Homespun Wisdom

How much truth is there in old wives’ tales? Gilly Pickup finds out. Apples . . . Seeing In The DarkD . . . And Coffee

However, if she also told you that eating your crusts would make your hair curly, Mother was pulling your leg, no doubt in the hope of getting you to eat every part of the bread on your plate.

Mind you, that may have had the opposite effect for little girls who hated the thought of curls!

Crusts are good for you, though, as they contain more antioxidants than the bread itself.

It’s what your mum told you, and what her mum told her. Although that’s a sweeping statement, apples are a great source of flavonoids, packed with vitamins and essential minerals. Eating them is linked to a lower risk of many diseases. Eating an apple is also a good idea in situations where you don’t have a toothbrush handy but want to get rid of those stains from the coffee you’ve been drinking. The skin of the apple, high in fibre, can scrub your teeth, helping to

remove staining.

Cheese-loving youngsters might have been warned that eating cheese before bed produces nightmares. Do you remember Dickens’s novel “A Christmas Carol”? Scrooge claimed that his nightmarish vision of Marley’s ghost was the result of eating just a crumb of cheese before bed.

However, a study some years ago by the British Cheese Board found that, while cheese did give some volunteers more vivid dreams, they couldn’t really be classed as nightmares.

So go on, you can have that extra piece of Cheddar after all!

Since coffee gets a mention here, we ask: does it really stunt your growth? This is something else you may have been warned about when you were younger. The answer is no,

it doesn’t.