Ladies – are you sitting down to read this? Leap to your feet immediately! Don’t you realise you’re prematurely ageing yourself?
Scientific research has discovered that a sedentary lifestyle makes cells age faster, giving women a ‘biological age’ that is up to eight years older than their actual age. What effect prolonged sitting has on men, who only get out of bed on a Saturday to lie back down on the sofa watching Sky Sports or entire box sets, is so far unexplored.
And what’s the cosmetic future of those of us who make a living sitting down and spend, perforce, an eight-hour day chair bound? On top of scientific scaremongering we have the press publishing an endless succession of eating regimes and exercise routines guaranteed to prey upon our anxieties and exploit our gullibility in the name of protecting our health and prolonging our lives. Many of these are devised by celebrities with neither formal training in science, dietetics nor fitness techniques.
Food faddism is sweeping the country and we’ve fallen willing victims. Nutrition has become as briefly cyclical as fashion. You think no? Did you buy a juicer? A spiraliser? Not long now till they’re relegated to the top shelf in the futility room, along with George Foreman’s fatless grill, the Breville toasted sandwich maker and the electric carving knife.
Along with the gadgets comes the ‘free’ vocabulary – meat free, dairy free, gluten free, sugar free, salt free; the merits of alkaline versus acid foods, organic versus commercially produced vegetables; the baseless belief in ‘superfoods’ – beetroot and blueberries, kale and quinoa, avocados and broccoli; the current craze for smoothies, courgetti spaghetti and cauliflower rice. Ever had courgetti spaghetti? I wouldn’t recommend it. Sushi? Cold, wet, raw fish which, according to the latest food alarm agency, is full of microbeads from cosmetic cleansing products washed into the sea.
And then there are the allergies and ‘food intolerances’. I don’t mean to denigrate those to whom certain foods genuinely prove dangerous, but for many never clinically tested, it’s indigestion or affectation. One slim, shiny-eyed ‘clean eating’ advocate with no qualifications lauds the nutritional merits of ‘bone broth’. If I may draw a culinary analogy, she’s teaching her grandmother to suck eggs. The weekly meat order which I, as a child, was dispatched to collect, invariably included a big, knobbly marrow bone for soup – and I still have my school Domestic Science textbook whose first recipe is ‘Beef Tea for Invalids’.
There’s many a figure-conscious 20-something gulping down the green slime of a kale smoothie for breakfast who wouldn’t eat sprouts or cabbage for her mother.
Despite the fact we’re fully grown autonomous adults who’ve been eating since we grew milk teeth, we must be re-programmed for optimum consumption. There’s ‘mindful eating’, the definitive recipe for eating less but enjoying more. “Sitting at a properly laid table devoid of electronic devices, appreciate your food’s presentation, inhale its aroma, reflect upon its origins – who produced it, cooked it, served it. Only then lift your knife and fork, focusing on each mouthful, savouring the taste and texture while making pleasant conversation with companions.” Try fitting that into an office lunch hour.
Another ‘expert’ recommends chewing each mouthful 32 times – which guarantees your dinner’s cold so you won’t want any more anyway. My favourite tip, read recently, is: “Look out the window while you eat and you’ll eat less.” Not if the view’s two bins and a brick wall.
Note the small amount of space I’ve left devoted to exercise. I have loathed all forms of physical exertion since school days when it was compulsory and I wasn’t any good at any of it. I don’t see the point of any activity that makes you hot and sweaty and flattens your hair. Lots of runners and cyclists use our country road. I can admire their lean muscularity in a detached sort of way, but their faces have a gaunt, attenuated look, skin stretched over bone.
I find I can achieve several thousand steps a day dancing to the radio in the kitchen, without a pedometer strapped to my ankle like a young offender’s tag.
