Coming down the vegetarian pub?

Two London pubs – out of 7,000, the first in the capital – have just announced that they're ditching meat from their menus. The idea of a vegetarian pub remains alien to most Brits; one of my favourite boozers tricked me, the Harden brothers and many others when it announced on 1 April this year that it was going veggie for a month. But there are in fact around 16 vegetarian pubs across the UK, several of which are apparently in Glasgow, which has always been a haven for bien-pensant lettuce-eaters.

One of the new places is the Smithfield Tavern, in the middle of the largest meat market in London. (I've been there at five in the morning: the punters don't look like they eat much tofu.) The other is the Coach & Horses in Soho. In some circles, this is one of the city's more famous boozers, attended by hacks in macs, wasted artists and, until 2006, presided over by Norman "You're Barred" Balon. Private Eye, whose offices are up the road, still hold their lunches there. Jeffrey Bernard was among the Coach's more famous and tragic regulars. He never ate anything there and took all his calories from booze, so if nobody eats the new food at least there's a precedent for it.

Does Eating Fruits and Veggies Make Us More Attractive?

By Kim Carollo | ABC News Blogs 

Eating lots of fruits and veggies may not only improve our overall health, but may actually make us more attractive, according to a new study published in the journal PLoS ONE.

That's because the yellow-red pigments found in fruits and vegetables, called carotenoids, are associated with changes in skin color, the authors found.  They also found that the skin pigment changes may be viewed as healthier and more attractive.

Researchers from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland monitored the fruit and vegetable intake of 35 Caucasians over a six-week period and measured skin color changes.  In a separate experiment, they investigated how attractive people found the skin color changes associated with the increased intake of fruits and vegetables.

Increasing consumption of carotenoids is associated with a more yellowish skin tone, and the authors also found that eating more fruits and vegetables correlated with skin that appeared to have a healthy red tone.

"Such coloration is held to contribute beneficially to the appearance of health in human faces as is the case with skin yellowness," the authors wrote.

The effects on skin color required only a moderately increased intake of fruits and vegetables, they said.

Carotenoids are made by plants.  They are distributed through the bloodstream to various organs, including the skin.  Previous studies have found that high levels of carotenoids offer protection against ultraviolet radiation by decreasing the skin's sensitivity to redness caused by UV light.

But it's the perception on attractiveness that the authors think could potentially be the key to encouraging people to eat more fruits and vegetables, something that adults in the U.S. and the U.K. don't do very much.

"Such inadequate intake is estimated to precipitate 2.6 million premature deaths per year worldwide," they wrote.  "Fruit and vegetable consumption affects skin carotenoid levels; this may lead to skin color change in a fashion that is known to contribute to the appearance of health.  It follows that dietary change may be motivated by illustrating to individuals these beneficial effects on appearance."

The authors also add, however, that further research is needed to determine whether carotenoids affect non-Caucasians the same way.

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