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I thought we all agreed now that fat isn’t the problem?

A “fry-up” pie should be banned from a hospital canteen, says a food expert.

The £1.50 “heart attack on a plate” is crammed with bacon, sausage, black pudding and beans, with an egg on top.

It is being sold at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, where doctors fight to save stroke and heart attack victims.

Prof Mike Lean, former government adviser, and chair of human nutrition at Glasgow University, said it was a “shocking” example of a meal, adding: “It should never be anywhere near a hospital. It is laden with fat, salt and without a vegetable in sight. There should be strict guidelines for all food sold in hospitals.”

Don’t we? Haven’t we had the proof that it’s not fat just recently?

Or does medicine work like the other sciences, we’ve got to wait for the generation with the wrong beliefs to die off, for it to advance funeral by funeral?

16 thoughts on “I thought we all agreed now that fat isn’t the problem?”

  1. I want one. Though I would prefer the beans drizzled over it rather than inside it and served with a side order of pommes frites and a squirt of sos de tomate.

    Yum yum.

  2. Lean (ho ho!) is a professional healthist ‘crat. He’s also a Scot, like most of the worst of the breed (it’s the Calvinism). And he got “heart attack on a plate” from American ultra-puritans The Centre For Science In The Public Interest.

    Never has a man been less worth listening to.

  3. “Or does medicine work like the other sciences, we’ve got to wait for the generation with the wrong beliefs to die off, for it to advance funeral by funeral?”

    That’s exactly how it works. The dreaded Dr Atkins was demonised by the medical profession throughout his career and yet it turns out he was largely right and they were largely wrong: eating refined carbohydrates will make you fat, eating saturated fat won’t.

  4. The real shock is that it costs only £1.50, and the main ingredient seems to fried bread, not pastry. I doubt the costs of making and serving are being covered. So this story is about the subsidy Scotland trope as much as it is about the deep-fried everything trope. Pray God they vote next month to exit the UK.

  5. Aaah. Will be in England for the weekend, daily morning fry-ups in a country pub.

    As long as the €218,000 a year Lufthansa pilots don’t strike about pay this weekend, of course. Could Tim come and give them some economics lessons? On what people in the world’s most globalised industry do when not happy with their T&C.

  6. In my experience NHS hospital food is shite. It doesn’t matter whether it is popular shite like the “offending” pie or commissar school-dinner style eco-freak shite. It is all ordure. The possibilities are ordinary filth or bizarro filth.

  7. “does medicine work like the other sciences… to advance funeral by funeral?”

    A psychologist once looked into Planck’s allegation and found it to be wrong. The old physicists of the era had accepted the New Physics at much the same rate as the young ones.

    Are you becoming a peddler of urban myths as old age approaches, Tim?

  8. I’ve just eaten the most delicious soft roll bacon and potato scone in the canteen of Prof Lean’s hospital. If he tries to ban them here he’s likely to be strung from the scaffolding by the porters.

    He’s English btw IanB so Calvinism doesn’t explain it (unless he was an English Calvinist which I doubt)

  9. Bloke in Costa Rica

    SOG knives make this rather handy modern-day tomahawk. It’s only $65. I would suggest the sum of human misery could be reduced greatly if someone were to use it to cleave this tosser’s head in twain.

  10. Whenever some self-important “rationalist” mentions evidence-based medicine, I respond that it sounds like a very good idea and I’d love to have some if it ever becomes available. Meanwhile, as long as doctors peddle medicine based on a mixture of evidence, tradition, superstition, obstinacy, protectionism, rank, guesswork, bureaucracy, politics, and disdain, I reserve the right to ignore them without being accused of being “anti-science”, thanks very much.

    Anyway, the problem with NHS food is that patients don’t eat it and therefore don’t get better due to malnutrition — partly because it’s dire and partly because they insist on serving it up at the same time regardless of the patient’s circumstances, so it is normal to be taken away for a scan or something and come back to discover hour-old cold food next to your bed because you missed your union-approved mealtime. Even if it were true that this pie causes heart problems etc (it isn’t), all that would mean was that it was unsuitable for a small subset of patients. What most patients need is lots of energy and protein to build up their strength, for which such a pie is clearly ideal.

    Across the road from the Ulster Hospital is a McDonald’s. I used to bring food from there to my wife when she was in long-term — and lived off the stuff myself as well, as I had no time to get food from anywhere else. And I wasn’t the only one. Packages from over the road are one of the most welcome gifts a visitor to the Ulster can bring.

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