Health stories to make you give up: pt2

A salad of rare quality

The award for the biggest throw-your-hands-up-in-despair moment to come out of last week’s health stories was not membership fees for the NHS or even African sand clogging up our lungs.

It goes instead to University College London for announcing that five a day isn’t enough, and we should all aim for seven a day.

Actually, there’s no scientific evidence that five – or seven – a day is an essential health requirement, although this advice does at least have the benefit of making sense.

The recommendation also says not that the majority of your seven should come from veggies, because fruit contains sugar and even natural sugars should be treated with care.

At which point I find myself musing over whether olives and tomatoes – technically fruits – count as such in this context.

I’m not bad on the old five a day: sometimes I don’t make it and sometimes I get more than that.

Breakfast is the biggest bugbear though.

A helpful – or attempting to be – piece on the BBC website last week was trying to suggest how you could increase your intake of veg, but managed only one practical (sort of) suggestion: adding a handful of spinach to a breakfast omelette.

Now, my understanding on five a day has long been that a portion is something like a whole apple, where it's an obvious whole, or about 80g of a food that doesn’t come as such a convenient handful.

But that’s an awful lot of spinach – or any other leafy food.

The advice also suggests swerving clear of fruit juice and drinks like smoothies, simply because they concentrate a lot of fruit – and therefore sugar – into a single portion.

And also based on my understanding of previous advice, only one portion of any veg counts per day – so no, if you have three portions of mushrooms, you can’t count it as three – and the same goes for pulses.

Variety is part of what makes sense.

To be honest, I ignore the fruit juice one myself – a small glass a day of pure stuff will not be the death of me.

So how else do you get your five – let alone seven?

Weekends are easy. On Sunday, for instance, I had a late but substantial breakfast, with quality bacon and scrambled egg, fried bread – and enough tomato, mushrooms and baked beans to constitute three portions. Plus a glass of fruit juice.

After that, it’s a coast.

Dinner came with carrots and leeks, and there was a little fruit after.

That was seven without any strain.

The difficulty is weekdays.

The most I’m likely to get if I breakfast at home is fruit compote (which means some added sugar) in plain (unsweetened) yogurt and a small glass of juice.

These days, breakfast out usually means eggs on toast – the toast might not be top-quality bread, but at least it's mostly my only bread of the day.

Quality eggs on toast

Lunches are easier – if I take my own, which I manage approximately 2/3 of the time, then it’ll be assorted salad and pickled veg, with some source of protein.

But if lunches are bought out, then most of the time I either end up with soup (vegetarian, so a source of at least one portion) or something between lumps of factory bread, which is never going to give you much on the greens front.

It’s worth noting here that mass-produced bread may be the reason for the rise in some intolerances: there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of people who cannot eat bread in the UK because it makes them feel bloated, but have no such problem on the other side of the Channel. And that’s without mentioning the taste.

However, back to those bought lunches: most salads struggle to be appetising.

Last week saw an exception that proved the rule. Arriving early in Islington for a job, I had time to while away and a need for lunch, so took the opportunity to enjoy the first al fresco meal of the year on a gorgeous spring day, at a café called The Blue Legume (geddit?).

Scanning the menu, I opted for a goat’s cheese salad.

It came in a large bowl that was filled with a veritable mountain of assorted leaves, plus cherry tomatoes, all topped with garlic ‘crouton’ – actually a thick piece of baguette, sliced on the bias – and a roundel of very slightly melted cheese, and with a dressing that included loads of finely-chopped walnut.

The main thing to point out is that the leaves were worth eating – not bland or lifeless or left in a dressing for hours to become simply depressing, as it so often the case. Even the little tomatoes had actual taste – no mean achievement in this country, particularly at this time of year.

The crouton was seriously garlicky, the cheese as pleasing as it should be and the dressing an ideal compliment without overwhelming everything or soaking the leaves.

I like salad, but there’s a reason I still remember one eaten in a café for local office workers near the railway station in Perpignan in spring 2006.

And the reason that I remember it was because it wasn’t a posh café and yet it was one of the first times I realised how good leaves can be – and it had three sorts of cheese and not just the one, rather bland one that you’d be likely to get in the UK if you ordered a cheese salad.

