Healthy Eating - 28 November 2003

"Being thus arrived and in good harbour in safety they fell upon their knees and blessed the God of Heaven who had brought them over the vast and furious ocean and delivered them from the perils and miseries thereof, again to set their feet on the firm and stable earth, their proper element."

How often I wonder in the past half century have I warmed to this talk about the last Thursday in November, which since a proclamation by Lincoln has been celebrated as a day of national thanksgiving.

The first proclamation came from the Yorkshireman I've quoted - William Bradford - who had led that storm-battered voyage from Southampton to Cape Cod.

After losing half his 100 settlers to a winter of starvation, misery and violent cold, the following November produced a first harvest and Bradford decreed it should be celebrated every year by a ceremony of thanksgiving and prayer for the colony that was now pretty sure to survive.

When they landed in 1620, their rejoicing was short-lived for Bradford goes grimly on: "They had no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertain and refresh their weather-beaten bodies, no houses much less towns to seek for succour, and ahead of them a desolate wilderness with wild beasts and wild men.

Some of them petitioned to go back over the "vast and furious ocean".

But the tougher ones foraged among the grasses of the Cape and came on patches of three crops: a crop of maize - later throughout the Americas known as corn - and bogs of cranberries, and the potato.

And by the following spring the resident Indians had become sufficiently friendly to show them the use as high cuisine of a wild animal that was not in fact wild in action but easily taken, quietly slaughtered and cooked into a delicious dish: the turkey.

Last Thursday, the staple meal throughout the United States of this family feast (and Thanksgiving is, more than any other day, the day of the family) is roast turkey or smoked turkey, corn - maize - pudding, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie.

Incidentally, grace is recited in more than 75% of all families sitting down, usually at about two in the afternoon.

Most of them will have seen on television the president's brave, if alarming, speech in Iraq.

But this year it would not be surprising to learn that very many Americans wonder what they have to be thankful for.

And just to spoil even the Thanksgiving dinner itself, here at home there is a new compassionate campaign being mounted by greens - or you might better say animal lovers - a campaign to banish the Thanksgiving turkey itself from the board.

It's the same argument which is certainly hard to meet or ignore as the one advanced by people who've been put off by the knowledge of how cattle and pigs are bred for human consumption.

The cramped, medicinal lives of calves has been lamented for generations but even lovers of birds who campaign passionately to stop shooting them tend to look the other way when delicious veal is mentioned.

The protest is not against the family farmer - a type that is, by the way, beginning to vanish - but against the big corporation farms and what is deplored as the industrial production of turkeys that is fast, cruel and leaves little time in a turkey's life to trot around and take the air.

I doubt it will have any more long-term success than similar, brave campaigns against beef cattle and pigs.

But there was held last week in New York city a conference, a protest conference, by an unlikely group, practically a summit meeting of - wait for it - bread bakers protesting against a recently-revealed fact of American life among the young.

During the past year, a government survey was published revealing an appalling statistic: 40% of all American children, teenagers most of all, suffer from obesity.

"A national disease of epidemic proportions" is the sort of headline that has entitled surveys and laments in every sort of publication through the medical journals, parents' magazines, newspapers and down to the tabloids, finally being deemed so serious a national problem that many, very serious papers have abandoned the national love of Greek and Latin and come out in plain English: "Our children are too fat!"

Well, the result of this study has been a far-reaching government campaign, not to change its long-standing recommendations for healthy eating - little saturated fat, less fried food, fewer carbohydrates, lots of fruit and vegetables - but to try to arrest the landslide of junk food, that constitutes in life, the actual diet of too many children.

The insistence on eating less saturated fats has already affected the big, fast food chains, so as to cause them to promise to reduce the fat content of their burgers.

But the recommendation that hurts a much larger industry is the urge to reduce carbohydrates.

The charge that set off the bread bakers' summit was the advice of government health men, the medicos, the parents' groups, to have their children eat less bread, less pasta. Less pasta? - what an outrageous demand!

For the past decade, maybe two decades or more, if there's been a national obsession, it has been pasta.

In a national popular food guide, which lists every sort of restaurant from the most expensive French to a chain of coffee shops there are three Afghan restaurants, 35 Indian, 250 French, four English - and 600 Italian.

And along comes a blithe doctor and says: "Hey, gumba - cut out the pasta, cut out the pizza." If those bakers ever catch him, his life won't be worth an angel's hair.

But the bakers had a right to be alarmed. The message of the government and the medicos and the parents has got across, and at this conference, ominous figures were quoted about the number of bread bakers who have gone, or are about to go, out of business.

The dread sentence was not, in my report, ever spoken. But behind the loud assertions that bread is the stuff of life, was a still small voice saying: "Perhaps at last the craze for pasta is going the way of the previous fad for croissants - remember?"

I've not mentioned for some time our old bugbear, another and a continuing national obsession - cholesterol - a very complex alcohol that is known about and controlled and worried about by everybody as a perilous cause, not of obesity, but of heart disease.

Some time in the last year, I took not a galloping poll but a stealthy questioning of friends and acquaintances.

I asked guilelessly how long ago, when do you suppose, did this popular obsession with cholesterol get started? Most everybody thought - oh I'd say 10, 15 years maybe.

Well, I've now discovered the text of a lecture I gave to the American Heart Association in Boston over 40 years ago when I remarked: "The word cholesterol gibbers through the land as the word 'unclean' used to herald the approach of a leper."

At the time there was a tremendous to-do about the lethal snags created in the bloodstream by carbohydrates and animal fats.

But then the medical profession had decided that cholesterol was as fatal as silt along a riverbed.

Since then nothing has changed about the cholesterol warnings except the public awareness that there are two kinds: the low-density lipoproteins, known as the bad cholesterol, and the high-density lipos, known as the good.

This is too complicated for most people and what they fear is that their total count of good and bad will go, by our scale, much over 200 points.

This seems to be a fear of all types of all ages. Every American, from a bishop to a truck driver, knows his cholesterol count. Every woman from a cleaning lady to a psychoanalyst, knows hers.

Americans are astonished to discover when they go abroad that the French don't bother with the cholesterol count. And in Britain, in the code they print on packaged foods, protein is big, but often no mention is made of the deadly cholesterol.

So many other chemicals have come to be identified as having an effect on the heart that I heard myself a month or so ago saying to my cardiologist: "I won't be here to see it but I'll bet 10 years from now some other bugbear will have replaced cholesterol."

"I shouldn't," he said, "wonder."

He felt even more sceptical when I told him the true story of a friend of mine in San Francisco who's in his mid 80s and follows no diet.

His combined cholesterol count - now remember 200 is safe, normal - his count varies between 625 and 650.

Two doctors have warned him that he's a walking time bomb.

My friend's secret, it seems, is that his grandfather came from an ancient village in Greece where some gene in the tribe produced men with huge cholesterol who all lived to be about 100.

My friend gives every sign of continuing the family tradition.

Meanwhile, as for the two doctors who warned him he was a walking time bomb: both are dead.

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