that whatever else she was suffering from, malnutrition was not it. But their strong link was that neither of them did anything but nibble and get the boring stuff off the table as soon as possible. 

They didn't smoke either, not from virtue or self-restraint, but from simple distaste. Similarly, they didn't drink and were always embarrassed when you said, ‘What'll it be for you?’ You know the type? They want to be sociable, they've never really got used to the social convention of having a glass in their hand and first they look embarrassed and then baffled, and then you suggest some ghastly fizzy chemical confection called Scat or Fuzz, and they leap on the suggestion with artificial enthusiasm. ‘That would be just splendid’ they say and subsequently they sit there sipping the stuff like a patient sipping a carton of dye before submitting to a GI X-ray series. 

Well, I wondered about this man. I know he's alive and flourishing and I begin to wish I were like him. Also, he's the type who says, limply, ‘I'm no good at pills’. So, at a stroke, he's freed from having to search through the pharmaceutical literature and find out what he ought not to take. More than any other type of human, he does give me to think that maybe we know very little about diet and by ‘we’ I include the dieticians. I mentioned the other day to an otherwise mature and responsible woman that I was having trouble unscrewing the tops of fruit jars, jam jars, so on. She said it was arthritis. I said it was using too much right hand on my golf drives. Anyway, I'm quite prepared to put up with it, whatever it is. She said, with the passion of an evangelist, ‘You must eat cherries!’ 

And a friend of mine is having back trouble from, the doctors say, a disintegrated disc. One expert surgeon, who's getting old and is against surgery except as a last resort, he sends his patients with this affliction off to Canada or Mexico to have the disc dissolved by an injection of a chemical that is a distillate of papaya juice. Now, this treatment is banned in the United States, the surgeon says, because it would deprive the surgeons of part of their living, but another orthopaedic surgeon in New York says, ‘Not so!’ He says a double blind study, done in this country, some patients being injected with distilled water, others with the papaya chemical, neither doctors nor patients knowing which was which, only went to show that the treatment had no effect whatever. And the people who are for it maintain that the papaya juice is a protein solvent. At any rate, it is a respectable operation in Canada and Mexico. It is not allowed in the United States. 

And the saccharin-sugar conflict still rages. And there's always with us the fear of cholesterol. Nagging ladies of my acquaintance shudder at the very sight of butter and milk and anything fried, and try to force soy bean sauce on us – I don't have to be forced, I like it – and go on and on about polyunsaturated fats. 

Carbohydrates, we all know, are murder in spite of the fact that so long ago, as far as the mid Thirties, when the League of Nations put out a comparative study of the diets of the rich and poor in several nations, it came out that if you make a little more money in Italy, you tend to eat more fruit, more vegetables. 

In Britain, the richer you get or got, the more your diet got rich in carbohydrates and, from my observation, the orgy of carbohydrates still gets wilder and more intense as you go up the British money scale. And yet, I don't know that the Italians, with their admirable eating habits, live any longer or suffer less of the usual afflictions than Englishmen, with their love of meat and potatoes, and bread and butter and cakes, and biscuits, and cakes. 

My father, in old age, became an enthusiastic minor dietician, but I noticed that he simply began to make a religion of his likes. I had a mother of very strong character and, in a quiet way, she had ruled the roost for decades, giving us what she thought we'd better have. And I decided, looking back on it, long after both of them had gone, that my father, a sweet and exceedingly affable man but not beyond a little private ingenuity to counter my mother's dictates, he was too timid to come right out and say he didn't like this or that and he wouldn't eat it any more, he knew he was likely to get his block knocked off, in a manner of speaking. 

He would discover a new book and come home full of final scientific evidence to prove that rhubarb or chocolate cake or cucumbers, or whatever else he was devoted to, were the staff of life. He went about eating them with gusto but also with the impression that he was doing it for his own good. My mother decided that, in old age, he was growing eccentric. Strategic deafness helped, and that he had better be indulged before the end came. 

Now, as you know, I've spent a lifetime commuting between the Britons and the Americans and not the least of the pleasures of watching these two tribes practising their own habits and customs is to notice how horrified each of them is when contemplating the bedrock, normal diet, what you might call the maintenance food of the other. Not a diet so much as but... but what everybody accepts, specially on sporting occasions. 

An Englishman attends his first baseball game and is appalled to see clerks, grocers, bankers, scholars, all gobbling up hot dogs, dripping with mustard, or wolfing plastic hamburgers, an eighth of an inch thick, on foam-rubber bread, one inch thick. An American attends an English golf tournament or a picnic and is equally appalled at the notion that anybody can settle without nausea to such things as pork pies, veal and ham pies, plum cake and choccy biccies. Not to mention the range of suet and bread puddings, what my wife, offensively, calls ‘glob’. 

Well, by the mid 1960s we'd all been so overwhelmed with literature preaching the lethal qualities of fats that we were ready to cave in, boil or poach everything, and pour on soy bean oil. But then, two eminent researchers – Yudkin and Roddy, if you're interested – came out with a paper that fell like a bomb on the medical profession. It bore the catchy title, ‘Levels of dietary sucrose in patients with occlusive atherosclerotic disease’. The paper said that all the evidence went to show that sugar, rather than fat, is responsible. High sugar intake, in fact, not only was a prime villain in arterial and heart disease, but it reflected fairly accurately the rise in cardiovascular diseases. 

Well, as I say, all this came into my mind after a week of watching the telly, during which I might a little list of things not to eat, chemicals not to have about the house, drugs that were once thought a boon and a blessing but must now be put down the sink as soon as possible. And watch out for the hairspray, the cockroach spray, the after-shave spray, the deodorant spray! Aerosol is now about to be banned completely from sprays because of its effect, once it gets up into the ionosphere, of weakening our protection from the sun's rays. 

Well, by way of relief from this relentless bout of muckraking on the part of the Food and Drug Administration – for which, I ought to say, I do have the most lively admiration – I went off to a movie, a desperate expedient in my case because the only movies I ever see these days are these nights on the Late Late Show. No sooner had I settled in to the theatre than the hero, an Italian-American simpleton, in training for the heavyweight championship of the world, staggers awake to his alarm clock set for 4 am and he breaks five eggs into a blender and swigs off the whole gooey mess. 

My daughter, who is a one-woman Food and Drug Administration in herself, screamed aloud, ‘My God!’ she cried, ‘That's worse than all the violence in all the movies!’ Just like me, you notice, she speaks in nothing but precise, scientific terms. She reeled and gasped, ‘All that raw egg white will kill him!’ ‘What's with egg whites?’ I whispered. 

‘Well,’ she hissed, ‘raw white of egg combines avidin and biotin and prevents the biotin from reaching the blood.’ 

‘Sounds serious!’ I said, ‘Do go on!’ Our hero, by the way, was now jogging himself silly all over Philadelphia at dawn, apparently unaware that his biotin was not reaching his blood. Understandably, he was panting. ‘Well,’ she went on, ‘what it does is draw out all the vitamins from the body. Raw white of egg also draws out impurities. It can be used on sores.’ 

We were shushed into silence by people who were callow enough to want to enjoy the movie. In a hoarser whisper, she asked, ‘What's five times 260?’ ‘Thirteen hundred.’ I said. ‘My God!’ she screamed again, ‘Thirteen hundred grams of cholesterol in one swallow!’ 

‘If he'd added a tablespoon of sugar,’ I said, ‘he’d have dropped dead on the spot!’ ‘Anyway,’ she growled with some satisfaction, ‘He didn't win!’ ‘No wonder!’ I said.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.