Dinner, as on Sunday, sorts itself out quite efficiently: it's not difficult or time-consuming to peel and slice a carrot and toss a few peas into boiling water out of the freezer – and frozen peas are one of life’s decent conveniences that don’t destroy the nutrition.

But given UK food culture in general, it’s not difficult to see why anyone would, on reading this new health advice, just feel like giving up entirely.

Ultimately, all this sort of advice seems counterproductive and will leave people feeling that they face impossible challenges – particularly if they read enough to know that it’s not even grounded in concrete scientific proof.

So what do you do? The easiest thing, it seems to me – and I realise that this too has its logistical complexities – is to eat fresh food, freshly prepared; to eat as little heavily processed food as possible and to eat as big a variety of vegetables as possible.

Eat good-quality protein, cut back on the crap bread, eat three meals a day and don’t snack as a matter of routine.

Don’t worry about a couple of sugars in your afternoon cuppa, but avoiding processed foods and loads of fizzy drinks will keep your sugar consumption down – and there seems to be a growing body of evidence that artificial sweeteners aren’t good for health either. But do drink water – something that you can even get free.

Apart from our food culture, though, there is another elephant in the room. And that is falling incomes and the rising cost of living.

It’s easy to tell people to eat better: to eat this or that or the other. But when the majority of people’s incomes have been falling steadily for 30 years – and more rapidly in recent ones – against a rising cost of living, then something has to give.

And for many, one of the few things that they feel they can control to a degree is food. It’s arguably easier to buy cheaper food than it is to cut lighting or heating beyond a certain point.

It’s no surprise that, in the last few years, average household spending on food has declined further, from a point that was already well below that on the Continent.

If we really want to change how people eat, there are a very great many things that need changing. Hectoring them with constant messages about what they should eat and how many minutes of how many days a week they should do whatever amount of exercise really will only start to make them feel it’s all hopeless anyway.

Stage 7: Villefranche de Conflent to Collioure

The train to Perpignan was due to 2.26pm - or so we thought. But getting back to the station in good time - we had to buy tickets - there was a shock in store.

That departure was on weekdays only and this was a Saturday. We had, in checking the timetables, forgotten to verify such a tiny, but deeply important detail.

The next train, then, was for three hours hence, by which time we were supposed to have already met the agent for the cottage in Collioure and taken possession of the keys.

There was remarkably little swearing. We tried to see, via the internet on our phones, whether there were any buses that did the journey to Perpigan. Nothing appeared.

If we waited three hours, where would we wait and what would we do?

After a few minutes, The Other Half asked what the state of play was cash wise and, receiving a positive answer, rang a taxi firm whose number was displayed outside the station, asking what the fare would be to Perpignan.

It turned out to be acceptable, so he asked for a cab. 'Tout suite' turned out to be a little longer than we might have imagined, but that was probably, in part at least, because we were still at the edge of panic. Or perhaps it was simply that the driver had his lunch to finish.

But after the discomfort of Le Petit Train Jeune the day before, this was welcome luxury: a modern, air-conditioned car that did the journey smoothly - and in less time than the scheduled train, at any time of the week, would have managed.

And as if we were not already aware of just how near the heart of Pays Catalan we were, it also allowed a first glimpse of Canigou, the Catalans' sacred mountain, which soared above as we left the Têt Valley behind and bore across the plains that we're most familiar with, approaching the Corbiere hills in remarkably short order.

Perpignan station - the centre of the world, as Surrealist artist Salvador Dali described it when he managed to find his way out of Figueres in Spain - was crowded. But improvements in the last 12 months meant that we were able to get to our platform without having to carry the bags up or down stairs, as previously.

The train from Narbonne was on time and we joined the game of hustling on board with all the other people making for the coast.

It's just a trio of stops, with the sea tantalisingly just over the near horizon and the foothills of the Pyrenees sloping down to the Mediterranean in front. Elne, Argeles sur Mer and then through the final tunnel that brings you to Collioure.

Standing and with bags ready by then; ready to be off; ready to walk past the tiny arena and down the hill into the town itself. Sights to welcome and to greet once more; a sense of the intervening year simply fading away; sangria waiting by the beach.

We'd made it. We were back.