Soft fruit - healthy or hazardous?

Berries are often promoted as a healthy food and grabbing a punnet of blueberries may seem a darn sight easier than giving up smoking, cutting down on alcohol or taking daily exercise. Or indeed, easier than cutting down your total intake of fats and sugars. But of course it’s your entire dietary mix that matters, not whether or not you eat berries.

Fresh berries are expensive because they are so perishable but packets of cheaper frozen berries have now become widely available. These are advocated for all kinds of “healthy recipes” in magazines and cookery books. They are also used by manufacturers to decorate ready-made frozen desserts such as cheesecakes.

There have been two examples in the news recently of serious illnesses being contracted from eating frozen berries.

In Sweden three elderly people died from norovirus, contracted from eating a frozen dessert that contained berries of Serbian origin in  And in Australia, earlier this year, there were several cases of Hepatitis A, linked to frozen berries imported from China. 

Hepatitis A is linked to faecal contamination of food and norovirus can also be spread in this way.

If we were to give the EU berry farmers the benefit of the doubt, we would envisage their fields and packing areas equipped with fragrant portable toilets and well-equipped hand washing facilities. We might confidently envisage that their staff induction sessions include training on the importance of hand hygiene. Whether or not all farmers reach these high standards I cannot say. If we let our imaginations travel further afield then we might be less optimistic about hygiene in berry fields and processing plants. 

Berries are delicious and if you have a garden, growing your own soft fruit is a great way to use it. Fresh soft fruit  should be washed – but of course you can’t scrub a raspberry. As for imported frozen berries, they can potentially do you more harm than good. My advice is to avoid all uncooked berries if your immune system is compromised. And for everyone else, treat frozen berries as a cooking ingredient that needs to be thoroughly cooked before eating.

Sugar as a healthier option?

Hard to imagine how you did that Waitrose, given all the publicity about escalating rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. 

Your current promotion is entitled “Kick Start Your Health”, with special displays, recommended recipes and 25% discounts on supposedly healthier ingredients. How on earth did this become a prominent promotional display, featuring banks of golden caster sugar (25% off)?  It stopped me in my tracks when walking into my local store.

After some discussion with you, Waitrose, I now realise that the whole display relates to a free recipe for scones, upgraded with carrots and pumpkin seeds aimed at making them “healthier”. Ironic that fruit scones are one of the few types of cake that can be made without added sugar. (Though they do cry out to be smothered with cream and jam, thus cancelling out any low-sugar credibility.)

When I cornered one of your senior managers in my local store he was defensive about the recipe, telling me, “It’s healthier because it contains carrots and seeds”. When “Oh no!  how did we get it so wrong?” might have been more convincing.

In a written response on your Facebook page, I got more of the same, passed down from “the team in head office”. I conclude, Waitrose, that you are  still not seeing this from the point of view of your customer.

Did no one on “the team” spot that customers, who did not have recipe leaflet in their hands, would either:

a)    be somewhere on the spectrum between bemused and outraged that sugar was being         promoted as healthy 

or

b) think that this light brown sugar was a “healthy” product?

How did you mess up so badly? And why, when I point out your error, do you persist in talking about the recipe? I am disappointed and definitely in the outraged camp, to see that such a reputable food retailer has got “healthy eating” so badly wrong.

Acid reflux - alkaline diet?

The growth of the Internet has enabled health myths to spread around the globe like a virulent strain of flu, infecting websites, books and the beliefs people hold about their health.

One of the most prevalent is the alkaline/acid diet myth. This seems to have come about as a result of an unfortunate marriage between Western alternative ideas about nutrition and Oriental concepts about the medicinal effects of foods. There is no evidence to support the idea that following a diet dictated by these notions can prevent any illnesses, cure any diseases or improve health in any way. The pseudo-scientific explanation of those who preach this doctrine talks about acid-forming and alkaline-forming foods (sometimes referred to as acid and alkaline foods for short).

One of the most confusing aspects is that an apparently arbitrary list of foods that supposedly makes your blood more acidic or alkaline. If you take fruits for example, citrus fruits are considered “alkalising” while cranberries and plums are considered “acidifying”.  This leads to statements like “lemons alkalise the blood”. In reality the chemistry of the blood is self-regulating and can withstand people consuming pints of orange juice or several antacid tablets in a day. These dietary recommendations have nothing whatsoever to do with whether the food has an acidic taste or contains any actual acids, such as citric acid or ascorbic acid. Or indeed, whether they a high or low pH.  An important scientific word has been seized and shaken it until it is unrecognisable.


This belief system is doubly confusing when it is used to advise people suffering from acid-reflux. Someone taking medicine aimed at neutralising their stomach acid, or reducing its production by the glands of the stomach, really does not need this muddle-headed pseudo-science thrown into the mix. Yet there are many books and websites that promote these dietary ideas to this group of patients.


