Or if they do appear to work – as in the case when she famously lost a wheelbarrow load of fat on a stupid liquid protein diet – they are not sustainable.

After years of well-documented fluctuations in size, Oprah’s latest setback on the scales came last year when she found out she had a debilitating thyroid problem.

She still continued on the deprivation treadmill though, earlier this year embarking on a “21-day cleansing diet” – documented for all her viewers and readers worldwide, naturally – that banished meat, fish, poultry, eggs, dairy, gluten, you name it, from the menu. Instead, she loaded up on soy products, for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Call me crazy, but how did she think that this was the answer? She was undoubtedly desperate and if my every move was watched by millions perhaps I’d be willing to embrace any diet that came my way, too.

“I’m mad at myself. I’m embarrassed,” she writes in the January issue of O magazine. “I can’t believe that after all these years, all the things I know how to do, I’m still talking about my weight. I look at my thinner self and think, ‘How did I let this happen again?’”

But given the powerful influence she wields over others, let’s hope it’s a message that resonates long and hard with millions of her followers.

But what if the food being dished up is not merely tasteless but is actually holding back our recovery? Peter Dingle, an environmental and nutritional toxicologist who teaches at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, recently took a children’s hospital to task for the quality of its menu. Standard offerings include hot dogs, sausage rolls, polony sandwiches on white bread and chocolate custard.

“If you feed kids healthy foods they will heal faster,” Dr Dingle argues. “But what hope have these kids got if the hospital feeds them this kind of rubbish?”

He’s right. And it’s not just the kids who suffer. Elderly patients also get the raw end of the stick with overcooked mush standard fare in nursing homes and hospitals. A friend who visited her mother in hospital recently was so alarmed at the quality of the “cuisine” she started to bring in home-made soup each day.

Real food nourishes and when we are at our most vulnerable – ie, sick – we need nourishment more than ever. We’ve all heard the jokes about hospital food, but the reality is no laughing matter. The stuff being dished up in many hospitals around the world is often processed, high in salt and sugar, and of little or no nutritional value. It’s a sad fact that the food is more often driven by budget considerations than the good it will do the people the hospital has committed to heal.

Food that heals, not harms

Not all hospitals are guilty of crimes against nutrition. Some wised up to the problem long ago and brought in consultants or staff to rehabilitate offending kitchens, with impressive results.

Take the Royal Brompton Hospital in the UK. Its visionary catering service manager Mike Duckett saw his role as being as much about healing as that of the medical staff. “Morally Iʼve got a responsibility to actually look after peopleʼs health and what weʼre eating these days is totally unhealthy, all this pre-packed food, pre-cooked food… it doesnʼt do anyone any good.”

The hospital is one of four working with Sustain: The Alliance for Better Food and Farming on the London Hospital Food project, aimed at sourcing as much food as possible from local and organic producers. Mike also focuses on seasonal fare for optimum nutrition.

Royal Brompton hosted a debate on hospital food organised by the Soil Association and attended by organic devotee Prince Charles, earlier this year. The fact that such a debate is still necessary is an indictment on national health systems around the world. If we tell everyone they need to eat better for their health and then dish them up rubbish in centres for healing, something really is wrong.

Poor diet cost adds up

Jesse Ziff Cool can’t wait to get her hands on the menu at Stanford Hospital in California. The organic proponent and chef runs Cool Cafe at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center and has come to know many of the hospital staff who regularly eat at her fresh food haven. She says she’s been begging for ages to be let into the hospital kitchen. Her persistence has paid off and she’s been hired as a consultant to work on a better menu.

“I promised them I could deliver nutritious, wholesome food and it won’t cost them any extra,” she says.  “The food will be simple; things like an organic chicken soup… it doesn’t have to be complicated, it just has to be delicious and nourishing.”

While Jesse has only just started work on the project she is optimistic about its prospects and hopes to see it rolled out through other hospitals across the States.

Even if organic and fresh, local food do cost a hospital a bit extra in the short term, however, surely it saves us all a lot of money in the long run. The better the food, the quicker the recovery and the less likely that patient is to end up back in hospital.

We all know the costs of poor diet; it’s one of the reasons our hospitals are under so much pressure. The place you go to get better should be the one place where you are guaranteed to be well fed.

Tough going: Craig Sams battled inertia and skepticism to create organic success stories.

Pioneer isn’t a label that Craig Sams feels comfortable with. The man who is synonymous with so many innovative brands in the organic sector simply chuckles when I describe him as a trailblazer of the movement.

