The Cheese Man Of Huntingdonshire

[Timble2]

Now I like cheese, but this is bizarre.

Hunts Post

Cheddar gorge
14 February 2007

A diet of cheese, plus the occasional packet of crisps, is all that Dave Nunley can consume without feeling sick.

A FOOD phobia has left a Wyton man unable to eat anything apart from mild Cheddar cheese ever since he was a toddler.

Dave Nunley, 29, eats about 16st of Cheddar, preferably grated, each year and has never consumed a hot meal in his life - not even hot cheese.

The BMW panel beater explained that, while his diet may seem to be unhealthy, the cheese was actually keeping him alive.

"If I had a choice then I would not eat like this," he told The Hunts Post. "I do not think I'm putting my life in danger, I think I'm actually keeping myself alive because if I didn't eat cheese I wouldn't eat much else."

After talking with experts on a BBC television programme, Dave can now eat an occasional bowl of Ready Brek or a bag of salt and vinegar crisps.

But it is only on very rare occasions that he is able to cope with other foods, and instead has to eat cheddar, about 375g a day.

He said when he has tried other foods his throat closes up, making him feel sick.

According to Mr Nunley, the only side effect of his diet is tiredness and he considers his health is "spot on" apart from lacking in Vitamin B.

"I would consider myself fairly healthy. I take vitamin tablets and go to the gym two or three times a week," he said.

He has been living on cheese ever since he was a toddler and believes it stems from his refusal to drink milk as a baby.

"Once when I was four years old I nearly starved to death because my parents wouldn't let me eat cheese and I wouldn't eat anything else," he said.

As a child, Dave was bullied because he did not eat the same food as other children.

"They didn't understand why I would only eat cheese and some kids made my life very difficult."

To try to overcome the problem he has tried hypnotherapy, acupuncture and even taken part in a BBC show about people with eating disorders, but to no avail.

"I feel a bit awkward sometimes but going on the television programme has shown me that there are other people like me. I never chose to be this way but I have learned to live with it and not to be embarrassed or to hide anyway."

However, medics on the BBC3 programme warned his unhealthy diet could lead to his nervous system failing as he consumes three times the recommended daily amount of fat through his cheese-only diet.

Psychological coach, Benjamin Fry who worked with Dave on the programme said this case should act as "a cautionary tale to parents who force feed their children."

He said: "This is the extreme edge of a common phenomenon. Often children who refuse to eat at the dinner table are seeking attention, and parents should work to address issues away from the table and the food problems will solve themselves.

"As a child, Dave battled with his parents about food and that manifested itself as a food phobia. Although he is now grown up, the battle still wages inside him and he refuses to eat for that reason.

"I only scratched the surface of his eating problem. He needs therapy to address it properly."

Dave's story will be shown on BBC3 on Wednesday, February 28, as part of a seven-part series called Freaky Eaters.

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[Jerry_B]

"I feel a bit awkward sometimes but going on the television programme has shown me that there are other people like me. I never chose to be this way but I have learned to live with it and not to be embarrassed or to hide anyway."

[...]

Dave's story will be shown on BBC3 on Wednesday, February 28, as part of a seven-part series called Freaky Eaters.

Hmm - maybe he won't feel a bit better about his problem once he sees what the series is called (the title seems very tactless IMHO)...

 

[Slejpner]

We had a student work with us once who lived on white bread sandwiches containing only squeezy cheese from a tube. Breakfast, lunch and dinner

He was healthy enough, if a little pale :?

 

[Jerry_B]

There was a case reported about 10 or so years ago in Fortean Times about someone who had allegedly subsisted entirely on popcorn for 5 years, and had not suffered any untoward health problems.

 

[escargot]

s'funny that he likes only cheese, as many people hate it, it makes some poor peeps sick.

Remember the cheesewire incident in Dad's Army?

 

[Beakmoo]

s'funny that he likes only cheese, as many people hate it, it makes some poor peeps sick.

Remember the cheesewire incident in Dad's Army?

No. Remind us.

 

[brianellwood]

Glad I've only got food allergies! I can't eat fish or seafood of any kind, or nuts with the sole exception of chestnuts and have to carry an adrenalin pen with me at all times. However I do love cheese of every kind, even cheddar, though the cheese from the cheddar gorge cheese shop is entirely different from what passes as cheddar in most shops.. lol.

 

[tilly50]

I've a friend who only ate sardine sandwiches for years. She only overcame the habit, addiction ?? when she left home to go to uni.
There were issues in her home that probably led to her eating habits at the time, but she was the only one of a large family that had the eating problem (and the only girl too).

 

[escargot]

s'funny that he likes only cheese, as many people hate it, it makes some poor peeps sick.

Remember the cheesewire incident in Dad's Army?

No. Remind us.

God, I have to do EVERYTHING round here!

It's when the Home Guard are being taught stealthy anti-sentry tactics. They are shown how to garotte a sentry silently from behind with cheese wire, with the promise that if they do it right, the bloke's head will come off.

