My grandmother, as a good Victorian, was brought up in a household run with Mrs Beaton’s Book of Household Management as the bible. She always swore, but in a most refined way, that good food meant real food. The supply chain was shorter in those days. You never lived far away from the farms where the cattle grazed or the corn ripened. The milk was fresh from the cow, the butter freshly churned, the bread freshly baked using whole grains (they were lucky enough not to get caught up in the fashion for milling the corn into white flour with all the nutritional problems that caused), and the meat from animals hung after being freshly slaughtered.

As one of the middle classes, she lived on a reasonably healthy diet of protein, bread, potatoes and other fresh vegetables. If she hadn’t had to decant her body into one of those boned corsets that made it impossible to breathe properly and redistributed her internal organs, her life would have been perfect. Although, looked at from another direction, forcing such a narrow waist was a first version of this new wrap-an-elastic-band-round-your-stomach-so-you-can’t-eat-as-much surgery we hear so much about these days.

You might be wondering what set me off on this path. Is this another of my post-phentermine withdrawal symptoms before the Acomplia kills all the cravings? Well, not really. It occurred to me that I still use butter in my diet. I actually used quite a lot when I cooked for us three nights ago — I made a really nice sauce for the chicken fillets with some of the Chardonnay we were drinking and sautéed the potatoes with garlic and lots of onions — those people of Lyon know how to eat well.

Now, alongside my phentermine and Acomplia, my diet philosophy is simple. There’s no reason to exclude any one food from a diet. The aim is to produce a balanced mixture of healthy foods in moderate quantities. Butter is so full of flavour, it enhances the taste and texture of what we eat. Which, in turn, represents another plank in the philosophy. I like to enjoy what I eat. If food is dull, it’s a drudge to put it in your mouth and all the harder to keep to the diet. So, like all thin Europeans, I eat good food, not manufactured products.

The other day in the supermarket, I picked up a box of spread-from-the-fridge margarines — one of those most heavily advertised as being a healthy choice. If I had my way, all advertisers and marketers would be made to eat a diet of only the foods they misrepresent. The box was a walking time bomb of trans fatty acids. To produce the supposed consistency of butter, the fatty acid vegetable oils are saturated with hydrogen which produces the more solid trans form. Studies have found that as much as 35% of each box you buy is trans fat. Yes, my butter contains saturated fat, but only a tiny percentage trans fats.

So, I’m prejudiced against this kind of manufactured food. But research has linked trans fat intake with diabetes, heart diseases and obesity. America is starting to react. In the last two years, New York and Philadelphia have banned trans fats in their restaurants. If the science can prevail against the might of the food marketing industry in the USA, we’re making real progress.

I suppose it’s a bit easier for me because I’m retired and have always liked to cook. So I have the time and the instincts of my grandmother to stay away from manufactured food products. My litmus test whenever I pick up anything is to ask, “Did this food exist when my grandmother was around?” If it didn’t, the odds are it’s not real food. My rule of thumb is to buy food without a label on it, i.e. fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and fish. If there’s a label, I look at the list of ingredients. If I don’t know what something is, I usually put it back. Curiously, the only time I break this rule is for my phentermine and Acomplia. I’m not completely prejudiced against the new. Sometimes, technology does help more than hinder.

Instead of seeing “natural” food in the shops, there’s a new fad about organic foods. Advertisers just can’t keep things simple. People have to be sold on the idea of eating what’s good for them. Anyway, no matter what it’s called, fresh food often costs more that the manufactured equivalents. So I pay more and eat less. Overall, I probably don’t spend as much as you and am healthier for it.

Tagged with: acomplia • healthy diet • Phentermine