Tapu Misa: Trust your gut on nutrition

My sister has been making a lot of chicken soup lately. It's just like mother used to make. She raves about how delicious it is, but we both know that she's feeding her soul as much as her tastebuds.

It's just as well her choice of comfort food is healthy or she'd have to swallow the guilt as well. And there's enough of that going around already.

She and I made resolutions last month, promising, in front of witnesses, to give up unhealthy habits. Thankfully, we've already discovered the loophole that allows us to back out of our rash undertakings without too much shame.

We've been saved by the fact that the supposed health experts are in confusion about what is and isn't good for us. Apparently, and despite the gazillions spent on research, the jury's still out.

That's okay. I've never heeded those conflicting studies purporting to provide the answers to a long and healthy life - unless it suited me to. Thus, I've been diligent about giving my heart the beneficial effects of wine, but I never did get round to taking iodised salt off the table or making the switch from butter to margarine. Turns out I was right all along, in my own slack way.

Besides, some studies seemed silly, even if the British Medical Journal saw fit to publish them. I could understand nightshift workers having an increased risk of cancer, but could women in high-stress jobs really count on a reduced risk of breast cancer?

Still, I expected more from those Rolls-Royce studies which were supposed to provide the definitive answers to women's health. The US government-funded project, which began in the 1990s as part of the Women's Health Initiative, cost $725 million and involved 49,000 women aged 50 to 70.

All that to prove not much. The studies found that a low-fat diet had no effect on lowering the risk of heart disease and colon cancer, and that taking calcium and vitamin D supplements made no difference to bone density or breast cancer.

This hasn't stopped some experts stubbornly maintaining that a low-fat diet, calcium and Vitamin D don't have benefits. Just that these studies failed to prove it. Evidently, it's not the hypotheses which are flawed, but the design of the studies. You'd think $700-odd million would have ironed out those little creases - but apparently not.

So what else is new in the conflicting world of health studies? Last April, the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention admitted overestimating the number of deaths from obesity by 365,000. It downgraded obesity from the number 2 cause of preventable death in the US to the number 7 spot.

And it found, controversially of course, that while extreme obesity was definitely unhealthy, moderately overweight people lived longer than people of normal weight, who in turn lived longer than thin people. Apparently, you really can be too thin.

(As you'd expect, there is more recent research, from the Northwestern University in Chicago, that contradicts this.)

So what's a moderately health conscious but not excessively obsessive person to do about all this?

Harriet Brown, writing in the New York Times this week, says the best diet advice is to trust your gut and enjoy your food. Eating well and with pleasure is more than hedonism: it's good nutritional policy and practice.

Brown says that when we eat something we like, our bodies make more efficient use of its nutrients. Which means that choking down a plateful of steamed cauliflower (if you hate steamed cauliflower) is not likely to do you as much good as you think.

(Thank goodness I've never forced my children to eat their greens; one less thing to feel guilty about.)

Brown cites a 1970s study in which researchers fed two groups of women, one Swedish and one Thai, a spicy Thai meal. The Thai women, who presumably liked the meal more than the Swedish women did, absorbed almost 50 per cent more iron from it than the Swedish women. When the meal was served as a mushy paste, the Thai women absorbed 70 per cent less iron than they had before from the same food.

Never mind the study, anyone who has sought solace in a peanut slab, as I have, knows that food isn't just fuel. It is pleasure and enjoyment and yes, comfort - something those joyless food nazis fail to appreciate. Food is emotionally loaded, which is why I've been cooking up a storm recently, preparing dishes of flounder, snapper and taro to lift my father's spirits. Potatoes would be cheaper than taro and probably as nutritious, but it would be tantamount to saying that I didn't care about him.

Perhaps it's going too far to describe good food and drink as spiritually uplifting, but it is certainly more than the sum total of its calories, fat grams and nutritional value.

I'm not sure our health authorities understand this. My well-meaning health worker friend, who is engaged in the battle against the obesity epidemic, thinks education is the answer, but I think that goes only so far. I don't know a single smoker who doesn't know that smoking is bad for them. But it fills a need, just as eating does, and as long as the need is greater than the risk, they'll keep on puffing.

I know a youngster who is officially obese. She is so conscious of the disapproval of those around her that she has become adept at sneaking food. She eats, I think, to fill an emotional need, which isn't being met.

The fattest woman I have known, fat enough to feature in a Xenical ad, fell into that category. I think she over-ate because she felt unloved by her adoptive family. In her case, Xenical wasn't the answer.

The need is greater and more complex, and the choices more limited, when you're poor. I always want to slap people who bang on about how deficient in character and intelligence poor people must be to eat so unhealthily. Spend a day in their shoes and I'm sure they would be dialling KFC.

If the way to some people's hearts is through their stomachs, maybe the reverse is equally true.