the final helping
Neil Donnelly
Neil is a Fellow of the BDA and retired Dietetic Services Manager. His main areas of interest are weight management and eating disorders.
Many of you will remember the time that you first became interested in a career in nutrition and dietetics. Perhaps it was through a suggestion of a relative, friend, teacher, or maybe through meeting someone who had a condition requiring an enforced dietary change. Or maybe it was a combination of a desire to help individuals and explore the underlying physiology/biochemistry of the human body and how it coped with food. My own interest in the link between food and health began when I was fortunate enough to obtain my first summer job at the age of 15 years in a factory near Coleford in the Forest of Dean. Friends at my Grammar school in Wales had made this 40-mile journey during the start of the summer holidays for the past couple of years and had returned after five weeks with what was then an exceptionally good wage packet. That year, the factory was taking on nearly 20 boys from our school, housing them in former prisoner of war huts and putting them to work in a variety of jobs on a very specific seasonal activity. That activity was the production of the blackcurrant cordial called Ribena. Virtually all the commercially grown blackcurrants in the United Kingdom were hand-picked and transported to the Beecham’s factory for processing. All this occurred over a period of around six weeks. I was loading boxes onto conveyor belts, making ‘cheeses’ which extracted the juice, cleaning the boards which pressed the pulp and, finally, graduated to the laboratory where we checked compositional details, including, of course, vitamin C levels. The original juice was then concentrated fivefold, which destroyed all the original vitamin C in the blackcurrants and ascorbic acid was then added when it was reconsti-
tuted. It was a fascinating insight into product development and a simple, but essential, nutrient that we all need. And so it began… Ribena, of course, is still with us today, except that now, as a result of the sugar lobby, Tesco have withdrawn it from sale from their shelves. Back then, no one knew about obesity. None of my friends were overweight. No one stayed in their bedrooms for hours except to sleep. We needed energy in our foods and drinks. The Co-op pop man came round on a Friday and my favourites were Dandelion and Burdock and Cream Soda. We played football endlessly in the school playground. No cars waited for us outside the school gates. We met with our friends face to face, not viewed them on a flat screen. Sure, times have changed and we all need to adapt, but removing one longstanding established nutritional product from sale in the belief that it is going to make a contribution to resolving the current childhood obesity crisis of the nation is to my mind unfortunate at best. I get the sugar message, but some kids are still kicking a ball around and need a drink with a calorie or two combined with a significant water soluble vitamin in it. I was going to talk about the furore relating to the amount the government spends in funding gluten-free products, but maybe that’s for another time! NHDmag.com October 2015 - Issue 108
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