THERE'S no such thing as a good food or a bad food. Sugar isn't fattening. Crisps can be part of a healthy school lunch - and children need to snack between meals. What's more, eating a lot of fruit and vegetables doesn't necessarily make you healthy, and eating chips doesn't necessarily make you sick. Even a fry for breakfast on a Sunday can be part of a healthy lifestyle. A little butter won't do you any harm either - but polyunsaturated margarine might.
Heard any of this before? Probably not. Such statements would be regarded as heretical by many in the business of handing out advice about food. Yet they're all based on the latest scientific research.
Dr Michael J Gibney, Professor of Nutrition in the Department of Clinical Medicine at Trinity College, Dublin and an internationally recognised expert on food, thinks that most of us have completely lost perspective on what we eat. It's not really our fault; we're being bombarded by conflicting and inconsistent information from advertisers, special interest groups, the media, even the Government.
"It's divisive, piecemeal and incoherent and it's making us neurotic and not necessarily improving our health," he says.
Dr Gibney cannot understand why a consortium of special interest groups, including the Irish Heart Foundation, saw a need to publish a statement on healthy eating before this summer when five months earlier a Government advisory group on nutrition had published an extensively researched document by the country's experts.
He is also critical of the fact that one "major nutrition issue", breastfeeding, is ignored in most healthy eating advice, despite the evidence which is amassing that this single food choice could have one of the greatest impacts on long term health throughout adult life.
"If pressure groups set the agenda, you are going to get a patchwork of conflicting advice and a set of distortions," he says. For example, not everyone needs to drastically cut down on fat to prevent a heart attack. And a woman who drinks less milk and eats less cheese to avoid their fat content may inadvertently - give herself osteoporosis by depriving herself of calcium.
In the midst of this minefield of advice is the bewildered consumer, often a parent trying to choose what is best for a crowing family. Many of us cling to the notion that healthy eating means getting the whole family together around the table with a large piece of meat firmly in the middle. Guilt sets in when this doesn't work out: but how can it, when one child has an erratic sports schedule and another is ultra particular about the few things he or she will eat?
The family meal will never again be the way it was in the 1950s, when the glistening joint dominated the majority of Irish tables, Dr Gibney predicts.
There are two reasons why. The first is simply a matter of demographics. A large group of the population are quite young and have travelled abroad. They are as happy to eat Italian, Indian and Thai food as they are chops and chips. "You can almost see an equilibration in the way we eat across cultures, from Europe and the Pacific, the Far East and the US. We're seeing Italians making boxty and Irish people who have been to Tuscany turning to pasta based diets."
BUT the changes are quite superficial in that while we're absorbing new flavours and cooking styles, we re often not changing fundamental ingredients. "All it really means is that we'll still be eating chicken, we'll just have a choice between Cajun, Thai or Tandoori," says Dr Gibney.
The second thing which is changing the way we eat is lifestyle. "To have a traditional food approach requires the traditional family structure," says Dr Gibney. Today we have more and more families where there are two working parents or a single parent trying to feed children who have varying schedules for school, sports, work experience and endless other activities. Nobody has time to put a roast in the oven. Also, it's no longer the apex of many people's culinary dreams.
"We're turning to convenience foods like frozen pizza. We're becoming international grazers who simply raid the freezer for most of our meals and only occasionally come together for a big family meal," says Dr Gibney.
The mother standing at the Aga stirring a steaming pot of stew has been replaced by a large, laden freezer compartment offering the kind of international dishes which would scarcely have been recognised in Ireland as little as 5 years ago.
At the forefront of this trend has been Iceland, a British frozen food retailer which has just opened stores in Dun Laoghaire and Ballyfermot, offering Dubliners the ultimate freezer grazing experience with 45 types of pizza, 88 desserts, 94 different ice creams and more than 130 assorted ready meals just there for the taking.
"Over the past 25 years lifestyles have changed, travel, vegetarianism, healthy eating, low calorie diets, convenience `grazing' and microwave cooking have all influenced our eating habits," according to Iceland.
There may once have been a time when people just ate when they were hungry and were glad when they were full but by and large it's gone. Now, however, the more variety available, the more people can become confused.
