Sometimes it seems like we all need to diet, by order of the food police!  It wasn’t always that way, was it?

Not too long ago, back in the 1980s in fact, I worked in Great Britain for Nabisco, that well-known maker of Oreos, Ritz Crackers and lots of other glorious cookies.  It was just the start of the health fanaticism that we are all bombarded with nowadays almost at the expense of everything else (but watch out - the Global Warming craze has made great strides and may now even exceed food and diet fetishes as the most extreme cult of modern times).

I remember a chat with one of the Nabisco Marketing managers who was something of a cultural student and he predicted that the health issue would be a dominant trend in the years ahead.  His view was that Nabisco should have jumped on the issue right away and started to reformulate products so that they were the predominate force in the industry on health.  I thought he was over-exaggerating, but how wrong I was!

Since then we seem to have been more and more taken over by diet “political correctness”.  In one sense its not surprising that what you put inside your body has a major impact on health and wellness issues - but don’t you occasionally wonder how mankind survived as long as it did during the centuries in which much of this wisdom was  undiscovered?  And isn’t is strange how the advice changes so often?

For example, when I was a mere child, one of the main pieces of medical advice I recall was to eat dairy foods and other stuff that is now considered lethal.  At that time, as long as you consumed milk, butter, white bread and good chunks of red meat, you would always be healthy.  Vegetables and fruit were, of course, good to include, but the extent to which they were left out didn’t seem to trouble many doctors.

And weight?  Well, being fat was not ideal, but hardly a case for frantic worry.

In contrast, where are we now?

Well, it looks as if virtually every ailment has a dietary cure.

Arthritis?  Try the arthritis diet.

Too many toxins in your body?  Go for the master cleanse.

Heart disease, macular degeneration, diabetes? Get help from antioxidants.

Just need to lose weight?  Ok, now you’re in trouble because you have simply too many choices, varying from the one-shot options like stuffed peppers and acai berries, all the way through to rapid weight loss tips and the biggest loser diet.

And that’s before we get started with pro-active health food stuff like fish oil benefits and the merits of green tea.

But do they all really work?

I regularly read about the number of overwieght and actually obese people being on the increase, even after a couple of decades of dietary naziism.  And in tandem, fundamental advice one day then gets reversed (the modern day equivalent of dairy products all of a sudden becoming harmful).  Yesterday it was cholesterol that we needed to control by dietinary means, now the latest theory focuses on tryglycerides.  So I wonder just how far we have yet to progress before we really do have the definitive version of what we need to do with our food.

I’m probably being unfair and over-simplistic.  I know that health is a complex problem with many reasons for the issues we face.  But in the meantime I’ll say goodbye for now because I’m off for a large steak and fries followed by a large slice of chocolate cake.

I might die young, but at least I’ll have been happy!