Booze. Smokes. Sprouts?

They are the vegetables that split opinion and now doctors say Brussels sprouts should come with a health warning after a man was hospitalised by eating them.

The leafy green vegetables contain vitamin K, a chemical the body uses to promote blood clotting, and it counteracts the effects of anticoagulants (blood thinning medication).

The man, from Ayrshire, Scotland, was prescribed anticoagulants after suffering heart failure last year and his dose was monitored once or twice a week to prevent blood clotting.

When his blood started to clot close to Christmas last year, the man was admitted to a specialist heart unit of the Golden Jubilee Hospital in Clydebank.

Doctors could not work out why the medication was not keeping his blood thin until they discovered he had been eating too many sprouts.

The Prick actually doesn’t mind sprouts, and there’s a lovely way of doing them in a mustard sauce with duck confit in Thomas Keller’s Bouchon cookbook. But maybe there’s a wag-the-dog strategy in here somewhere: if we get CRAP Health and the rest of the regulators het up enough about Brussels sprouts they’ll leave the rest of us with our other, more agreeable, pleasures alone for that much longer.

UPDATE: A friend of the site writes, “I prefer a multi-stage approach: first an education campaign, employing many public health researchers and activists. Next, a series of production, promotion and consumption regulations, oversight of which requires employing many public health researchers, activists and bureaucrats. Last, a major push for banning, which requires a coalition of bandwagonning and unthinking politicians with public health researchers, activists and bureaucrats (including household garden inspectors to ensure no domestic production). Ta Dah! Because it costs so much, it also qualifies as stimulus.”