"People have a very bad image of modern food supply which is grossly uninformed because it's one of the best regulated areas of our life," says Dr Gibney. "The BSE thing has made us even more suspicious - but it's a sharp fact of life and a lesson to us." It is not a basis for moving away from a food that he believes is essential to a healthy diet: "I eat beef and I don't even think about it."
If a person wants to be a vegetarian for ethical or religious reasons, fine, believes Dr Gibney: not so if one is doing it solely because of BSE. But is there a greater risk than BSE? Some Irish nutritionists believe that one of the results of people giving up meat suddenly due to the recent scare could be widespread anemia, especially in women and children. Without the haem iron which beef contains, it is extremely difficult to absorb enough non haem iron in your body from other sources to be healthy. While it is one thing to become a committed vegetarian, changing your cooking style and researching nutrition to ensure you have all the iron and other nutrients you need, it's another to stop eating beef without making allowances in your diet.
Dr Orla Hardiman is a neurologist who was recently appointed consultant at Beaumont Hospital and a mother of three who knows all about CJD. "I'm feeding my kids beef and I'm not at all worried about it. The real worry is that they might become anaemic."
AT the core of the current fear of eating beef is the notion that there are foods which are unqualifiably wholesome. But says Dr Gibney: "Eating cannot be risk free".
The US National Toxicology programme tested all known naturally occurring compounds and found half cause cancer. Then it tested all known synthetic chemicals: half of them also caused cancer. In other words, force feed enough carrot juice to a rat, and it could develop a tumour. It's a basic tenet of toxicology: sola dosa facet venom - "These alone maketh the poison."
What each of us needs is the right balance of foods for us. The occasional fry is fine as long as we balance it out with a low fat evening meal like a salad with lots of vegetables or soup and crusty bread.
"Eating itself is not risk free, and the things which are putting people in hospital and continuing to cause deaths, chronic illness and loss of quality of life are to do with nutrients and having the nutrient balance wrong. It's nothing to do with food additives and chemicals and BSE," says Dr Gibney.
More important in preventing heart disease, hypertension and cancers is to be fit, he believes to increase your intake of fruit, vegetables and fibre and to reduce fat and stop smoking. Equally, people should worry less about where to buy organic vegetables, which he sees as being no safer than the ordinary variety, and more about simply eating as many vegetables as they can.
"It doesn't matter if they're tinned or frozen or pre chopped and pre packaged in cellophane," says Dr Gibney. "There may be subtle differences in nutrient content, but the most important thing for people is to consume fruit and vegetables and not worry about things that don't contribute to ill health in the general public in the first place."
Yet even when parents can assuage their fears about the safety of the food supply, there is still the worry of getting the "right" foods into their children in the correct amounts. However, Dr Gibney is convinced that "while it may be getting harder and harder for the family to eat together on a regular basis, this doesn't make it harder to provide a balanced diet as long as children are getting a variety of foods."
Research has shown that children allowed to freely graze from the refrigerator, the freezer, the fruit bowl, the bread bin and the cereal box have an uncanny ability to put together a balanced diet which is rich in nutrients.
This is partly because of their very high energy requirement of up to 3,000 calories per day. This voracious appetite gives them a lot of leeway, so that a few chocolate biscuits and a bag or two of crisps "do no harm" and provide energy. Crisps, he points out, are the major source of vitamin E for many children.
Dr Gibney is particularly incensed at the notion that children should not snack between meals. Children cannot survive without doing so, he maintains. When you need 3,000 calories per day, you cannot divide that into three meals of 1,000 calories each. It would be impossible for your average child to consume such huge quantities at one sitting.
The way many children actually like to eat - supplementing meals with bowls of cereal (an ideal low fat snack which is fortified with nutrients), fruit, yoghurts, cheese and bread - can be healthy. Such children still get most of their food energy from bread cereals, potatoes and other starchy foods.
Neither is it necessarily so that the more money we spend on food the better the diet. "You can make judgments," says Dr Gibney, "but when you take the list of foods in people's diets and actually put them through the computer there's not a massive difference in nutrients across the social classes."