IF THERE'S ANY TRUTH to the old saying that "you are what you eat," then I think I am in a deep heap of dietary doo-doo. What I have eaten and drunk over the years suggests I am a culinary desert, a breeding bed for bugs that drive cows bats and a testing ground for terrorist explosives - probably all three at once.

Not that I had given any of this much concern. Make that zero concern, because over these past half-dozen decades I had consumed French fries and marvelously greasy burgers by the thousands and quaffed enough of their product to keep the Scotch whisky business up to its barrel staves in profit, with few deleterious effects to show for it.

(Well, except for the triple-bypass heart surgery and five months in the hospital while my pancreas was deciding it would no longer support the Scotch folk. Still, every life has its little imperfections.)

But now come the food police - hordes of health scientists and dieticians and doctors and politicians whose joint credo, when it comes to food and drink, runs along the lines of: if you like it and enjoy it, it will give your phone number to double-glazing salesmen, answer the doorbell when Jehovah's Witnesses call and refuse to use the litter tray.

In other words, what's good is by definition bad. Which explains why in recent years the culinary cops have decreed that beef burgers will turn us into gibbering idiots unable even to recognize the doorknob when we get to Hell's portal, butter converts our arteries into concrete spaghetti, and if you insist on eating eggs you might as well invite Lucretia Borgia to breakfast.

If the food police are apostles, nutritionists are their high priests, ordaining that the stuff we eat should be organically grown, shunning any help from fertilizers. And genetically modified foods should be banned, lest our oatmeal grow teeth, talons and tentacles and gobble us alive before we can give it a good bash with the toaster.

Actually, I'm not totally without sympathy to their cause, particularly about fertilizer. I am well aware that terrorists like the IRA and various fruitcakes in the Middle East use the stuff for making bombs to blow up newsstands, burger joints, bicycle shops and other symbols of imperialism's yoke.

Besides which, I'm old enough to remember when a boatload of fertilizer blew up and killed a bunch of folks at Texas City, Texas, in the 1940s. If muck can do that to a steel ship, I've no reason to believe its products are necessarily going to do me any great favors oozing about in my innards.

British journalist Richard Morrison has looked into this nonsense, and I accept his conclusion without question: "The only thing that food experts have done consistently is create epidemics of anxiety." That way, he says, "if the food doesn't kill you, the worry will."

I once lived with a one-woman anxiety epidemic, a (long since ex-) girlfriend whose grasp on alimentary reality diminished with each new food report, and never mind the cracks in the pot: the eggs were cunningly disguised packets of salmonella, the milk would glow in the dark, crispy bacon was the plank to the seas of cancer.

Also diminishing was my own waistline (surprising as that might seem today), our cupboard was taking on Mother Hubbard dimensions and the cats, between fainting spells, were starting to drool over my leather shoestrings.

She took to flushing the red wine down the crapper (carcinogens, y'know), bread was verboten (something about additives) and the lettuce went into the trash can (maybe it was DDT, or Agent Orange - hell, by this time I was too weak to give a flying you-know-what).

As the household diet rapidly descended past vegetarian and even left vegan in its scrawny wake, a health food fad called "macrobiotic" came to the fore, and I was hauled off to a macrobiotic restaurant in London's Paddington district.

There I was presented with a plate on which lay a corpse-white slab of something called tofu, or soya (I disremember which - maybe it was both). It looked like lard. I nibbled an edge. It didn't taste like lard. Lard tasted far better.

I politely asked for the ketchup. We were politely asked to leave.

A few days later, I returned home rather parched (alcohol in any form having long since been proscribed) and thinking to quench my thirst, I got a glass and headed for the faucet. Suddenly, behind me, a screech: "Don't drink the water!"

It seems she had heard a news report that drinking water from London's River Thames was polluted, that we should boil the stuff before drinking but it would be best to stick to bottled water. A few weeks later, the bottled variety also went on the no-no list when yet another research report claimed it was more dangerous than the Thames stuff.

That was just about that for me. Without going into the gory details, suffice it to say my lady friend and I parted company shortly thereafter. She went on to marry a millionaire and, as I hear it, is doing nicely these days on fois gras and lobster thermidor (but the Key lime pie is low-cal).

As for me, I took up where I started at age 18, vowing never again to eat green or yellow vegetables. On the TV, the food police's chef brigade tells me 78 exciting things to do with eggplant. I'm happy with the knowledge of a 79th, which doesn't involve eating the things (although it might involve removal surgery on a sensitive part of the anatomy).

I scoff down apple pie with lashings of cream while perusing the Environmental Working Group's report that an "apple a day" over the course of a year means eating 38 different pesticides. I laugh in the face of death (as long as it doesn't come in a bilious shade of green and have bad breath).

I eagerly chomp a fine hamburger (my very English wife does these very well) while pondering news reports of a new outbreak of so-called "mad cow" disease in a tiny village somewhere up country. So far, about 50 or so Britons have snuffed it from this disease. The same numbers are killed every week in traffic accidents.

The food police may be right, and this stuff will indeed get me in the end. But in the meantime, I have no intention of rushing things by starving to death.

Thought for the Week: Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy.

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