Once upon a time, John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me, was an active member of the 'V club'. How times have changed.
Trying to cut down on meat? Trying to eat healthy? Trying to do the right thing? Do you look at vegetarians and think that maybe you should be more like them but just can't face wearing the hemp trousers? I assume this is why some people who eat meat still want to call themselves vegetarian with the excuse that 'I only eat a bit of fish '.
Sorry, that rules you out of the ‘V club’, as does eating prawns, chicken or witchety grubs.
You wouldn't be alone if this was the case. In recent surveys, many people say they that are, or would like to, cut down on their meat consumption for 'health reasons'.
Non-meat eaters are often seen as more healthy. For some it is an aspirational lifestyle.
This seems especially true amongst the middle-classes, for whom reduced- or zero-meat-eating seems to somehow have acquired an elevated social status, as though not eating meat reflects greater intelligence and sensitivity. It also has 'green' and ecological overtones. All of which attracts a certain moral superiority.
This is all very different to how it was in 1984, when I quit eating meat. Back then being a vegetarian was the sole domain of the stoner, the anarcho-hippy and, possibly, lesbian communists.
It was subversive, weird and a bit frightening to the general population, which was one of its attractions to me, of course. The idea that it might be an aspirational lifestyle choice for some people would have been unbelievable.
But times change and not least because, in the intervening years, everyone from the government to your doctors to fashionable magazines have been telling us to eat less animal fat and red meat and more vegetables in order to keep us healthy, stop us having heart attacks and also just because it’s more hip and cool.
So has it worked? Yes, it has. While the number of vegetarians hasn't increased hugely – still around 2-5% of the population – research shows that we are actually eating much less saturated animal fat than 35 years ago, along with a lot more fruit and vegetables and polyunsaturated vegetable oil. We eat much less butter and lard and a lot more low fat spreads and margarines. Instead, we eat more carbohydrate and sugar.
Result?
A massive, fat, sick nation. Well done.
But surely less people are dying of heart attacks? Yes they are. But only because medical intervention to keep people alive after a heart attack has improved hugely, as has the ability to stop people having heart attacks using heart-bypass surgery. This is nothing to do with diet. In fact, the incidence of heart disease seems not to have changed at all, which it really should have if this change in diet was actually healthy, especially as smoking has reduced radically in that period of time.
So let's recap: we swapped our meaty, fatty diet for a less greasy, more carbohydrate-based one in order to be more healthy and ended up with more people being more sick in more varied ways than at any time in our history.
When you look at things this way, that healthy veggie diet full of carbs in the form of brown rice, lentils, fruit and veg doesn't look such a great healthy option. But the fact remains the V diet is still being marketed as especially good for you, and certainly an improvement on the low carb, butter-rich, grass-fed steak and organic, pasture-fed eggs diet that I now thrive on. That is proper health food and I wish I'd realised it 26 years ago.
John will be appearing at the Hampstead and Highgate Literary Festival. Healthy Eating: Myth or Magic? More details here.