Cholesterol-free Christmas, anyone?

My spies have been out on the public highway and even if a court order is issued to have me name them, I shall, like all the most chic investigative reporters these days, refuse to reveal my sources and go to jail. In the expectation, of course, that the sentencing judge will relent and let me out for Christmas having given me a little heroic publicity.

What the spies have to tell me is this, that on a morning this week in Boston, with flecks of snow marring an otherwise mild day, one of our most grave and reverend doom-laden columnists was seen sneaking into a department store with his neck buried in his collar as of a man hoping to evade the CIA. He's a man who deplores most things about his administration, most of all the notion of missiles in space and the whole Star Wars theory of national security.

What was he doing? Why did he have his collar so high and snug? He was buying a Star Wars video game for his son and a Cabbage Patch doll for his daughter.

So this is plainly not a time to go on about the deficit or the arms race. I promised last time to tell you about some spectacular but very respectable findings that concern our health and what we can do to come through the Christmas orgy and even survive well into the New Year. And I will certainly get round to that in a minute or two, but first, there's a tragi-comic row going on about how to celebrate Christmas which is becoming an annual joust, so much so that it's gone up to the Supreme Court and, in another test case coming up in March, it will go up there again.

I'm talking about the big crèche debate. A crèche, in this context, having nothing to do with a day nursery for infants, but meaning the crèche, the model of the manger scene at Bethlehem. For many, many years, a familiar sight in this country – where one person in four, remember, is a Catholic – a built-up model, sometimes hideous, sometimes charming that you see in front gardens and more pretentiously in front of the facade of churches and occasionally at the entrance, say, to a public library or in a public park.

'Public' is the fighting word and public ground is the fatal place to erect a crèche. Last year there was a famous example whereby in – I forget which state – the local Christians put up a crèche in the public square. Next night, other citizens, religious affiliation unspecified, reverently took it down. The Christians returned and rebuilt it. The citizens brought suit to have it removed and the judge allowed that it was a charming custom, but – alas! – it was set down in the constitution that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion and, therefore, no citizen can constitutionally display the symbols or emblems of a particular religion in a public place, no matter what he does on his own property or in private.

Well, there were so many similar brushes with the constitution last year that eventually a case was settled one way by the first court, lost on appeal and appealed again and went, in the end, to the United States' Supreme Court. Its ruling hedged. It said that if secular symbols of Christmas – Santa Claus, reindeer etc. – predominated, the crèche model wouldn't really be taken as a purely religious symbol. This, as one baffled woman put it, was a beautifully open-minded judgment that managed to offend practically everyone.

So, now we've seen all round the country models where Santa Claus hovers over the Christ child, where such an inscription written in electric lights as 'Unto Us a Son is Born' is topped with a bigger, electric sign saying, 'Noel', one, in which very movingly, the reindeer awaiting outside the manger, presumably to have Santa Claus give the three wise men a lift home. To put it mildly, as Othello did, 'chaos is come again'.

It is odd. It's significant in some way I don't care to go searching for that, in the year when the president wants to have prayer in schools and the Congress constantly asks him, 'Whose prayers?' that, in this year, when the debate between state and religion has hotted up as never before, New York City's department of parks, instead of bowing quietly out of the feud, should aggravate it by allowing, for the first time since anybody can remember, a nativity scene to be set up in Central Park, which is nothing but public property maintained by the public's taxes.

I had a sneaking wish that Central Park would be invaded by a group of devout Jews bearing on high a menorah, the seven-branched candelabra used in Jewish worship. No sooner wished, than done! The parks department gave permission for two Hanukkah menorahs in city parks. Well, several Jewish organisations protested against the nativity scene, including the Jewish organisations which, taking the firmer constitutional line, protested against permission having been given both for the nativity scene and for the menorah ceremony.

Well, Christmas will soon be over and we shall have to wait till March before we write the script and fill out the order forms for next year's crèche, if any. The best comment came from a Lutheran pastor who said, 'The only one who benefits from this festival of light is Con Edison, the electric company'.

