The Price of a Healthy Lifestyle

My sister has just phoned me to tell me that the booty shaking routine works really well to Take That’s “Pray”. Something is clearly wrong here.

As there was, in fact, yesterday, when my sister and I decided to get ourselves a nice oaty, fruity, nutty bar of righteous goodness from the supermarket on the way home. In fact, we pushed the boat right out and decided to have a whole year’s worth of righteousness in one go and indulge in a bottle of superfoods (which we shared because we weren’t prepared to pay £2.30 each for our bottled righteousness).

The bottle announced health all over it. Apparently we were not just buying a healthy drink, we were buying a “green machine” a “turbo-charged garden of goodness” and all wrapped up in the guise of an apple, pineapple and kiwi juice smoothie. It all started to go down hill when my sister opened the bottle and, holding it out, no more than a centimetre from my eye announced that I shouldn’t look at the colour before drinking or I’d be put right off.

So she takes a glug, I take a glug and she announces “eugh, that tastes of something bad” – I try to reassure her that it’s just the way apples taste when in combination with pineapple. So she takes a closer look at the bottle and announces that there’s half a mango in it (and, good god, we’ve been conned, only half a kiwi). But this does not account for the “something bad”.

So I take hold of the bottle, and while she’s still mulling it over, announce that perhaps it’s the GARLIC. Yes, that is garlic in our superfoods drink (listed right there next to the mango – that girl needs her eyes testing).

Snatching the bottle off me in horror before I get to tell her about the broccoli and spinach, she squeals that they’ve put blue green algae in it. None of my attempts at explaining this as a health freaks dream convince her that the drink is anything but wrong. “Imagine”, she says “disguising it as an apple, pineapple and kiwi juice smoothie, it doesn’t say anything on the front about garlic”.

For those of you interested, it appears we also indulged ourselves in some spirulina, green tea, echinacea, barley grass, wheat grass and chlorella – which my sister announced with horror as cholera. Hmmm – I think that only confirms my suspicions about her eyes.

I have just noted on the website of the juice we had that their tag line is "nothing to hide". What about that garlic then? Hmm? Hmmmm?