What on earth is healthy eating, and what isn't? Those of us who have lived through quite a few food fads have seen diets once promoted as extremely healthy condemned as potentially lethal. On the other hand, food we were once encouraged to shun is now being declared good for us.

For instance, most of us now in our middle years grew up nurtured on fat. Big, greasy bacon sandwiches helped to protect your chest from the winter cold. Dripping on bread built you up. As for all those lovely globules of fat floating about in the gravy of the stew made from neck-of-mutton scrag end....Well, you could fairly feel them doing you good.

All that has now changed, of course. If we want to stop our arteries furring and up and increase our chances of living to a ripe old age we now have to put all that fat stuff behind us. We are told that our early diet could have done us terrible harm, so we must shy away from fat and hope that our bodies can repair themselves.

Meat is trimmed of every trace of fat. The chicken has its skin stripped off it and discarded as soon as it comes out of the oven (or before it goes in the casserole). Butter is banished and even low-fat spread is used only very sparingly. Labels are read with care for fat content in processed food. Everything that will grill is grilled and what really has to be fried encounters the barest minimum of olive oil. The chip pan has been exiled to a high shelf in the garden shed.

But not to worry. If we can't have chips, at least we can have lashings of potatoes in other forms. The latest news from the world of nutrition is that carbohydrates as represented by potatoes and bread aren't at all fattening, as we were taught 30 years ago.

It seems they got this reputation because of all the things we put on or in them. We slapped butter on our bread and toast and it was that which caused us to put on weight. We mixed butter or the top of the milk into our mashed potatoes and fried our chips in lard, and it was that which did the harm.

Now drink is increasingly coming under scrutiny of the health gurus. Middle-aged people are particularly at risk, it seems. I read the other day that drink was the third largest cause of death (after cancer and heart disease) among the fiftysomethings. Those of us who have been regular social drinkers since our teens might have done terrible things to our livers by forcing them to process countless gallons of alcohol over the years.

So, driven by a new-found determination to lift the odds in favour of living long enough to see my grandson grow up, mineral water has replaced beer and wine as my tipple for a trial period and possibly (but only possibly!) forever.

It breaks the habit of a lifetime and, like mashed potatoes without butter, it's pretty boring. But the consolation is that if you can't feel it doing you any good, at least you know that it isn't doing you any harm.

Until, that is, the experts decide otherwise.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.