Biscuits as Medicine

Kale, eh?

The super-darling super-food of the super-earnest, it has a super-reputation for super-godliness like some super-evangelist, think Jimmy Swaggart, just before it turned out had a super-saucy super-predilection for prostitutes, BDSM, cheating on his wife and super-preaching the exact opposite. Remember him? “Please send super-rolls of cash to help God stamp out sin, etc.”

And just like Pastor Swaggart, Kale has a super-dodgy dark-hearted underbelly.

Like all vegetables in its category, it contains progoitrin, which can interfere with thyroid hormone synthesis. Just ask the 88-year-old woman in China who fell into a coma after eating 3 pounds of raw bok choy daily for months. As a “natural cure”for diabetes.

A study by one of those exact super-keen kale cheer squad members, a nutritionist in America (who knew they had them there?) found something amiss in a bunch of his clients who has been stuffing down kale like to was something edible. They were suffering from mild thallium poisoning. “Thallium?” I hear you say. “Isn’t that a toxic heavy metal used in rat poison* ?”

So, scratch the kale.

And yet some of the tea industry is very keen on promoting trace elements as though there were the key to eternal life. Drink a cup of Gyokuru daily and you’ll live forever** etc.

But no-one ever thinks about the accoutrements, to whit: biscuits and cake.

I just found out there is such a thing as kale cake and so, quite wisely, I’m just going to set discussion of cake aside. But let’s talk biscuits. Yesterday, in ALDI, I found these:

Fruit AND Fibre Oat Biscuits. Surely they must be good for you, right?

And look at this:

Yes,  apparently there is now some sort of uber-nutritional body, The Grains And Legumes Nutrition Council, who wish to subjugate our personal freedoms and force us to eat a certain amount of grains and/or legumes!

And that august, or possibly fascist, body has decreed a set of rules that these biscuits fall into like with meekly. I bet the other biscuits hate these collaborators. They probably get roughed up by Scotch Fingers and are forced to sit at the back of the room with the Orange Creams.

But actually, I can attest that the ‘official’ serve of two of these little blighters does go down rather well with a nice Darjeeling.

Of course, they do offer a bit of fibre***, so all you kalephiles, time to switch.

And they have no effect on your thyroid and won’t poison you, or a rat, or send an 88-year-old woman into a coma if she eats 3 pounds a day of them****, so I think we can safety say that tea and biscuits is an essential part of your daily food intake.

Of course, I might just have to chocolate coat them. I wonder if there’s a Chocolate Nutritional Council? If not, I could always start one.

* What a wonderfully knowledgeable bunch you are

** If that were true, I’d still be hard-pressed to drink Gyokuru

*** When did we start saying ‘fibre’. I much prefer the old-fashioned ‘roughage’

**** Possibly a diabetic coma, in truth