Well, certainly not every day. Yet now doctors are saying that five a day, which was the previous recommendation, isn’t enough. That’s bizarre.
Even at a hormonally active age I had better things to do than to go at it like a hyperactive bunny rabbit all day long. Like reading, writing and mercifully very little arithmetic. Occasionally even going to work.
And I’d maintain that any reasonable, non-priapistic appetite ought to be slaked by one or two a day, with perhaps the odd peak activity when on a business trip.
It’s a sign of our licentious modernity that satyriasis and nymphomania should be pasted all over the papers under the guise of medical advice… Oops!
Never mind. My wife has just looked over my shoulder, as she so annoyingly tends to do, and said I ought to read the articles, not just scan the headlines.
What the articles are about, and anyone but a blithering idiot would realise this, is eating seven portions of fruit and vegetables a day – not the smut I, according to her, have on my mind. And isn’t it about time I started acting my age.
Well, I’ve now read the articles and I’m about to start acting my age. Part of this paradigm shift is insisting that my uninformed take on the headlines was less nonsensical than the articles themselves, or in fact the University College study on which they were reporting.
A portion of vegetables is defined as 80g. Seven times that makes 560g (I did do some arithmetic as a youngster). That’s a pound and a quarter to those fossils who are, like me, stuck in the Stone Age.
Call me a health Luddite, but this sounds like an awful lot. Let’s see.
A bacon sarnie for breakfast could perhaps accommodate a slice of tomato. Call it 20g.
A slice of pizza for lunch, with, say, a lettuce leaf and some other salady things on the side. Perhaps 40g in toto. Where are we so far? 60g? Now wine is made of fruit, does it count? Apparently not.
That leaves 500g, well over a pound to be gobbled up at dinner. That’s a lot of broccoli, too much actually, especially if you dress it with a little butter. Eating on that scale is how one gets fat, and surely obesity can’t be good for one’s health.
And wine still doesn’t count. Neither does that grappa in which one occasionally indulges after a slice of Black Forest.
All things considered, this seven-a-day business is clearly a non-starter for any self-respecting gentleman – or even a self-professed lady like my wife.
But hold on for a moment. The author of the study, Dr Ouinlola Oyebode (just think how far you’d go in life if you had a name like this), thinks what I’m saying is nonsense.
“The clear message here,” he says, God bless him, “is that the more fruit and vegetables you eat, the less likely you are to die at any age.” Logically, if one is unlikely to die at any age, one is likely never to die.
Now we’re talking. Dr Oyebode doesn’t need God to bless him. Since only the deity can confidently promise immortality, he himself is God.
Stuff yourself with the green stuff at every meal and, whatever age you are, you’re unlikely to die. The logical inference is that, if you were a vegan and wholly reliant on veg for your sustenance, you could give Methuselah a good run for his money.
Yet the same book in which Methuselah is one of the dramatis personae only promises three score and ten. Fine, thanks to clean water and antibiotics, perhaps now the book could upgrade to three score and twenty-five. Add another year or two for good (and utterly boring) behaviour and, give or take a year, you arrive at the universal life expectancy in the civilised world.
Perhaps in a generation or two this will grow to 90, even 100. But that’s it: the likelihood of death for all of us is, in round numbers, 100 percent. A time comes when we are absolutely, unequivocally guaranteed to die no matter what we have for breakfast.
Even God Almighty stops short of promising immortality in this life, at least not until he comes again with glory and all that. Nor does he talk about eating fruit and veg in that context, though he does offer some rather imperative dietary advice in the first part of his revelation.
Yet following the commandments of that book isn’t whither we look for immortality these days. Booklets on diet and exercise are a much more popular option in our pagan, solipsistic age.
Death is now seen as not so much tragic as unfair. Death breaks modernity’s chief promise of a long, possibly indefinitely long, life.
Never mind what kind of life, never mind how meaningless and spiritually impoverished. We want to live! Physically! Parrots can last for centuries, so how come we can’t? Death is no longer a transition to a new life. It’s a promise broken.
So by all means, eat your seven a day if that’s what turns you on. But if you expect never to die as a result, you’re in for a letdown.