I have a theory that 80 per cent of our diet should come from fresh vegetables and fruit, prepared in any way we like.

As far as I’m concerned, the other 20 per cent can be whatever we want it to be. Meat, dairy, eggs, nuts and seeds, grains and legumes. Chocolate, wine, pizza …

Now should this theory work on volume, weight or some other measure? Raw or cooked? I think the easiest way is by volume and as 80 per cent is such a big figure, I also think it’s okay to test this theory out doing it entirely by eye. So I’m not going to be precious about it. For foods like rice that bulk out as you cook them, perhaps the 20 per cent could be for cooked volume, not raw. Still, as this is a personal theory, I’m going to be comfortable playing around with it and tweaking it as time goes by.

Say we eat three meals a day. That’s 21 meals a week. Seven of those meals are breakfast, and that’s the one meal where this idea is going to come unstuck the quickest. The only way to overcome the breakfast problem is to free ourselves from our conditioning.

I’ve always been a leftovers-are-great-for-breakfast kind of person, so dinner as breakfast works fine for me. As someone who grew up eating different food to the rest of the world (at least, that’s how it felt—we were lacto vegetarian and pretty much raw foodists waaaay back when it wasn’t heard of, let alone acceptable), I have found it fairly easy to overcome the cultural conditioning that you ‘should’ eat particular foods at particular times. But I don’t push this on my partner who pretty much eats traditional meals at traditional times.

Over the past few years, I’ve been leaning towards the conviction that we shouldn’t consider food in terms of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Rather than thinking of breakfast, we would then identify it simply as a meal. That means any combination of food that makes a meal is acceptable for the first meal of the day. (The next step would be not thinking in terms of meals but rather of hunger and food. But that’s a bit left of field and the subject I’m exploring here is how you could get this 80-20 theory to work in practice.) So within the parameters of three meals a day and a couple of snacks thrown in, what could eating look like?

If you love fruit, you’re sorted. Fruit for breakfast, salad or vegetable soup for lunch, apples or carrot sticks for snacks and a huge plate of vegetables with a small amount of meat for dinner. (See, back to breakfast, lunch and dinner already. The conditioning of a lifetime isn’t easy to escape, is it?)

But I’m more of a vegetablearian than a fruitarian. I try to do the fruit-as-snacks routine so that I will actually eat some fruit and so I make better choices when snacking. I also love cooked food which I guess means ingesting less nutrients than raw … but on the flip side, cooked vegetables are pretty easy to digest. I’ve found a way to easily abide by my decision to eat more raw fruit and vegetables. I eat salad for breakfast. If I have stew-type leftovers I put a couple of spoons of that in my salad to add softness to the crunch. It makes eating salad so much easier and tastier.

Is this strange? Am I weird? You tell me. But I can tell you this. At least by having it as my first meal of the day I am eating salad every day. It’s super easy to do the basics while I’m preparing meat/cheese-and-salad sandwiches for my partner because I have some salad vegetables on the bench anyway. I just chop extra lettuce, cucumber and tomato into a dish. I pour in a wee amount of sacha inchi oil (also known as inca inchi) or olive oil and massage it into the tomatoes. Then the dish goes into the fridge as I’m putting my salad box away. When I’m ready for breakfast, I usually add to those basics. Somehow, because some of the work is already done, it’s psychologically easy to do a few finishing touches, like sprinkling some seeds (pepita, sunflower, chia), adding home-cooked beet if I have some in the fridge, dicing an avocado, slicing a pear or grating some carrot over the dish and throwing in a few sultanas. English spinach, radicchio, capsicum, raw or cooked mushrooms, leftover roast pumpkin … you are limited only by your imagination.

As theories go, I quite like my 80-20 theory. It may not be perfectly balanced and it may not be workable in the long term. Perhaps it’s too hard for those days when I need to pack a sandwich for lunch and my partner wants pizza for dinner. But all is not lost; I have another theory. If I try to live up to the 80-20 theory, I might, just might, manage to make fresh fruit and vegetables half the food I eat on a daily basis. And you know, in the old days, 50 per cent was considered a pass.

