Meat

If I had a leg of lamb for every time I heard a woman tell me that she has given up red meat to cut down her fat and “be healthy”, I could open a butcher's shop. The fact is, lean red meat can have less fat than chicken, especially intensively reared ones. Even 100g of corn-fed chicken comes in with 129 calories and 4.8g of fat, compared with 135 calories but only 4.5g of fat in the same weight of a lean beef sirloin steak. Moreover, the sirloin gives you three times as much of the energy-boosting mineral iron (which many women in the UK have too little of) and almost four times the amount of zinc needed for a strong immune system. Ah, you may say, but what about the saturated fat - the type that furs arteries? The corn-fed chicken comes out only fractionally better. No one is advocating tucking into massive rib eyes or a rack of ribs every day, but if you choose lean cuts and have them a few times a week, lean red meat can be a positive addition to your diet.

Ice-cream

Clearly, polishing off a whole tub of Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice-cream in front of the telly each night is not a path to vibrant health. But you do not need to banish ice-cream from your dietary repertoire completely in an attempt to get fit. Ice-cream is actually low-GI. In other words, we digest it slowly and it releases sugar gradually into our blood after eating - which means that, unlike alternatives such as sorbet or puddings such as Pavlova, it is quite satisfying and will not leave you craving more. A typical 75g scoop has just 114 calories and 6g of fat, which, at the end of a meal, is a much better choice if watching your weight than a slice of cheesecake with 511 calories and a staggering 43g of fat.

White bread

In the effort to raise our fibre intake, many of us switched from white to wholemeal bread, thinking it was a better choice. Doing so will certainly give you more fibre. While white bread has 0.8g of fibre per 50g slice, wholemeal comes in with 2.5g (the target is 18g a day), which is good news for your intestines. But when it comes to minerals, white bread triumphs. This is because, since the Second World War, all white bread-making flour in the UK is fortified with calcium and iron (as well as the B vitamins B1 and niacin). This brings the levels of bone-building calcium in white bread up to the same as those in wholemeal. And here is the interesting bit: because white bread has less fibre, it is likely that more of this calcium is absorbed, because fibre interferes with calcium absorption. The moral of the story is that if your family resolutely refuses wholemeal, you can stop feeling bad about opting for the “refined” version of the staff of life, because it has nutritional merits too.

Butter

I have never understood why anyone would want to swap a delicious pat of butter churned from milk for a manufactured hotchpotch of oils, artificially hardened to create margarine. OK, if you have inherited high levels of cholesterol, there is a reason to do so. Otherwise, a 10g pat of butter, which is enough to spread lightly on two slices of bread, gives you 8g of total fat, of which 5g is saturated. This is about a quarter of a woman's and about a sixth of a man's daily upper intake. When you consider that this is the same amount that you find in a small latte from the coffee shop, swapping to a skimmed cappuccino would mean that you can go back to butter on your toast at breakfast or in your lunchtime sandwich. The other good news is that butter is one of the few natural places where we find vitamin D in our food (oily fish is another). Dark yellow butter, which comes from cows fed on grass (rather than hay), also naturally gives us the antioxidant betacarotene, which appears to be good for our lungs and hearts.

Kebabs

More often associated with lager louts than healthniks, kebabs do not get the best press. But a shish kebab is one of the healthiest choices on the fast-food circuit. A typical lamb shish kebab gives you about 232 calories and 6g of fat (even less if you have a chicken version) and a useful smattering of minerals, including iron. Ask for extra salad and it even counts as one of your “five a day” fruits and vegetables. Adding huge dollops of the garlic sauce that is offered on the side would, however, skew the sunny nutritional picture. It is just a garlic-infused mayonnaise, so you would add 207 calories and 22g of fat per tablespoon (which would suddenly make a regulation hamburger from McDonald's, with 250 calories and 8g of fat, appear a virtuous alternative). Stick with a straightforward chicken shish kebab and you cannot go wrong.

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