Eat raisins to live longer! Or until they make your leg drop off

Here is a summary of the stories concerning foods that are bad for you, and ones that are good for you, that have appeared over the past couple of days: steer clear of ultra-processed foods (UPFs), they’re poisoning you, but do eat raisins every day at breakfast because they slash the risk of cancer and heart disease.

Oat milk, it has nothing on dairy milk, waste of time, and don’t give your children those premade pouches because they’re not nutritionally sound, but do fill your boots with plantains because they’re as healthy as tomatoes, and the Paleo diet, up to you, but be warned. It is “boring”. (© Gwyneth Paltrow.)

The important thing I want you to take away today is: it’s never too late to make the changes you won’t make because the next flurry of reports might say something completely different. Wasn’t oat milk the bee’s knees for a while? Wasn’t butter vilified until it wasn’t?

Tomorrow, it may well be that raisins at breakfast not only make a leg fall off but do so at the least opportune moment, like when you are running for a bus and you know there won’t be another one for ages. If you live rurally, there may not even be one for another week. You’ll be cursing raisins then.

As it is, I’ve just read about “the eight UPFs that aren’t as bad as originally billed” (© The Daily Telegraph). I also remember once reading that a glass of wine a day is beneficial (helps heart) and, in the very same week, also reading that it’s not beneficial (damages heart).

We all have our schedules but, for me, I find the ideal time to have a drink and also not have a drink is about 6pm. It’s a nice way to round off the day and I always look forward to pouring out a glass then tipping it down the sink. It’s your health, take charge of it.

It is always my endeavour to be helpful, as you surely know by now, and while I’m not a doctor or nutritionist, except on Mondays, I feel I can help to clear up some of the confusion, so have answered a few of your questions on this topic:

Tell me, please, will they soon be adding protein to tap water, apples and my trainers because they’ve already added it to everything else?
Yes. The first trainers with “added protein” are slated to be released next year. You will feel so good about having made this choice you won’t bother to investigate whether they are necessary or what else your trainers are made from. Clever you. Where trainers go, apples and tap water will surely follow, and there are even plans for protein to be added to the air, although we don’t yet know if that will come into effect before this fad burns itself out. Should it happen in time, get in quick and take a ton of breaths while you can.

Isn’t our food labelling the wrong way round? Why not assume a food item is organic unless it’s labelled ‘‘non-organic’’, followed by a list of reasons it isn’t? Why “low fat” but never “high fat”? Why aren’t we putting neon labels screaming “UPF!’ on the front of packaging?
Oh, come on now. Grow up. You want to live in a “nanny state”? With the government actually coming down hard and purposefully on the huge food conglomerates? We’re not all perfectly capable of making our own decisions based on being slyly deceived?

Going back to the protein, could I add “whey” — a byproduct of food manufacturing that would otherwise have to be dumped — to what is essentially a candy bar and sell it as wholesome?
You sure can, honey. There’s no law against it.

Isn’t it basic common sense? Eat food-based food?
I bet you’re fun at parties. I always have a glass of wine at parties, which I then pour away. Sometimes I really let my hair down and have two!

Crying at death? No. TV? Always

I went to the theatre recently to see James Graham’s Punch and by the end I was a puddle. I had a stranger on one side who kept casting glances that said, “Who is this loudly blubbing idiot?” and the truth is, I don’t know.

I almost never cry in real life. Like everyone, I’ve lost people and so on but on those occasions the tears don’t come. I sometimes try, because I feel it’s the done thing, but it’s just a dry choking, which alarms everybody. Am I essentially stony-hearted? If so, why do I cry so easily at the theatre, at films, at TV? It’s embarrassing. Is there even one episode of The Piano (C4) I haven’t cried through?

But I’ve now done some research — have you heard of the internet? It’s pretty good — and, for some, when faced with a distressing situation the brain goes into coping mode. What do I need to do next? How do I sort this? And that part of the brain elbows the emotional part of the brain out of the way.

That part of the brain says to the emotional part of the brain: “Sorry, I don’t have time for this right now. Clear off.” But when you are not in control, and not responsible for fixing a situation — when you’re at the cinema, say — the floodgates can open.

You may also, it’s said, be crying for all the things you didn’t cry about at the time. I recently cried during a film purely because the house featured looked like the house my parents (RIP) had lived in.

It does make sense. Or, to put it another way: peg out and I’ll deal with it, but show me an Instagram post about a dog that’s befriended a duckling? I’m gone.