Dietary guru of Jody Scheckter – ex-Formula One star turned organic farmer is our main interviewee this month.
Editor's Letter
I’M all confused now.
Just when I thought I’d sorted out the dos and don’ts of a healthy diet, along comes some erudite theoretician to prove that I’ve been wasting my time
Now, I must be honest: the much acclaimed ‘five-a-day’ fruit and veg routine is, in my world, a custom honoured more in the breach than the observance.
I’m fine on the vegetables – I probably have enough broccoli in the fridge to start a farmers market – but consumption of raw fruit has always ranked slightly below a spell in Alcatraz on my list of most coveted delights.
Still, I’ve done my best to shape up.
But then, just as I’ve traded in my pasties for peaches, stocked up on melons and adjusted to the idea that apples need not always come in pies, along comes the dietary guru of Jody Scheckter – ex-Formula One star, organic farmer and our main interviewee this month (see p12) – and suddenly all bets are off.
According to this Weston A Price, a dentist and dietary researcher from the early 20th Century, much fruit and veg is so saturated in pesticides as to be of more harm than good.
All my virtuous wolfing down of Cape gooseberry, bush banana and bunya nut has, it transpires, done about as much good as a portfolio of RBS shares.
Nor is that the end of it. Too many eggs, we’re so often told, are bad for the heart.
Yet according to Price, people actually experience less heart disease when they eat more of them.
As for red meat – another villain of popular nutritional mythology – it’s actually a rich source of vitamins, phosphorus and zinc. Good for the nervous system, insists Price.
But what about cholesterol? Surely that’s a cardiac arrest in waiting, isn’t it? Well, maybe not.
Apparently, dietary cholesterol actually builds up the strength of the intestinal wall – unless it happens to be oxidized, in which case it does indeed wear away at the heart. And where do we find oxidized cholesterol? In powdered eggs.
So although normal eggs are, after all, a very good thing, the powdered variety might kill you.
Memo to self: give up fruit, slaughter the fatted calf and get some free range chickens for the garden.
Which reminds me: I have a lovely apple tree at Nye Acres, currently laden with ripe apples which, of course, I shan’t need.
So why not pop round and get some? You’ll find me sitting under the branches. With a sausage roll.
