In a confusing world, where we are assailed by conflicting advice about what is or isn’t good for us, it is reassuring to be able to cling to some eternal and unquestionable truths. Smoking is bad. Exercise is good. A high-fat diet is bad. A high-fibre diet is good. Big Brother is a dangerous, addictive carcinogen that eats your brain, saps your will to live and leaves you feeling dirty and consumed by self-loathing.
I am reeling from the shocking question marks that have been raised about one of these big five truisms, the one around which my whole life revolves. (No, not Big Brother.) Fibre, it is claimed, does not do everything it says on the packet. Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found no link between bowel cancer and the amount of fibre people had eaten. Ever since research in the 1960s suggested that roughage was the key to a healthy colon, we have taken this as one of the gospels of healthy living, and now it might all be a load of brown stuff.
I find this news highly indigestible. I love the rough stuff. I’ll happily eat half a dozen slices of wholemeal toast at a sitting (yes, I know there’s more salt in a loaf of wholemeal bread than in all the seven seas, but I can’t help myself). I eat lots of fruit and veg, plenty of grains and more beans than is perhaps advisable for one who works in an office. But by far the most important thing is getting my oats in the morning.
Porridge-making has been one of the main leisure activities in my family for years. We are not mere Johnny-come-latelys who eat porridge because some faddish diet tells us to. My father is a master of oat cuisine who is up tending his porringer at an hour so unholy that most of the rest of the world has only just gone to bed. My mother-in-law cooks a huge vat of porridge on a Sunday and then stuffs it in a metal-lined drawer and fries portions of it during the week, a hangover from when she lived in a bothy. At least I think that’s what she said. She may have been talking about crofters in the Western Isles in the 19th century. But it’s too good a mother-in-law story to quibble over the exact details.
Until quite recently my wife used to cover her porridge with salt. Just to really get the blood pressure up. She explained that this was a Scottish thing. Really, I’d never have guessed that. I am not allowed to touch her porridge which, bizarrely, she makes with water rather than milk. I make mine in the microwave, which will appall purists. The emperor has yet to complain, although he prefers fistfuls of raw oats that he can spill over the floor.
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Now I wonder if the sense of wellbeing that porridge gave me was all in the mind. Was that smug, self-satisfied glow merely a result of feeling that I was doing something virtuous, when in fact I wasn’t at all? And if a high fibre diet is pointless, what about the other great health truisms? Perhaps if I ditch the porridge in favour of a daily fry-up, high-tar fags and a life on the couch, I’ll live just as long and healthily.
I won’t be trying that, of course. I’ll simply ignore this latest bit of research until I forget about it and once again believe that porridge is the answer to all life’s ills. The trick with medical research, I feel, is to believe what you want to believe.
* I was bothered by that cover story in times2 about the woman who lived as a man for 18 months. The emperor took one look at the curious androgynous creature: “It’s Daddy.” My wife tried to explain that it was not. He returned a few minutes later, studied the picture again carefully, and announced solemnly and with utter finality: “It is Daddy.”
damian.whitworth@thetimes.co.uk