Private Pike runs out, hands over his mouth. Cpt. Mainwearing contemptuously assumes that he's overcome by the thought of the decapitation, but Sergeant Wilson says it's not that, he just doesn't like cheese.

 

[Anonymous]

Inedia / Breatharianism.

Inedia is the alleged ability to live without food. Breatharianism is a related concept, in which believers claim food and possibly water are not necessary, and that humans can be sustained solely by prana (the vital life force in Hinduism), or according to some, by the energy in sunlight. The terms breatharianism or inedia may also refer to this philosophy practiced as a lifestyle in place of the usual diet. While it is often seen as an esoteric practice performed by eastern ascetics, recently some groups such as the Breatharian Institute of America have promoted the practice as an option for anybody, once the proper techniques for accessing it are made known.

I have a vague recollection of one of the founders of the Breatharians getting caught tucking into a huge meal in a hotel by a reporter.

EDIT - found this

In 1983, most of the leadership of the cult in California resigned when Wiley Brooks, its 47-year-old leader, who claimed not to have eaten for 19 years, was caught sneaking into a hotel and ordering a chicken pie.

 

[DeeDeeTee]

Jerry_B wrote:
There was a case reported about 10 or so years ago in Fortean Times about someone who had allegedly subsisted entirely on popcorn for 5 years, and had not suffered any untoward health problems

I'm pretty sure there was a case reported in the FT within the past year of someone dying as a result of a diet of chips, white bread with an occasional treat of half a tin of baked beans.

Wasn't there someone in the 'Freaky eaters' program that had a broadly similar approach to diet?

 

[mindalai]

I can remember watching a program about people with strange diets and I can remember one woman on there who ate nothing but chocolate. I think it started with something traumatic that happened to her as a child (death of a parent maybe?). I just can't see how these strange diets are possible. There must be some exaggeration going on somewhere. The human body simply can't survive without some things and they're not all found in cheese or chocolate. These people must be either taking some serious vitamin supplements or secretly eating normal stuff when the cameras are off.

 

[_Lizard23_]

I do wonder about the traditional Eskimo diet sometimes, I mean that largely consists of fat and protein with very little vegetable matter etc. I know that they supposedly ate a lot of the meat and fish in a rawer state than we would (increasing the bio-availabilty of vitamins such as vitamin C which we hardly get any of from cooked meat), that their diet was not entirely meat-based and that they are adapted to their very different lifestyle etc etc, but they were basically modern humans who until recently were living pretty well on a diet that is a long way from the '5-a-day', high fibre, low fat diet recommended for the rest of us, with remarkably low levels of cholesterol, heart disease and so on considering the vast majority of their calories came from fat.

Then you have the Atkin-ites saying this is a much healthier way to live and the best way to stay thin - which always made me wonder about the probably something like two-thirds of the world's population who eat pretty much nothing but rice and seem remarkably to do pretty well on it without piling on the fat from those evil carbs.

I think at the end of the day the human body is a pretty amazing machine capable of running on all sorts of different proportions of it's basic macro-nutrients.
It may well be that a varied diet with lots of vegetables blah blah is the healthiest way of doing things, but it doesn't necessarily mean that other ways are always necessarily deadly or inevitably lead to significantly reduced health.

Having said that, the 'pizza and salt-n-vinegar crisps' bloke I saw on TV recently did say he took vitamin tablets.

 

[James_H]

It depends on lifestyle, too. You might want to eat a high fat, high protein diet if you were doing intensive farm labour from 4 in the morning everyday, without a tractor, but not if you work in an office.

 

[Anonymous]

It depends on lifestyle, too. You might want to eat a high fat, high protein diet if you were doing intensive farm labour from 4 in the morning everyday, without a tractor, but not if you work in an office.

Why would anyone want to do intensive farm labour in an office?

 

[James_H]

Well it beats office work.

 

[DeeDeeTee]

_Lizard23_ wrote:
I do wonder about the traditional Eskimo diet sometimes, I mean that largely consists of fat and protein with very little vegetable matter etc. I know that they supposedly ate a lot of the meat and fish in a rawer state than we would (increasing the bio-availabilty of vitamins such as vitamin C which we hardly get any of from cooked meat), that their diet was not entirely meat-based

I remember being at a talk were someone had spent a year with them as part of his PhD. Seemingly the only traditional source of vegetable matter was if they killed Caribou and found moss in its stomach. (Yep they'd eat that too).

Mind you, you wouldn't survive very long on a mainly vegetable diet in those lattitudes as you'll need high-energy sources. Those explorers walking to North/South pole I think needed ~4-5k calories a day. Atkins diet seems the most natural solution there...

 

[_Lizard23_]

Yeah absolutely, need a very high calorie diet trudging about in the arctic, but my point was more about the availability of various vitamins and minerals that we consider vital to good health and consider as being mainly found in fruit and vegetables, as someone had said that there can't be 'everything you need' in cheese or chocolate. I was basically sort of agreeing there probably isn't, but that that there might be just enough in some unlikely seeming foodstuffs (like the vitamin C in meat) as demonstrated by the traditional Eskimo diet, so that people on very restricted diets can get by.

