I suspect I have found the best medicine for what ails me.
The good news is, it’s available on every high street, you don’t need a prescription, and it comes with no nasty side effects. I’m such a convert that I’ve started pushing it on my toddler, too.
I feel better than I have in literally years, and the largest part of that is down to the miracle medicine of… good food. No, not exactly groundbreaking. But, after two years of asking every doctor I met if I might make lifestyle changes to improve my autoimmune condition and being told it would make very little difference or that there was “no point in making yourself more miserable”, I finally got so desperate I gave it a go.
And desperation is what it took to give up caffeine, gluten and almost all sugar and processed foods. Of course, there is an alternative for everything these days, nicely branded in bright colours to make you think you’re drinking a strawberry milkshake and not something that tastes like warmed bin juice.
For another pound, you can get something that makes your cupboards look millennial and doesn’t make you retch when you add it to your tea (rooibos for me). So, yes, it was desperation that led me to the whole foods aisle and desperation that forced me to put my hand in my pocket to pay the extortionate cost of health.
Like most Scottish babies from the 1980s, cut me open and I bleed sugar, Stork margarine and soft, highly-processed white bread. I wouldn’t say we ate badly but, short on time and energy, as a family we definitely depended on big bowls of pasta, the occasional frozen pizza and takeaway. So, I don’t think I understood when I virtuously tossed my first box of sugar-free, organic muesli into my trolley what financial ruin I was setting my family up for.
Had I read the Food Foundation’s brilliant Broken Plate report for 2023, which analyses “the state of the nation’s food system”, I would have known that the cost of healthy foods is over double per calorie than less healthy foods.
I would have learned that one in four high street food outlets are fast food providers, and that fast food retailers gravitate to areas of poverty – “31% of food retailers in the most deprived areas are fast food outlets compared with 22% in the least deprived areas.” That life expectancy in the most deprived 10th of the population is 19 years lower for women and 18 years for men. And nearly 9,600 diabetes amputations are carried out on average each year, an increase of 19% in six years.
Essentially, if you are poor then one of the fundamentals of living a healthy life, preventing illness and treating it – good, healthy food – is likely beyond reach.
Annual cost of obesity was £5.3 billion
Poverty has been a reality in Scotland since I was a kid eating dry toast on Sunday and longing for the benefit book to be cashed on Monday morning. But surely, you would think, someone might have realised that the short-term costs of providing disadvantaged communities access to decent food might outweigh the long-term consequences and costs.
In fact, a recent report by charity Nesta, Counting the cost of obesity in Scotland, found that the “annual cost of obesity in Scotland in 2022 was £5.3 billion – a figure set to rise in the coming years”, and that “supporting a population calorie reduction of 230 kcal per day for adults living with some level of excess weight would be enough to halve obesity prevalence”.
I’d still need regular surgery and autoimmune medication, but I might not have had to take months off work, bedbound, or depend on more and more drugs
I think of my weekly expensive tablets and injections, my countless blood tests, CT scans, visits to NHS consultants trying to get the root of my appalling ill health at 42 and wonder how much might have been different if when I’d asked: “Is there anything I can do myself to make this better?” they’d not just shrugged and shook their heads but actually been able to refer me to someone who could actively support lifestyle changes.
Yes, I’d still need regular surgery and autoimmune medication, but I might not have had to take months off work, bedbound, or depend on more and more drugs.
Scotland can invest in better nutrition in many ways
With the Nesta report also revealing that obesity is now the leading cause of death in Scotland and is linked to 23% of all deaths, surely it’s time for a holistic approach to health? That means better housing and better access to healthy food for our poorest communities. Which, of course, means money, so higher wages and subsidies for nutritious food, continued home energy savings.
Perhaps it means free exercise (and I don’t mean hoofing it around the park, but access to good gyms with excellent equipment and motivational classes). Maybe it means food education from school lunches that satisfy nutritional needs.
And, if a corporate fast food restaurant wants to open in a deprived area, make them pay for that space by putting money – a lot of it, not just sponsoring a local football kit – into local healthy eating and fitness schemes.
With the Scottish Government aiming to half childhood obesity by 2030, dietary inequalities in the UK impacting people’s health, and with a cool £5.3 billion and our children’s future on the line, you’d hope improvements will be made soon. Until then, I’m grateful to be able to feed myself and my family better and improve my health tenfold, even if my muesli tastes of the privilege every Scot should have.
Kerry Hudson is an Aberdeen-born, award-winning writer of novels, memoirs and screenplays