My pantry is filled with all sorts of health foods. I have succumbed to the seductive call of chia seeds (both black and white), black sesame seeds, inca inchi powder and oil, macadamia oil to swap for my normal olive oil, plus a few health food store vitamins and minerals that I forget to take anyway.

But I do truly wonder about the benefits these products actually provide.

A TV program a while ago followed a number of people who were trying out different liver cleanser wonder products and saying how much better they felt after having been on the regime for a short time. A doctor pointed out that they were stressing their bodies and their ‘feeling better’ was actually from creating stress on the adrenals, which is a depleting and dangerous process for our ongoing health.

So some of the things that we think are doing us good could actually be accomplishing exactly the opposite. While I have succumbed, along with many others, to the marketing allure of these products, deep down I have a belief that health comes principally from fresh fruit and vegetables, with vastly smaller quantities of good quality meat protein and nuts, dairy, carbohydrate and fat to give a balance to the diet.

Of course, I can rationalise my use of any of my chosen superfood-type products but in the final analysis my rationalising only makes my belief stronger; it doesn’t actually change whether or not the foods are as good as I think they are. Placebo effect aside, they may be doing me no more good than my previous choices of pepitas, sunflower seeds, olive oil and plain ol’ Vitamin C powder with a bit of iodine tincture painted on a body part (usually the feet, as the tincture makes a yellow stain) from time to time. And when I remember it, some selenium.

And for those of us who believe that a nice variety of fruit and vegetables is the underlying key to health, what should we be doing? Buying better quality F&G, dehydrating them for snacks, and washing every piece so that we at least remove any pesticides and bacteria from the outside. The easiest way to do this seems to be putting fruit and vegetables in warm water with a couple of teaspoons of salt for five minutes before rinsing for the softer items, and scrubbing with a brush then rinsing for the more sturdy and waxed items. I get very lazy with this because a lot of the produce you buy is prewashed and looks clean. Time to pull my socks up.

Choices are great, right? They give us a feeling of expansion, of being able to have exactly what we want. When it comes to food we can go around the world—twice!—in seven days. Italian and other Mediterranean influences, Indian, Chinese, Thai, Mexican, French, Japanese … the list is as endless as the countries from which the dishes come.

We live in an era where the world is accessible—in real life or through the internet. We can be adventurous and experiment with the tastes of the planet. Heck, we can do it every day if we want. How good is that? Well, excuse me for putting a dampener on all this largesse, but I wonder if perhaps that’s part of our problem. We just have so much choice and our tastebuds now crave all those different experiences. We want sweet, sour, bitter, hot. Don’t get me wrong; I love many international dishes to the extent of being a little piggy for them.

I’m thinking, though, that our more sophisticated (well, not necessarily sophisticated, but more choice-orientated) tastes are now a big part of our obesity problem. We don’t seem to really ‘do’ bland any more. Could our almost inexhaustible desire for different foods and new flavours be pivotal to our rising obesity? If we limited ourselves to just one cuisine and concentrated on preparing delicious and nutritious food within the traditional parameters of that cuisine, would we be better off?

Not that long ago, we westerners thought Chinese fare was a special treat and that spaghetti bolognaise was quite exotic. It wasn’t that our diet was so great—white bread and white sugar were to be found as part of the daily staple for the vast majority—but we ate simpler food. The Scots had their oats for breakfast. It was meat and three veg at dinner most nights for those with an English background. They managed to thrive on it, too, even without the simmer sauces and flavour sachets that we seem to need nowadays.

So my thoughts on choice are beginning to change. We are eating more and more. The variety of foods and flavours we can access on a daily basis is nothing short of astounding. And what’s happening? We are getting fatter and unhealthier.

A better choice—a more considered decision—would be to eat less and to donate the money we save from doing so to people who don’t have a choice, and who are starving because of it.