The first frosts arrived here in the North East this week and we immediately started eating more. A lot more. The children are demanding extra helpings of pasta, rice, biscuits and toast. I told them this was their bodies getting ready for hibernation, storing up fat that may be called upon as times get harder.
Some of us , of course, will welcome that call, especially if it’s addressed at the bit around the middle How else can you most usefully eat in winter? Table-straining meals eaten slowly with lots of friends is one way. We’ve already had some big stews and baked-potato lunches, and a gorgeous slow-roast belly of pork in beans. There is good reason why the winter’s greatest feasts happen in the darkest months.
Staying happy and healthy through this time is a big issue up here. In Edinburgh we’ll get just 8 hours 23 minutes of daylight today, while Londoners will have a full 35 minutes more, rising to nearly an hour by mid-December. (Edinburgh’s daylight is much more refined, of course.)
How best to eat for winter is also on the minds of the dietitians and nutritionists out to make a buck from the worrying well. I get press releases from them most days. “Good news: there is a cure for the common cold, after all,” announces one popular British health and nutrition website. While medical science, it says, cannot find a cure for flu and cold viruses, “diet, supplements and lifestyle management” may do the trick. The site prescribes two South American herbal teas, a jar of expensive “aid to immune system” pills and as many garlic capsules “as your social life will allow”. You can buy them all from the page.
You wouldn’t think many people fall for this stuff, but in Britain we now spend about £850 million a year on dietary supplements, good and bad, and the food industry has embraced “eating for wellness” as a hugely profitable area of operations. All this snake-oil selling serves to blur the genuine discoveries being made about links between winter’s malaises — psychological and medical — and our diet. One old-fashioned supplement that research is showing worthy of a second look is that childhood horror, cod liver oil, or the vitamin D in it.
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In Ireland, Finland and America vitamin D is already added to milk as a matter of course, before it is sold, because the evidence of its efficacy seems incontrovertible. We get most vitamin D from sunlight: there is not much of that in winter in Scotland, but in the past we might have got more D because Scots ate lots of oily fish and offal. Not any longer.
Dr Oliver Gillie, author and medical campaigner, believes that the lack of vitamin D is responsible for some of the appalling health problems in Scotland — those not accounted for by poverty or our notorious diet. (Gillie doesn’t sell vitamin D, which, for me, makes him more trustworthy than most TV nutritionists).
Lack of vitamin D has been linked with multiple sclerosis, heart disease, some cancers, osteoporosis and problems with the immune system. Naturally sceptical, we have nonetheless since September been dosing ourselves with vitamin D3 (it is important to go for this type, which is what humans metabolise from sunlight, rather than the more common D2). And we’ve been pretty healthy, so far.
A cure for the common cold? Gillie does not claim that but he says: “When they introduced the fortification in Finland they monitored army recruits and found evidence of fewer colds and fewer days taken off.” There is talk of adding vitamin D to Scotland’s milk, but Gillie has little hope that it will happen. We refused fluoride in the water here and have the teeth — or lack of them — to show for it.
There’s a great deal of debate over how much we should take. The levels suggested by the US authorities are twice those recommended here. But the daily intake should start at 280 IU (international units) for a baby, rising to 2,000 or more for an adult. You don’t have to take the vitamin daily — Gillie takes 150,000IU once a month. It would take an awful lot of cod liver oil to get up to those levels, but herring will do it — a half-pound fish delivers 3,000IU. Even when kippered.