Big brother is watching you eat!

It seems that you can hardly open a newspaper in Britain these days without reading some “shocking” exposé of how badly we are eating.

Thanks to films like Supersize Me we have all now heard that (gasp!) eating McDonalds every day is bad for you. We are aware that drinking to excess destroys brain cells (double gasp!); and that eating fatty, sugary snacks will increase national levels of obesity (surely not!).

While none of these revelations are exactly shocking, I suppose that stating the obvious every once in a while can’t hurt the message that we all need to be aware of what we eat. But recently, these sensationalist reports had a new victim: the humble sandwich.

Britain is the country where the sandwich originated and estimates suggest that Brits still consume over 12 million sandwiches each year. Personally, I have probably eaten more sandwiches in the time that I have lived here than in the preceding thirty years of my life – they are everywhere you look, and available in every possible permutation.

I have now become quite a connoisseur of what to buy and what not to buy among the staggering array on offer and, of course, I have my favourites. So I was rather disgruntled to read a report a while back shrieking in horror at the fat content of prepared supermarket sandwiches, like my favourite, cheese, mayo and spring onion. And the report goes on to suggest that such dangerous foods should be dropped altogether in favour of healthy, low-fat alternatives in an effort to combat Britain’s growing obesity problem.

Now this annoys me for a number of reasons.