It's getting so you can't have a dinner party without sending out a notice in advance: "thank you for accepting our invitation to dinner . . . Kindly fill in the enclosed questionnaire listing which foods you will not be eating on the evening."
That is, if you dare serve food at all. In an age of spirituality without religion, marriage without commitment and sex without the exchange of bodily fluids - we now have dinner parties without food. Conspicuous nonconsumption is the order of the day. It makes you wonder, when one guest is off dairy products and beef, another off gluten and wheat (that rules out pasta), a third shunning pork and fish and a fourth armed with a list of dangerous vegetables, wouldn't it be easier simply to send out written invitations discreetly embossed with the letters BYOD - Bring Your Own Dinner?
Not even the men want a square meal any more - especially not the men. The Nutron diet which is responsible for all these eating habits has been embraced by the male population of this island as the panacea for middle-age and a paunch. Nutron claims that it is food intolerance rather than overeating which makes people fat. It's just what the men were waiting to hear. It's like the scales have fallen from their eyes and now they while away hours in the sauna melting off excess fluid and talking about this weird thing called a "neutrophil". Wouldn't you know that when men take to a diet en masse, it would have to be a nerd-fest of scientific mumbo-jumbo?
It used to be the women that huddled around the table talking weight loss and self-denial. It's kind of unsettling to see the men with their heads together at one end of the table as they compare their thumbed and frayed "lists" of forbidden foods. John's off beef, cod, cabbage, dairy products, gluten and yeast, which means bread and - the greatest revelation of all - beer. (Anybody could have told him that if he cut down on his beer consumption, he'd lose his pot belly, but everyone was too polite to say so.)
Bill can't touch coffee, tea and tomatoes. Ed's avoiding bread, but eating steak and chips five nights a week. And guess what? They've lost six stone between them in the past two months and the rest of us are sick to death of hearing about it.
Where women martyr themselves to their diets, men make it a macho competition, holding their pints of water in the pub like status symbols of their new-found health consciousness. And we can blame one woman, Kathryn Duffy, ebullient entrepreneur, mother of three, and wife (her second marriage, by the way) of Paul Duffy, the international showjumper. Kathryn Duffy, who lives in Galway, brought the Nutron diet to the Republic and Northern Ireland.
Hardly anyone had heard of Nutron when Kathryn lost 2 1/2 stone on the diet after having her third child. Ten months ago, she opened her first Nutron clinic in Galway. Today there are 21 Nutron clinics in the Republic and Northern Ireland, three of them owned exclusively by Kathryn and 18 of them run by her franchisees. She's expanding to the UK in July.
It's probably safe to say, that the Nutron diet is one of the biggest eating fads ever to hit this country. Maybe it's because the diet is so expensive - it costs £210 - that bragging about it is in order. They're talkig about little else in the golf clubs, which have become hotbeds of Nutron lore. And Spanish professional golfer, Jose Maria Olazabal, is among those who have endorsed diet.
Kathryn says that 60 per cent of her clients are men, most of whom have heard about Nutron "by word of mouth" and "on the side of the football pitch". It was her own marketing concept - and a canny one at that - to discreetly suggest to managers and trainers of hurling and football teams that they try the diet. Soon she was able to say that Mattie Murphy lost 2 1/2 stone in two months . . . Paul O'Halloran lost 2 stone in two months . . . Tommy Lyons lost 2 stone so fast his friends hardly recognised him. Kathryn claims a 95 per cent success rate (average weight lost: 1 stone per month) but the greatest success is Kathryn. Having started with nothing a year ago, she's on her way to her first million, which she expects to see "by the end of next year".
While Kathryn has made a success of her clinics, the Nutron concept is the brainchild of Ian Stokes, of Guildford, Sussex. Stokes is a criminologist. Although he is not a doctor or medical scientist, he is committed to the view that obesity is an inflammatory condition like arthritis, asthma and eczema - a theory which is controversial to say the least.
He claims that most excess weight is fluid retention caused by inflammation and that all inflammatory diseases, including excess weight, are caused by everyday foods. Give Nutron 10 ml of your blood and £210 and Stokes's laboratory in Sussex will analyse the blood to determine its reaction to 92 common food ingredients.
Stokes's notion is that particles of undigested foods can reach the bloodstream and attract the attention of neutrophils, immune system cells which patrol the body seeking out foreign material and destroying it. He believes that if you are intolerant to a food, your neutrophils will react and even burst upon contact with it, spewing out dangerous inflammatory chemicals.
In the Nutron lab, this reaction is measured by a haemotological analysis machine. Nutron then provides a list of specific foods which the client should avoid. Clients who follow their lists and who also avoid processed foods and food additives will supposedly see their arthritis, asthma, eczema and obesity vanish. That's the claim, but does it make medical sense?
Dr Bruce Mitchell, immunologist and food allergy specialist at the Blackrock Clinic in Dublin, says that Nutron's claims comprise "an outlandish misrepresentation of medical fact". He adds that "if you put a neutrophil in a test tube with a food particle you might see a reaction, but that does not mean that the response is specific for a particular disease or body shape. Until this supposed diagnostic test is properly validated and studied, the significance of any observed change must not be misinterpreted."
The fact that fat is not inflammation, as Nutron claims, is not in any doubt, he says. Some people are overweight because of their genetic makeup, others because they take too little exercise for the amount of calories they take in. Furthermore, people with genuine food allergies tend to lose weight - not gain it - due to problems of malabsorption.
Nutron is using "an unproven test without any evidence of proper controls. It's been around for a very long time but it has never been subjected to any critical analysis in the peer-reviewed literature," says Dr Mitchell.
The neutrophils which Nutron claims to observe reacting to specific foods are involved in any inflammatory process and have no specific relation to food allergy, Dr Mitchell explains. The prime cells involved in allergic reactions are actually the eosinophil and the mast cell. If neutrophils are reacting to foods under the microscope, it's because neutrophils will react to any chemical which you put them in touch with.
Dr Mitchell suggests that the Nutron diet is working for some people because they are cutting out many staple foods and thus cutting calories, whether they intend to or not.
Not all doctors are as sceptical. Dr Martina Rea, a GP in Headford, Co Galway, has patients on the diet and also gives advice in some of the Nutron clinics. "I can only speak from my own experience and say, `yes', I do see it working all around me. It seems illogical, but it works," she says. "In medicine, a lot of things were working for a long number of years before they described what was happening."
She says she has seen people lose 2 1/2 stone in only two months without reducing their energy intakes. "The beauty of it is that you don't have to restrict calories and you are never hungry because you can eat as much as you want." Some of her patients with inflammatory conditions have "benefited enormously". One of her asthmatic patients was able to stop his medication after stopping drinking coffee and tea on Nutron's advice. Another GP in the west, whose clinic's name and telephone number were available through Nutron but who wished not to be named in this article, says that he has had 20 patients on the Nutron diet and is disappointed with the results. Only one lost a significant amount of weight and another saw his eczema disappear.
He says that if the principle behind the Nutron system actually worked, he would have expected it to work on all those who tried it.
But who cares what doctors say? In the macho world of male dieting, if your friends tell you it works and you can see the flab melting off them, you're going to try it. And at £210 a pop, you're going to make sure it works.