Soups and stews are the best route to ‘wellness’ in my household
Are you sitting comfortably? If so, you’re probably nutritionally deprived, according to Dr Paul Clayton, a former scientific adviser to the government. Dr Clayton argues that homo sapiens has become “homo sedens”, a species whose inactive habits leave a looming gap between the quantity of food we require for adequate nutrition, and the calories it contains. NHS guidelines recommend a daily intake of 2,500 calories for a man and 2,000 for a woman, but Dr Clayton argues that “correct” nutrition requires 3,000odd calories a day.
We writers are sedentary types, so who knows what hidden deficiencies I may be harbouring, thanks to my inadequate diet? Or even my adequate diet – for according to Dr Clayton, “People who say you can get all your nutrients from a well balanced diet don’t know what they are talking about.”
Happily, he has the answer. Lyma, a “supersupplement” for which he is the scientific adviser, contains, according to its glossy website, “seven patented ingredients, none of which can be found in sufficient quantity through your daily diet”. A “starter kit” of 30 capsules packaged in a “handmade copper vessel” costs £199. “Why not invest in your wellness?” the website urges.
Those of us who can’t afford the investment must presumably resign ourselves to creeping malnutrition. Or we could follow the deathbed advice of Hilaire Belloc’s doomed Henry King: that “Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch and Tea/are all the human frame requires”, and devote the long winter evenings to cooking hearty vegetable soups, fragrant stews and buttery crumbles, in the hope that these humble comestibles may, in some unscientific (but delicious) way, prove sufficient to sustain our “wellness”.
The new academic year brings renewed concern about essay mills – businesses that target vulnerable students via social media, offering to write their essays for a hefty fee. Students caught cheating face penalties including the loss of their degree.
As it happens, my job is also to target vulnerable students, under the auspices of the Royal Literary Fund, which places writers in universities to offer free academic writing tutorials. Most of my students have been to state schools, and have good A-levels but little idea of how to write a university essay. It generally takes only a single session to persuade them that essaywriting is not alchemy, but a skill no more arcane than video-gaming.
University vicechancellors have written to the Education Secretary to demand action against essay mills. But there is surely a case for treating the cause of the malaise, rather than its symptoms. If the A-level curriculum included a basic university-level essaywriting module, the essay mills (and I) would soon be out of business.
Radio 3’s Music Matters excelled itself this week, with a captivating interview with Dr Felix Ströchens, a German bio-psychologist fizzing with enthusiasm and plosive sibilants, who has been investigating the auditory systems of crocodiles. His findings were fascinating, but it is the lingering image of lightly sedated crocodiles, lying in MRI scanners listening to Bach, while their primitive, 200-million year-old brains flash like a reptilian fireworks display, for which I am most grateful. Do listen (at 10pm tonight or on iplayer), if you can.