The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Liver little! Have a wee drink!
Coffee is good for the liver. I’m glad something is, although I am doing my level best to keep my head above water and the rest of my sorry old corpus in what passes for a recognisably human shape by dint of making my liver the best exercised part of me.
I may be using Bell’s instead of kettlebells and Pilsner instead of pilates but surely making some kind of effort counts for something, if only a few stray calories, along the way?
There is not yet, to my knowledge, a booze-related version of the Fitbit, measuring steps on the road to (mother’s) ruin.
I work on the Biblical principle, being highly selective in what I care to believe from the contents of the Good Book, of taking a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.
And, it would seem, although the main proponent of the Christian faith on earth had form on turning water into wine rather than producing an acceptable Americano Smooth, the same relationship might be forged between coffee and the internal offal.
Caffeine, it appears, is the very dab for preventing said offal, known for its Doctor Who-like powers of regeneration, from transforming itself into the human equivalent of foie gras.
Two cups a day can, it is claimed, halve the risk of liver damage.
Although it’s probably a bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul (saints or prophets aside) if you’re tanking up the poor old throbbing organ to bursting point in the first place before dousing it with lively bean juice. If I stopped drinking now, mine would probably die of shock and then where would I be? Answers on a postcard… In a strange, cannibalistic kind of way, liver is also one of my favourite dishes which is perhaps why I am marinating my own on the hoof, so to speak.
Some friends of mine and I have formed an impromptu, occasional dining club called Ladies Who Love Liver where all kinds of rich and strange recipes are tried out, accompanied by richer and stranger red wines.
Now we have the perfect excuse to go for the serious after-dinner coffee, too.
We’re not being like a kind of selective, carnivorous reverse Muirfield about this, in not allowing men in.
It’s just that we haven’t, among our wider male acquaintance, found many of them who can bear the stuff. It must be all the iron that we pinkly anaemic girlies so often lack that does the trick for the female of the species.
Although I suspect it’s the prospect of treats like fried onions and mustard cream sauce that tips the balance, not to mention the scales. Yum!
So, having admitted to using the good old Tassimo almost as often as the Waiter’s Friend, I still know where to draw the line.
I turn my face away and my nose up at a purported diet aid of which, until recently, I was happily ignorant.
There is, it seems, an abomination in our midst consisting of coffee made with butter.
Now, I have nothing against butter per se although I don’t eat a lot of it. But as far as I am concerned the best and only place for butter is lavished on a scone.
This horror beverage is apparently known as “bulletproof” coffee.
Aptly, as my first reaction to the notion that anyone could perpetrate this ridiculous charade and crime against the great bean is that they should be shot.
All in the name of weight loss, too, although I surmise that the appalling brew is not so much slimline as just plain slimy. And just wrong.
Mind you, on the counter-intuitive principle that what seems bad for you is actually doing you good, I have also learned in this season of high pollen counts and all kinds of snottery allergies that a good old G&T can soothe hay fever.
Which perhaps accounts for the irresistible rise of the appropriatelynamed Fever Tree tonic brand.
It’s all to do with sulphites and histamines and triggers and all that sort of stuff, as, in spite of the fact that alcohol is reckoned by many to make their symptoms worse, that’s mainly if the bevvy in question is of the darker, fermented type.
Clear distillations, like gin and even the odd wee voddie, can do your offended nasal orifice and itching throat a power of good.
And this is according to no less an authority than Asthma UK.
This, as you might assume, adds greatly to the gaiety of nations round our way, where we only missed the recent celebration of National Gin Day because we didn’t notice it was any different from any other day in our house.
That wonderfully euphemistic phrase “for medicinal purposes only” takes on a whole new meaning when you come across comforting and selfjustifying stories like these.
All it means is you can go on doing exactly what you’ve been doing all this time.
If you know what’s good for you.