So, put his modesty aside for a moment and consider his record. He was the owner of London’s first macrobiotic restaurant, Seed, which was frequented by John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Rolling Stones, as well as many other sixties icons; he founded Whole Earth Foods; created the first British Fairtrade product, Green and Black’s maya gold chocolate bar; and has been the chairman of the Soil Association since 2001.

Throw in other titles such as author, ambassador, grower and baker and you start to get a picture of the man who is now putting all his energies into a smaller enterprise, Judges Bakery, in Hastings on the UK’s south coast.

“It was very difficult in the beginning,” recalls Craig. “We were marginalised in the extreme, as we weren’t just pushing the organic message – it was about macrobiotics, too. When I launched my first business with my brother in the late sixties we thought it would be a matter of years before the whole world swung around to our way of thinking because it made such perfect sense not to poison the environment and not to damage your own internal environment. The combination of healthy eating and healthy farming was a no-brainer.

“We were young and had no idea of the vested interested of big business and general human inertia. People like their burgers and chips and you can’t just tell them to stop eating them. It turned out to be a much longer, harder slog than we could have imagined.”

It was health problems that Craig, now 65, suffered while travelling as a young man that prompted him to pursue a life without chemical nasties. “While I was in India I became very ill, so much so that I actually could conceive of my own mortality for the first time. While I realised that immortality wasn’t possible I certainly treasured life enough to live it as healthily and as long as possible. I never wanted to feel as awful as I did in Delhi again,” he says.

“To me eating a healthy diet of food that I really enjoyed was an obvious path forward. What I fail to understand is that most of my contemporaries haven’t had that eye-opening experience – like every other teenager they felt like nothing would ever wither them. I’ve realised that it’s quite hard to persuade perfectly healthy people that changing their diet makes a difference.”

He admits that although he has been largely successful at getting the message out to the general public, he still doesn’t have all the answers. “It is the greatest mystery of my life,” he says. “It is nothing to do with race, sex, education or income – some people get the healthy and organic message and some people don’t. What I do know is that people who go organic never go back. It is the single most effective choice you can make to make the world a better place – you can do yourself, the planet, society and the economy good all at the same time.”

There is no doubt that Craig Sams is a successful businessman. For example, his recent sale of his stake (20 percent) in iconic organic chocolate brand Green and Black’s to Cadbury Schweppes is believed to have earned him and his wife, beauty journalist Josephine Fairley, around £4 million.

However, this success has not come easily, as the man himself attests when he talks of having many sleepless nights over cashflow problems in the nineties. But his entrepreneurial spirit has driven his career forward. Matched with a strong ethical and health stance, it has seen product innovations such as fruit juice sweetened jams, organic peanut butter and the organic herbal energy drink, Gusto, as well as the runaway success of Green and Black’s (the name represents the green of organic and black of the dark chocolate).

“The history of my business career to date has been an innovation, a period of monopoly and then aggressive competition. I was the first to do fruit juice sweetened jams, organic peanut butter and Fairtrade chocolate,” Craig says. “The great thing about the chocolate was that it was very hard for anybody to compete with us because we built the business on our relationship with cocoa growers. We had farmers who produced the best quality cocoa beans and so that particular niche lasted a lot longer.

“Sometimes you realise that you’ve taken the brand as far as it can go and it’s time for a bigger company to move in. That’s what happened with Green and Black’s and Whole Earth Foods, and in both those cases we sold to people who had huge respect for the brand and took it further than we were able.”

His businesses have always been a family affair. He began Whole Earth Foods in 1967 with his brother Gregory, set up Green and Black’s with his wife and is helping his son Karim with his own organic fruit juice smoothie enterprise, Soma.

It’s no surprise then that Craig admits he enjoys working with his family, citing his partnership with Josephine as a particular highlight. He also observes that working with family enables small businesses to grow “organically”, as family members tend to have the muck-in attitude that is needed to make the business work. “The advantage of a family business is you have people outside of the legal requirements of working hours and the minimum wage. Getting a business like this off the ground means that the whole family becomes involved and there are huge commitments and sacrifices to be made. The benefits come much later.”

In addition to being proud of his achievements with organic brands, Craig is equally satisfied with his involvement with the Soil Association. As chairman he has overseen an intense period of growth within the organisation and the recognition by public figures of its important role in food and farming policy.
“It has been gratifying that now people not only hear when the Soil Association speaks but also feel obliged to address the comments we make. We have put food and farming on the agenda and I’m thrilled about that.”

