A TALE OF TWO DIETING CULTURES

July 10 2007: Many researchers like to go big on the numbers at all times, as if to try to blast away any methodological doubts with sheer scale. In the right instances, however, others may seek to find inspriation from single cases or from simple contrasts.

Coming back from a week in Portugal's Algarve, just such a juxtaposition comes forcibly to mind. In the drink fridges of the cafes tucked away in the narrow, gleaming limestone alleyways of hilltop Moorish villages and in the bustling bars of  the cosmopolitan seaside resorts, "diet" is virtually nowhere to be seen. The traditional bakeries and welcoming restaurants don't do picky - they do flavoursome and robust instead.

During a halt in a beautiful little spa village, high in the mountains, I quizzed our tour guide Sonia about all of this as we tucked into the local tapas snacks under the stone vaulted roof of an ancient bar - chopped chorizo baked inside a sizeable bread roll was the house speciality.

"As a country, or certainly amongst my family and friends, we eat when we are hungry. We don't waste our time worrying about food when it is not time to eat. But we enjoy our food a great deal," she commented. THE WISDOM OF A DIETING-MADNESS FREE LIFE DISTILLED INTO A SINGLE REFLEX COMMENT.

Portugal is way down on Europe's fat list. The UK is not. I bought an English newspaper at Faro airport for the journey home. There was a very prominent piece breathlessly spouting on about some mixture of belly fat liposuction, stem cell introduction, chest re-injection and breast enhancement scheme (I think that's what it was about - I was so flabbergasted by its idiocy that I rapidly glazed over).

I am old enough that I remember reading this kind of technobabble nonsense back in the Eagle comic as a child. It was full of Dan Dare stuff - space cars, robots, techno-luxury......general fantasist futurism.

Yet part of the wonder of human existence is our ability to seek enchantment in our environment. A degree of fantasy enhancement is not only normal but also highly desirable as a leveller of stress and disappointment. Just about all of us sand off the sharper edges with a few aspirational day dreams.

There's only the remotest problem when our innocent imaginings become a wholesale replacement for reality. With quasi-cyborg bodily obsessions now moving beyond established conceits such as cosmetic surgery, the consumerist society is losing reality with the beauty and satisfaction of natural eating rhythms and natural foodstuffs.

Sonia and her countrypeople by and large don't do Dan Dare living when it comes to their eating. It's far too sunny in their present.