
SOURCE: The Times      DATE: 13 June 1994        PAGE: 20 
Just let it melt in your mouth 
Bernard Levin 

 A little of what you fancy is worth any amount of medical research 
 Why don't you all listen to me, and do as I tell you? Have I ever tricked 
you? Have I ever lied to you? When you have followed my instructions, have 
you ever regretted it? When you have ignored or rejected my advice, have 
you tell the truth now sooner or later, wished that you hadn't? So why, I 
ask again, why don't you all listen to me and do as I tell you? One of 
these days I shall give up, and leave you to your own devices. Without 
boasting, I can tell you that it won't be a week not even a couple of days 
before you will come blubbering to me to come back. Well, I won't. 
  Well now. You have, no doubt, read the amazing news that, contrary to 
many years' belief, margarine has turned out to be a deadly poison, one 
teaspoonful of which, if ingested or even sniffed, will be instantly fatal. 
Nor does that news exhaust the horrors of the stuff; it turns dogs rabid, 
makes cats go bald, and kills any growing thing (except, I am sorry to say, 
broccoli), including the next door neighbours' children, and even, from 
time to time, the postman. 
  But that is not all; by no means all. If there is one thing that you can 
count on when Levin is on the warpath, it is that he remembers the things 
that his adversaries wish he had forgotten. What we were told, by pestilent 
bodies like the Health Education Authority, was that butter is bad for you. 
Nor did that claim rest there; from one end of the land to the other, as 
well as from side to side, the welkin resounded with eldrich cries of 
``Butter kills'', ``Down with butter'', ``Take the butter out of your 
children's mouths'', and to crown it all, ``Big Butter is watching you''. 
  Butter, it was said, was most frightfully polyunsaturated, or, as it 
might be, the opposite; whichever way round, if you so much as glanced at 
the butter-dish your life was hanging by a thread. As for cholesterol, the 
butter-wowsers were much given to fainting dead away at the mere mention of 
the stuff, heedless of the fact that I have always started the day with a 
steaming jug of it, and I still have all my hair, which is more than that 
dreadful wowser over there can say. 
  So they boosted the claims of margarine, and rubbed their hands in joy to 
think that something which tastes delicious was to be replaced by something 
that doesn't. And as far as my investigations go, I am quite convinced that 
they weren't in the pay of the margarine makers; they wanted to decrease 
the quantity of pleasure in the world just because it was pleasure. 
  And then came, thumb to nose, on a handsome horse and waving a wonderful 
flag, Professor Walter Willett of the Harvard Medical School (bless his 
little cotton socks) to tell us that margarine is not only nasty but 
dreadfully dangerous. 
  I return to the severe rebuke of my first paragraph. You should have 
remembered, and proudly declaimed, my tremendous down-with-the-wowsers 
all-purpose motto: ``Nothing you find hateful can be doing you any good.'' 
  That is no joke or slogan, but the literal truth. And just as I have to 
remind you of it, I have to remind you of the evidence. There is a huge 
body of such evidence, but I take one example, and a stunner it is. 
  In 1977, in Helsinki, a survey concerning health was set up with two 
groups, each group consisting of 600 men. (All of them, of course, were 
volunteers.) One half of the total were chosen because they were overweight,
they were heavy drinkers, they smoked, they took no exercise. These 
reprobates were catalogued for the study, but from then on they would live 
as they wanted, with no warnings or pleas. The other 600 were put on strict 
diets and regimens, becoming the very models of correct food, drink and 
behaviour. After five years, the two groups were investigated, to see how 
they had got on. Hark: 
 Researchers were surprised to discover that within five years the death 
rate was twice as high among those told repeatedly to cut down on calories, 
saturated fats, cholesterol, alcohol and sugar. The group was also told to 
eat more polyunsaturated fats (mainly soft margarine), fish, chicken, veal 
and vegetables, and to cut down on smoking. 
  After 15 years the ``healthier'' low-cholesterol sample continued to die 
more rapidly, 67 deaths in all, 34 of them due to heart disease. The 
control group, whose risk of heart attacks was theoretically higher, had 
only 14 cardiac deaths and 32 deaths from other causes. 
  But that was not all: in the Helsinki trials there was this to account 
for: 
 ...big trials of cholesterol-lowering treatments have failed to bring a 
reduction in deaths, with some showing a peculiar increase in numbers dying 
from non-cardiac causes such as suicide, accidents and violence... 
  Repeat after me, and go on repeating until nothing but a glass of cool 
champagne will do, ``Nothing you find hateful can be doing you any good''. 
  My merry tone is genuine, but I must put it aside for a little while. 
That motto is a real one, and I have lived by it for as long as I can 
remember. Some will say that it only a mask for sybaritism; I don't think 
it is, but even if I am deceiving myself, I am still a couple of paces 
ahead of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse, and even the Health Education 
Authority. 
  There is enough unavoidable pain and misery in this world to wish there 
was another one to go to. Since there isn't, we must do the best we can 
with the one we've got. And if pleasure is pleasing, why should we deprive 
ourselves of it? Yes, we should be considerate in our pleasures, and 
mindful of those who cannot afford them (though I cannot believe that there 
is anyone who can find no touch of pleasure at all, even if it is only the 
gift of a Kit-Kat or a Mars Bar) and we should not flaunt our pleasures 
unpleasantly. 
  That said, whose business is it to make a sour face if I want to eat 
three lobsters for dinner? No doubt the sourface is usually thinking of the 
lobsters, but remarkably often he is not. And when he is not, he has no 
excuse. I have remarked before about the people who leave me to my 
pleasures when they are, say, operatic ones, but get purple in the face 
when the pleasure is delicious food. 
  Whence, I am convinced, the actions of the powerful lobbies who would ban 
nice food altogether if they could, and whence also the downcast mien when 
one of their nasty tastes is shown up as not only nasty but dangerous, 
while we carouse in the realisation that we were right all the time, or 
pausing in our carousing to intone the magic words: ``Nothing you find 
hateful can be doing you any good''. 
  No, no; Sir Toby Belch and his cronies got it exactly right: 
 ``Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes 
and ale?'' 
 ``Yes, by Saint Anne; and ginger shall be hot i'the mouth too.'' 
  Enough of these niminy-piminy folk. I'll take my stand on that great man 
Wing-Commander Paddy Barthrop, who was one of those who fought in Britain's 
skies lest the jackboot should tread upon Britain's lands. I took him to 
dinner once, and he described (as he ate) his idea of good eating. It went 
like this: 
 I eat everything, as much butter and fried foods as I get can my hands on. 
My favourite meal is roast lamb with onion sauce, thick with cream, and 
spuds with butter on. I smoke between 40 and 60 cigarettes a day. To eat 
cornflakes you've got to have sugar on them, and lots of cream, otherwise 
there is no point in eating them. I am purely a social drinker. I have not 
had a drink at lunchtime since I left the Air Force in 1958, but if there's 
a party I drink as much whisky and water as I can get my hands on, no ice, 
and as much wine as they are prepared to buy me. The older you get the less 
booze you can take, which must be good for your liver. Now, after a few 
large whiskies and a bottle of vino, I'm gone. I have a main meal at night. 
I'm very fond of haggis with mashed potatoes with bags of cream and a 
dollop of butter. I like all food smoked salmon, lobsters, as long as you 
keep smoking cigarettes, drinking plenty of whisky and tap water not this 
rubbish in a bottle you'll go on for ever. 
  Prosit! 

   (c) Times Newspapers Ltd. 1994
    

