Bernard O'Shea: Coming down off sugar? Eat an apple

My six-year-old, when I told him he could have an orange if he was hungry, replied, "A chocolate one?"

Bernard O'Shea. Picture: Moya Nolan

For the last week, the family are basically coming down off sugar. I promised myself before Christmas I wouldn’t touch the stuff, but I had selection boxes for breakfast in November.

Admittedly I wasn’t the most fantastic custodian of my kid’s consumption of their cocoa bean intake either. They are now looking at their usual go-to snack of yoghurts and fruit as the second rate.

My six-year-old, when I told him that he could have an orange if he was hungry, replied: “A chocolate one?”

I eventually got them to start eating one of their favourite snacks again by reusing a classic adage that my mother used to say to us as kids: “If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re not hungry.”

My kids love them. We spend a weekly mini fortune on berries and grapes, but they eat them like there’s no tomorrow. I have followed my mother’s advice that if they eat berries and fruit let them at it, and they “Won’t be sick a day”.

But even she is amazed by their love of the Golden Delicious and their favourite, Pink Ladies. I slice them up really thin, so they also get the benefit of the skin, and I tell them (even though they don’t care or listen to me) that there eating a superfood.

Growing up, we had all types of exotic dishes. My sisters laugh that it’s possible we were one of the first families in Laois to have chilli con carne. But we were a bunch of hungry hounds.

My mother is a great cook. To this day, she reminds us that she used to hide school lunches in the washing machine. When we would complain that there was nothing to eat in the house, she would roll out her catchphrase again.

The benefits of this abundant fruit are oblivious. They are nutritious and packed full of vitamins and include our old belly-filling friend water. The water content can help with weight loss.

“Although the science is preliminary, it seems to be able to reduce fat accumulation and increase muscle gain when in a fed state, and to induce fat burning and preserve muscle mass when in a fasted state,” says www.examine.com.

Also, they are perfect for the ol’ bowel movements due to the large amount of fibre they contain. Evidence suggests that they help with asthma, and compounds called triterpenoids have been known to fight certain cancers.

According to Bord Bia: “They contain useful amounts of dietary fibre and Vitamin C.

“Like most fruits, apples contain more energy than vegetables. When eaten raw, they make a delicious low-calorie snack or dessert.”

So, the old saying “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” has some serious scientific backup. As a side note, the expression isn’t that old, and dates from the early 1860s.

I remember my granny saying: “An apple going to bed keeps the doctor from earning his bread”. This might not be true, but it certainly has been helpful for me to stave off my insane compulsion to engulf a litre of Häagen-Dazs before getting the snoozetime express to Blanket Street.

But then their most significant advantage for me is physiological. I’ve partially ditched the iPhone for the new year, but I still carry an apple. I buy those bags of mini apples that fit into the school lunch boxes.

I put two in the car and one in my jacket pocket. Whenever I feel like a bag of Monster Munch, I recall my mother, saying: “If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re not hungry” until I eat one. It works.

It works because, unlike a smoothie, a blender hasn’t done all the work for you that your stomach and your mouth should be doing.

If you think about it, you could never sit down and eat a bag of apples, but you could quickly drink pints of apple juice.In fact, I’ve been known in the past to drink gallons of Clonmel’s finest alcoholic lubrication on various wooden benches in some of Ireland’s most glamourous and not-so-glamourous public houses and afterwards had plenty of room left over for a large bag of chips and a few battered sausages.

So for January, I’m not going on any mad diet, counting calories, or any of that malarkey.

Every time I feel like putting something down my gullet that I know is just crap, I’ll summon my hand-me-down mantra: “If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re not hungry.”