Food and drink keep body and soul together.

22/08/2026 – 28/08/2026  By Uwe Heitkamp

Edition 33.2026

There are foods that help consumers lead a better life. I was a meat-eater for many years of my life, even though for just as many years I was deeply concerned that an animal would be killed for my consumption of meat. We humans invent a euphemism for ‘killing’ – so it doesn’t sound quite so terrible – so we kill animals by slaughtering them. I tried to avoid meat, but having become accustomed to it over many years, it wasn’t easy for me to simply give it up. In the end, an illness helped me. It was the solution to the problem. And it wasn’t just about meat, of course. The shrewd butcher processes meat that he couldn’t sell so well into sausages and other products and calls them delicacies. Until I realised that an entire industry around me was encouraging me, day in, day out, to buy food made from ‘dead animals’, bombarding me with it…

Meat and sausages can make you ill, or they might not. It made me ill. I inherited a condition from my ancestors called gout. And this condition usually flares up when you treat yourself to a beer, or a glass of wine, or eat seafood, and so on. It usually strikes when you least expect it. It wasn’t easy to work out what keeps me healthy and what makes me ill. Meat! From one day to the next, I stopped eating meat, as well as all alcoholic drinks – including the local Medronho schnapps after meals – and seafood such as prawns and sardines. A particular brand of milk chocolate also triggered gout. And gout is pretty much the worst thing that can happen to a person; the joints in your feet, knees, arms and hands freeze up. Slowly, I turned into a motionless mummy. Each attack was worse than the last. I simply could no longer walk. After I cut meat, alcohol and so on out of my diet, my health began to improve …

If, for a long life, you have eaten carefree and without a second thought – as the vast majority of humanity has – then in old age you start all over again: thinking, feeling and learning how to avoid dead animals. You completely turn your life around. It’s wonderful for people and wonderful for animals to live in symbiosis with one another, where aspiration and reality come together. You do what you’ve been planning to do for many years but never dared to put into practice. Now you have the chance to follow a consistently meat-free diet – without gout…

For many years, I was someone who loved hiking and walked a great deal. One day, my right foot swelled to twice its normal size. No shoes would fit any more, not even my hiking boots. I went to the private hospital in Alvor and had it examined. They wanted to drill into my foot, drain the fluid and then seal it up again with bone meal. I asked the attending doctor for a written two-year guarantee following the operation. Naturally, he refused. I asked again what guarantees the hospital could give me that the operation would be successful and that my foot wouldn’t swell up again after a few weeks? You get a guarantee for every repair carried out at a car garage. My right foot had swollen to twice the size of my left foot – a condition known as clubfoot. I sought a second medical opinion at Hospital da Luz in Lisbon and a third opinion from the University Hospital in Zurich, where all the footballers were treated. The doctors there wanted to treat the foot invasively – that is, by drilling into it, suctioning out the fluid and sealing it up again.

I listened to the doctors’ opinions, I read the written explanations carefully and then decided that I would not undergo the treatment these doctors were proposing. Because, in my view, a foot doesn’t just swell up for no reason. I wasn’t convinced by the doctors’ approach. And I adopted a holistic approach, believing that a foot will go down again – you just need to know how.

I went to see my GP in Aljezur. She has undertaken various additional training courses. She examined me thoroughly in her own way and suggested I cut out gluten from my diet. Gluten? A protein found in wheat that is used in bread, rolls, pasta and pastries. Gluten, the invisible binding agent, can sometimes cause inflammation…

I cut out gluten by buying bread made from buckwheat, pasta made from maize flour, and so on. There are foods that help consumers lead a better life. I’ll be explaining the difference between wheat and buckwheat in the next issue of ECO123, coming out next Saturday. And that’s not all. I’ll also tell you where in the Algarve you can find the best gluten-free, freshly baked bread. On that note, I wish you all a lovely weekend…