While he is coming to the end of his tenure as chairman, he will continue to be involved with the organisation that is so close to his natural values. Having recently published Sweet Dreams, an account of how he and Josephine created Green and Black’s, Craig is happy to keep expanding Judges for now. I wonder if there are any more innovations in the pipeline? “Well, I am working on a new technology project,” he says. “But that’s a whole other story.” Maybe next time.

Healthy start: Kids need the best you can give. Picture: Monkey Business

My brother puts an apple in his kids’ lunches in case an adult ever checks.  He told me he renews the apple every 10,000km.

School lunches can be a bit hit and miss in our house, too. I have good days and bad days. I’d clearly hit a good patch this week.

As I collected my daughter from school for her doctor’s appointment she grabbed her lunch.  As we talked to the doctor she took it out and proceeded to eat it in a most business like fashion.

Usually in a circumstance like this, your child takes out the sticky chocolate donut they talked you in to buying in a weak moment at the supermarket.  The doctor then raises her eyebrows and murmurs something about how the child’s condition may relate to poor diet. She might even hand you a brochure on major food groups.

God has given me children with the dangerous mixture of perfect timing and opportunistic wickedness.  They would probably say something like, “Yeah, Mum it’d be great if we could we have some healthy food.”  Then comes that angelic smile.  Strangling them later in the car park never seems to aid my recovery.  The damage is done.

Now if I were rational I’d have to admit the doctor probably didn’t notice what my daughter was eating on this particular day.  However, for me it was a religious experience – my kid was eating healthy food that I had prepared.

This week I really got my act together and roasted a free-range chook especially for lunches and hunted fresh lettuce and carrots and wholemeal organic bread.

Each morning I’d take out the frozen bread and make a generous chicken sandwich overflowing with long carrot slithers and fresh-cropped lettuce, then some mayo.

These sandwiches are my daughter’s absolute favourite.  There in front of the doctor she chomped away at them. From somewhere there was orchestra music.  My chest swelled with pride.  The angels came down from heaven and crowned me “Mother of the Week”.

Where were the TV cameras?   This was a moment to treasure and relive.  A newspaper headline.  CHILD EATS HEALTHY SCHOOL LUNCH IN FRONT OF FAMILY GP.

Don’t believe us? Here are some helpful ways to stay within the budget and improve family morale:

1. Use fruit and vegetables that are in season. We’ve been conditioned to think we can have anything any time and why not? But seasonal food is not only tastier and more nutritious, it is also less expensive. For starters, it usually hasn’t had to travel far or sit in cold storage for months.

Comfort food: Make great dishes such as this oxtail and vegetable stew on a budget. Picture: Monkey Business

2. Cook stews and casseroles. These are great comfort foods at any time. But they also have the added benefit of working best with cheap cuts of meat, such as chuck, gravy and oyster blade.

3. Make stocks. Simmering a good stock makes the house smell fantastic; the bones in the stock add valuable minerals and flavour to your meal; and they are great for future use in risottos, soups and curries.

4. Grow your own herbs. Your windowsill or balcony is an ideal place to do so. They add nutrition and flavour and can turn a simple meal into a class act.

5. Drag out your cookbooks. Your mother’s, or even your grandmother’s, recipe books were often written with the family budget in mind. They will be full of simple, comfort foods that are inexpensive to make.

6. Take inspiration from other cultures. Food traditions from countries such as India, China and Italy can teach you how to make the most of modest means. They get the best out of ingredients without compromising on flavour or nutrition.

7. Cook from scratch. Once you have the recipe, don’t be tempted to cut corners. You might be surprised at the cost of a food shop when you buy the basic ingredients instead of the packaged alternatives that are invariably inferior in quality, flavour and nutrition.

8. Cook in bulk. Not only do your basic ingredients stretch further, it means you have handy standby meals in the freezer and you’re less likely to resort to unhealthy and expensive takeout.

9. Buy the best wholegrain bread you can. It may cost more upfront but you need less of it to feel full and nourished, so it goes a long way – not to mention it is heaps better for your digestive system.

10. Shop locally. Find fresh markets where you can buy direct from the grower. Cutting out the middle man brings down cost – you’re not paying for packaging, storage or transport.  It also means you’re more likely to get the freshest and best quality produce.

If you have any other great suggestions for healthy eating for less, we’d love to hear from you.