Now for the warning word about what we should eat at Christmas and what not. Oh! First, first, I must mention another little issue, sort of semi-religious which challenges a dead man's wishes – a challenge I always assumed should never be made. Simply, is it proper, is it legal, to abide by the wishes expressed in a dead man's will? Myself, I should have said it's both. So, I, for one, was shocked when the poets, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, having declared in their wills that all their private letters were to be destroyed and by no means to be published, there was an indecent stampede of writers' biographers to get the letters and publish them.

Well, the other day in upstate New York, in the town of Rochester, a 72-year-old man, formerly with the merchant marine, died. He had prescribed precisely how he wanted his funeral conducted. His son obediently printed his father's wishes in the local newspaper announcement, whereupon a dozen or more people called up the undertaker and protested that the announcement showed a lamentable lack of respect for the dead, but the son said that respect was exactly what he was showing. The former marine had specified a drunken brawl will immediately follow the service. The son lost. Last Tuesday, a dignified memorial service was held instead.

It would be interesting to see what would have happened if this case had gone to the Supreme Court. I suspect the son would have lost there too, on the ground that the first amendment sanctions only the right of the people peaceably to assemble.

Now then about, er... about 30 years ago, there was a tremendous to-do in this country about the steroid alcohol in body cells and fluid which is known as cholesterol. At that time, the word 'cholesterol' gibbered through the land as the word 'unclean' used to herald the approach of a leper. It was established that the snags created in the bloodstream by carbohydrates and animal fats, either separately or in combination, were as lethal as silt piling up on a river bed and were responsible for most heart attacks.

Nobody explained at the time the miracle of how 55 million Britons were still alive, for, of all peoples, the British are the connoisseurs of animal fats and compulsive addicts of carbohydrates, what with the eggs and bacon and toast and butter and biscuits at 11 and lunch of more meat, and then tea and cake, and dinner and meat again, and potatoes, and pudding. And, help, even suet! And then, perhaps, an emergency snack of cheese and biscuits to see you safely through the night.

Well, this whole theory was, about two years later, in doubt and the rush to consume only soya bean and vegetable fats slackened and there was a grateful stampede back to beef. Now, however, the national institutes of health convened a panel of 12 men and one woman, experts in medicine, biochemistry, public health, cardiology, public interest law, all said to have no prejudice one way or the other about cholesterol. They have issued a terrifying report.

They say that the vast majority of doctors are too lenient in what they regard as normal levels of cholesterol. For people in the twenties, it ought to be no more than 180 milligrams for 100 millilitres of blood serum and no more than 200 milligrams for the rest of us. I think it's true that most doctors say, for those of us over 50 anyway, that anything between 150 and 300 is all right.

Anyway, the panel says that if the dietary recommendations of the American Heart Association were followed, the rate of heart disease in the population could be cut in half. That's the bad news.

Now, for the good news. How to avoid heart disease or being felled in your prime! Eat mainly lean meats, fish (not fried), poultry without the skin, skimmed milk and yoghurt and cottage cheese, margarine, some vegetables – that's about it. What you cut out if you possibly can, once for all, is bacon, sausages, whole milk, fried foods, butter, hard cheese, cream cheese, fatty salad dressing, all sauces and gravies and, of course, ice cream, no cakes and pastry or cookies made with eggs and butter. And if you must eat eggs, one a week is plenty.

This prescription makes me look back, touching every bit of wood in sight, to the relish with which my children used to wait for in a family reading – the arrival of the ghost of Christmas present – the jolly giant, glorious to see and his load of turkeys, geese and poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings.

I think there's no question, a point that Dickens forgot to make, that the jolly giant must have blown up from a coronary within 24 hours of displaying his cornucopia of goodies which, reduced to their lethal components, would have produced a mountainous sludge of cholesterol, gallons of saturated fats.

Well, all I can say, and it comes, if you'll excuse the expression, from the heart, is Merry Yoghurt, Happy Cottage Cheese and, if possible, a healthy and bearable New Year.

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.

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