On the Press Association training scheme my tutors and visiting speakers can never resist a 5-45 minute throwback to Fleet Street's hey days when drink and smoke rivalled oxygen, and few monitored what they ate. It's like one scriptwriter printed out a copy of the same speech for all of them, and one director ordered the same starry-eyed nostalgia. They always sign off with a lament that it will sadly never be the same for the next generation of hacks.
"Now", as Andrew Marr remarks in My Trade: A History of British Journalism: "there are regiments of women without discernible alcohol problems. The men are sometimes teetotallers who keep fit". In-house gyms and 'yoga detox bunny' drinks are commonplace in a 21st century news room.
This kind of evolution (or, revolution for the yoga mat-carriers of today's offices) is not restricted to 9-5 life. Once it starts to creep into football stadiums you really begin to notice the influence of our healthanoia. All over the country, pie and beer is being replaced by vegetarian lasagne and herbal tea. Forest Green Rovers have even taken meat off their match day menu altogether. Of course, food and sport is inextricably linked - footballers, rugby players, tennis players...all sports people need to be at their optimum physical capacity. Footballers are now on strict performance-optimising diets, with many rehashing the Women's Mag mantra: "you are what you eat" on Radio 4's Football and Food programme last week. Indeed, Novak Djokovic was nothing like the tennis superstar he is today before cutting lactose out of his diet. And, yes, the average diet of a sports fan at a match is objectively unhealthy.
But if we're going to live by the letter of nutritionist law, we're drinking our bodyweight in water, and eating some plants. Meat is ok, as a side. But then it's still not that ok. Obviously with advancing science and nutrition alongside a growing industry of processed foods, it is important that we are aware of what's healthy and what's not. I love green tea and have never had a kebab. I love a burger but I can hardly tout myself as a white bread and red meat kind of girl. But people are touting this change in match day menus and offices diets as 'progress' - towards what? Seeing our diet as a way to maintain bodily health ignores the essential idea of eating for enjoyment. It's the 'French Paradox': they eat bread, pastries, cake, red meat, drink wine, wine, wine and more wine, and yet are in many ways healthier than Brits, and certainly healthier than Americans.
In the UK we hear horror stories of LA. A salad dressing is the liquid devil and equality means that all men, women and children have a nutritionist. I would mock calorie counts on menus. But we've already crossed that line. Seasonal veg is also a thing of the past - it was something I learned about at school, not at dinner - and 'low calorie Christmas dinner' menus plaster the pages of most newspapers and magazines during the festive season. One magazine recommended pears for pudding. That is bonkers.
The danger is that vigilant monitoring of what we eat climbs right into bed and cosies up to the size zero mentality: treating food as an obstacle to looking good. How the Spice Girls look now and opposed to back then is a telling marker of how we think women should look and how it's changed. People are always writing, lecturing and moaning about the need to elevate plus size models to the mainstream, strip them of the 'plus size' label, and get rid of anorexic coat hangers. Heidi Klum frankly accepts in her True Hollywood Story that muffins are off the menu, and they almost cost her her livelihood. Who'd have thought fifty years ago that a spongy cakelike thing the size of a small hand could be the thing that stands between you and a job.
A friend of mine went to a nutritionist last month. The professional recommended so many 'necessary' changes to this healthy girl's diet that she would do well to live out the year, or at least keep a cupboard of clothes size 8 or above. Bananas are seen as a fatty fruit; avocados are banned. And yes, size 8 should be the minimum benchmark for average clothes sizes.
One day soon we will have the same food attitudes as they do in LA now. I wonder what they will have there by then. With no hint of sarcasm I can imagine 'flavoured air' being on a dessert menu - if it isn't there already.
Few journalists starting now will come to look back on fat-free yoghurts with a breathy and yearning nostalgia. Few football fans regard a match without a pie as a real match at all. This 'British Paradox' may not turn up the same surprisingly healthy results as French eating habits, but is it something we're willing to lose? As healthy as we want to be, let's keep a smudge of perspective.