One of the reasons for taking meat out of your diet has always been to gain improved health. There is a vast array of scientific data around that supports the view that a heavily meat based diet is simply not good for you. But of course if you mention that to many meat eaters they will simply ignore it on the grounds that they don’t feel unwell and they’ll carry on as normal (albeit often with the caveat that they ‘don’t eat that much meat anyway’.

I don’t know if you saw it but Dr Alice Roberts has got a really interesting little series on BBC2 on Thursdays – ‘Don’t Die Young’. Last week Alice was looking into her digestive system (quite literally as it happens – she swallowed a micro camera and watched with fascination as it descended to parts that up to that point only Carlsberg had managed to reach!). She got talking to someone who existed on a white flour, high fat, meat based diet. This person had all sorts of skin condition problems and a general lack of energy etc. The redoubtable Dr Roberts was alarmed and talked about the importance of bowel transit times. The kind of diet that her ‘patient’ was on led to a rather sluggish gut and the problem with this is that all the internal bacteria tend to get heavily to work on substances hanging around in the lower intestine leading to many medical problems – not the least of which is bowel cancer.

Alice came up with a great way of illustrating the problem. She challenged her patient to a sweet corn race. Sweet corn has the ability to, how shall I put it, get through our digestive systems reasonably unscathed and so can be easily recognised again! They both duly ate a bowl of sweet corn for breakfast one day and started the stopwatches. Whereas Dr Roberts with her high fibre, largely veggie diet came up with a time of just over 24 hours, her patient didn’t see any results (as it were) for over three days. Case closed – diet changed – many of her problems solved…..

I haven’t tried this yet but I’m going to and I am challenging all you blog readers to do the same and post your results (Beijing eat your heart out – oh that’s actually not a v nice image is it? Sorry!). Try it on your meaty friends and let me know what results they achieve.
Can’t wait for the results to come in…….