Not needed

Multivitamins are generally regarded as good for your health, ensuring you're not missing out on anything and getting all the vitamins you need.

But now I read they're a waste of money because they don't actually boost your health. A study of over 20,000 adults published in the British Medical Journal found no difference in disease or health conditions between those who took multivitamins and those who didn't. And a recent review of over 80 studies on vitamin and mineral supplements concluded they had little or no benefit in preventing cancer, cardiovascular disease or death.

Personally I've only taken multivitamins a couple of times, for a very short period, when I thought I might need them. They certainly had no visible effect on my health or well-being.

Nowadays I only take two tablets regularly - one to keep my blood pressure down plus vitamin D because most of us lack it in sun-deprived Britain. I avoid taking tablets unless I really have to. The odd aspirin or indigestion tablet is about it. Oh, and vitamin C if I have a heavy cold.

Jenny and I do our best to follow a nutritious diet that ought to give us all the vitamins we need. We eat lots of raw food like fruit and nuts and try to avoid anything ultra-processed (chocolate somehow slips through the net).

Jenny has been taking flaxseed oil tablets for a long while as she says they improve her health. Well, if that's what she says....

Food for thought

I'm reading a fascinating book by the American nutritionist Michael Pollan, who says all nutritional and dietary advice should be viewed with great scepticism as we actually know very little about what happens to food inside the human body.

The typical food item contains so many substances, many of them not yet even identified, that it's pretty hazardous trying to predict what that food will do to us after we eat it.

Also, every person has a unique metabolism that processes food in a unique way. So how a food will affect my body is quite different from how it affects someone else's body.

One person will get fat and develop heart disease, while another person eating the same food will stay thin and have a healthy heart.

Food is far more complex than nutritionists make out, but if they admitted how little they know about food and what it does to our bodies, their reputations would plummet.

One splendid example of ill-informed pronouncements was the advice to cut down on saturated fats to avoid heart disease. When people did so, the incidence of heart disease in fact rose. The advice turned out to be based on guesswork and supposition rather than solid evidence.

I must say I generally ignore nutritionists' advice, as I know that advice can change radically from year to year, often totally reversing the previous accepted wisdom. I just try to eat a healthy range of foods, including as many raw foods as possible.

One thing many nutritionists agree on is that what's known as the Western diet - lots of processed food, foods full of sugar and fat, food lacking vital vitamins and minerals - is wreaking a huge toll of chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease. So I also try to avoid such foods.

Common sense is probably more reliable than the latest dietary dictum.

Pic: Michael Pollan

Say cheese

You'd think that someone who ate virtually nothing but cheese would be really unhealthy. How could you possibly get all the nutrients you need? And wouldn't you be begging for a heart attack?

But it seems that Vicki Zukiewicz is quite healthy on just such a diet. The only things she can stomach apart from cheese are the odd potato, hunk of bread or slice of pizza (with cheese topping). Yet she's alive and well.

She says the texture or taste or smell of anything else turns her right off. No matter what delicious meal her husband is eating, she won't touch it. Try as she might, she can't overcome her engrained aversion.

It creates huge problems when she's socialising. In fact she avoids any social occasions involving food and usually eats at home, where at least her phobia is understood and allowed for.

Naturally everyone tries to psychoanalyse her, asking her what childhood experience brought this on, and diagnosing all sorts of fancy conditions. But she pooh-poohs them and says that's just the way she is and there's no rhyme or reason for it.

I do wonder how healthy she really is, though. Does she have regular medical checks to confirm her physical fitness? Is she a normally energetic, alert 32 year old? Or is she storing up trouble for the future?

I've heard of people with similarly limited diets before - and they were surprisingly healthy too. There was a boy who ate only marmite sandwiches and apparently came to no harm.

It seems awfully sad though that she finds so many tasty foods utterly repugnant. I can't imagine going without the fantastic flavours and aromas of all my favourite dishes. I would feel bereft, diminished, shorn of an essential everyday pleasure.

And much as I like cheese, eating it non-stop would smother its appeal pretty quickly.

Photo: Vicki Zukiewicz

PS: Cheese has more nutrients than you might think, including calcium, phosphorus, protein, amino acids, vitamin A, the B vitamins, iodine, magnesium, zinc, sodium, aluminium, nickel and selenium.