I remember reading about the herbivore stomach contents thing, but I wasn't sure if it was true or not.

 

[DeeDeeTee]

Yep, Vitamen C seems the sticky one - a quick google about seems to suggest that we can adapt to extract it from meat. (logically carnivores have to do the same). I would hazard a guess that gut fauna plays a key part. As soon as you maintain a meat-only diet those groups that don't have bugs that efficiently produce Vit C from meat either die from scurvy (or hopefully move to balmier climes).

Any individual who does have efficient gut then augments his groups survival, as being in confined spaces helps to spread the correct ones about the group.

This probably partially explains how someone can survive on grated cheddar/popcorn/chip buttys for most of their lives as they have by fluke, chanced upon an optimum configuration of bacteria that supplies their body with most of their needs.

 

[gridban]

A friend of mine claims to have lived for a year on nothing but toasted cheese sandwiches when he was at college - knowing his eating habits I'm inclined to believe him

 

[Xanatico]

They did a danish programme where they wanted to put a bunch of danes through eating eskimo food for months while doing certain physical tasks and see what would happen. Basically to understand more about obesity and such. However from what I could understand the participants cheated a lot with the food and didn´t to their tasks, so nothing really came of it.
I´ve heard it said that onions actually have all that you need nutrition-wise, except for the things that you can only get from meat. Anyone knows if this is true? I heard it mentioned in connection with an old viking story.

 

[witchflame]

Reminds me of tommy:-

He eats lots of cheese....but does he really eat lots of cheese?

 

[Quake42]

A friend of mine claims to have lived for a year on nothing but toasted cheese sandwiches when he was at college - knowing his eating habits I'm inclined to believe him

I lived almost exclusively on toast for my first term at uni, but I was very run down at the end of it and had to be a bit more sensible going forward.

Most of the "freaky eaters" I've read about in the past tend to drink fruit juice which will give them their vitamin C as well as various other vitamins and minerals.

Historically people's diets were often very limited by today's standards (the urban population in 19th/early 20th century Britain, for example lived largely on bread, boiled poor quality meat, a bit of cheese and copious amounts of beer without dropping down dead) and as Lizard23 points out large parts of the world today live mainly on rice or some other staple carb.

 

[Xanatico]

But are they living well on rice? Isn´t that part of the reason why chinese are rather small? As far as I´ve heard the children of japanese immigrants to the US are substanstially taller than their parents. Might be the same for chinese.

 

[Quake42]

But are they living well on rice? Isn´t that part of the reason why chinese are rather small? As far as I´ve heard the children of japanese immigrants to the US are substanstially taller than their parents. Might be the same for chinese.

Oh I'm sure it's not a brilliant diet, but all I'm saying is that people can live long and reasonably healthy lives on a fairly limited range of foodstuffs.

 

[CoporalJones]

Jerry_B wrote:
There was a case reported about 10 or so years ago in Fortean Times about someone who had allegedly subsisted entirely on popcorn for 5 years, and had not suffered any untoward health problems

I'm pretty sure there was a case reported in the FT within the past year of someone dying as a result of a diet of chips, white bread with an occasional treat of half a tin of baked beans.

Wasn't there someone in the 'Freaky eaters' program that had a broadly similar approach to diet?

Yep it was a lad from Sunderland i belive,we use that example to scare the kids into eating their veg!!

 

[rynner2]

Wonder if the cheese man has tried this one?

'World's smelliest cheese' named

Scientists at a Bedfordshire university have found what could be the smelliest cheese in the world.
Vieux Boulogne, a soft cheese from northern France, beat 14 other whiffy varieties in tests.

Experts at Cranfield University - who led the research - used an "electronic nose" to analyse the cheese odours, along with a panel of 19 human testers.

English Cheddar, aged between six and 24 months, was one of the least smelly cheeses tested, along with Parmesan.

Senior research officer at Cranfield University, Dr Stephen White, said: "The smelliest cheeses were washed rind cheeses.

"There was no obvious correlation between the age of the selected cheeses and smelliness, nor type of milk origin, although cows' milk cheeses did dominate the smell chart."

The particularly pungent smell of the Vieux Boulogne is created by the beer reacting with enzymes in the cheese.

It even beat Epoisses de Bourgogne, a cheese so smelly it is banned from being taken on public transport in its native France.

The electronic nose is a machine equipped with sensors to detect different chemical aromas. It is connected to a computer which analyses the different smells.

The experiment was commissioned by Fine Cheeses from France, a body that promotes French cheese in the UK.

Sally Clarke, of Fine Cheeses from France, said: "Love it or loathe it, the sign of a fine cheese is often its characteristic smell as well as its flavour and texture and we wanted to find out if France's reputation for producing smelly cheeses was true."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/beds ... 044703.stm

 

[elvissa]

Apparently cats' bodies make vitamin C from heat - hence why my cat sits under the radiator and over hot pipes that run throught the floor.

 

[Xanatico]

So the purring they make must be the sound of their little internal steam engine.

 

[elvissa]

Hahahahaha!