Reflux is caused by a weakness of the valve at the top of the stomach and not by an imbalance of the pH of the blood. There is very little evidence that any particular foods have a consistent effect on reflux symptoms. The best way for an individual to check if something disagrees with them is to give up just one food at a time, eat normally, and then re-introduce the suspect food for a day and note any effects. Then, as with all good scientific experiments, repeat this procedure a few times to check that the effect is consistent.

Other than that, reflux patients should eat a high-fibre diet which seems to help, possibly because it keeps constipation and straining at bay. Straining, in someone with a weakened valve, will tend to push acid back up the oesophagus. The other important point is to eat a diet that prevents, or reduces any tendency to develop a bulging waistline. In this way pressure on that problematic valve will be kept to a minimum.

Health Advice from your Home Doctor

In the days before the NHS, when the British had to pay for a consultation, "home doctor" books seem to have been quite popular. I've been whiling away a chilly afternoon by dipping into one that was published in 1935. It contains a great deal advice on how to keep healthy. 

On alcohol consumption readers were advised thus:

"The counsel of perfection would be that of complete abstention from alcoholic liquor." The author though, obviously feels this is unrealistic and without explaining why he deems it unhealthy to consume too much liquor, goes on to recommend a sensible daily consumption:

"A glass of beer, light wine or claret at the middle-day meal is quite reasonable, but it is wise to eschew spirits, port, sherry etc" ... A sherry between 6 and 7 pm (the cocktail hour) is preferable to a "spirituous" cocktail "and with the evening meal, a glass or two of white wine, claret or burgundy may be taken as routine" ... "A glass of whisky and soda last thing at night may round off the day, and the average man has had all he wants in the way of alcoholic stimulant for twenty-four hours."

Sounds like a fair bit to me - five drinks a day - but it rather sounds as if this is what the author consumed routinely. So it must be alright.

On tobacco he starts by saying: "It is at least doubtful whether the habit often does any really very great harm," - an interesting sentence that reveals his conflicted feelings. We know that the majority of doctors smoked in the mid 20th century because in the huge study of the effects of smoking, conducted on a large group of British doctors, only 17% were lifelong non-smokers. He goes on to list a number of forms of possible harm caused by the habit: irritation and inflammation of the airways, smokers cough ("too well known to require description"), irregular heart beat, colitis, gastritis, constipation and a form of blindness.

On the subject of exercise the good doctor is cautious, recommending a brisk, 15 minute walk, out of doors, every day, ensuring that one's breathing is deep, head is thrown back and arms are swinging naturally. This is seen as primarily beneficial to the lungs and the reader is reminded: "It almost goes without saying that smoking should not be considered during such a walk."

He cautions against launching into team sports without prior conditioning and recommends that that such activities do not combine well with alcohol or smoking. Running meets with cautious approval but "Except in rare cases, men of over thirty-five years of age should not partake in competitive athletics."

It is notable that the tone of the book is of one middle class gentleman, advising another. Women are considered when specific female problems are dealt with, such as the menopause. Female readers are warned against the habitual consumption of brandy, whisky, gin or aspirin and: "Emotionalism is to be avoided."

There are many pages devoted to areas of life into which health professionals would never dream of venturing today, such as the time of day to take a hot (but not overly hot) bath. The evening is deemed the appropriate time, with perhaps a cold dip in the morning.

There are pages given over to the kind of clothing appropriate for the maintenance of health. Wool next to the skin is strongly recommended but not "old, washed and felted woollen garments" which are, apparently, "a common source of colds." Undergarments made from other fabrics are given cautious approval. Tight collars are mentioned, which "certainly hide that Adam's Apple, but they do impede a free flow of blood between the head and the heart".

He ends the section on clothing with the following: "It should be remembered that to be well dressed is to be inconspicuously dressed, and some of the various freaks and vagaries of attire one so often sees in some individuals are quite unnecessary and usually a sign of exaggerated self-importance." 

The only place that science informed health advice of the 1930s was the diet because it had recently revealed the existence of the key nutrients, so the importance of having a balanced diet was understood. 

We sometimes gripe today about ever-changing recommendations about diet or the consumption of alcohol, so it is interesting to look back and notice how much has changed since the childhood of today's great-grandparents. Long gone are the days when doctors thought that colds were caused by woolly undergarments that had seen better days and the time when they had no idea that smoking caused lung cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Thanks to a great deal of careful scientific enquiry, we all have much better knowledge about the factors that affect health than anyone could have dreamed of in 1935. The official health advice we receive is not perfect, but it is no longer based on firmly held opinions and nothing more.

The Modern Home Doctor, published by the Daily Express in 1935 and written by "members of the Medical Profession".

Doll R, Hill AB. (1954). "The mortality of doctors in relation to their smoking habits". BMJ 328 (7455): 1529.