Only God can rule on what we eat - not the EU

Some people keep their vitamin tablets in bottles. Some use jars, others packets. I have a suitcase. It isn't the biggest suitcase you'll see - there are no wheels, no handle.

It's about the size of a hefty flight-bag, with more compartments than the Orient Express, and it's one of the best time-savers in my schedule.

Instead of twisting the cap off dozens of plastic pots every morning and fiddling to prize one or two tiny pills past the cotton wool wadding, I flick the catches on the cases and there's my intake of supplements laid out like a feast in a Chinese restaurant.

Many of the tablets contain 10 times the recommended daily allowance (RDA) of a particular vitamin or mineral, and they are designed to dissolve slowly in the stomach so that my system is flooded with maximum levels of the supplement.

I've heard all the reasons why I shouldn't do this. My ancestors, I'm told, didn't have multivits (mind you, most of my ancestors must have been dead at my age). My body, I'm told, wasn't designed to process tablets (it wasn't designed for the stress of running a football club either, but I'm thriving on it).

Most alarmingly, I am regularly warned that super-doses of vitamins may actually be damaging my body. The tablets, some friends insist, are worse than useless: they are actively bad for me.

I had to do without my suitcase for more than a week during the filming of I'm A Celebrity - the only tablets in the jungle camp were Christine Hamilton's laxatives, and I didn't fancy those. And when I emerged to civilisation, the thing that made me feel human fastest - more than good food, more than sleep, more than a shower - was a handful of tablets.

I got some vitamin C and B6 and B12 down my neck, and my energy levels soared as if I'd plugged my big toe into the mains supply. Tablets work for me.

You might say they're harmful, but they make me feel good. I'm in great health - the TV companies doctors who examined me (before sending me off to be mauled by crocodiles) pronounced I had the stamina and immune system of a 17-year-old.

So thanks for your advice, but I'll carry on doing what I believe keeps me in peak condition . . . at least until European Union bureaucrats stop me.

Legislation being drawn up in Brussels promises to make it illegal for British health food stores to sell combination tablets and high-dosage pills. Products that offer more than 100 per cent of the RDA of any dietary supplement will be outlawed, along with multi-vitamins and remedies combining two or more elements.

The popular mixture of ginseng and gingko biloba, for example, will be banned, despite rafts of evidence that these supplements work together superbly to increase the flow of blood to the brain and so improve concentration and memory function.

Now I wouldn't advise anybody to start taking these things without talking to their doctor first. But equally, I never heard of anyone taking a suicidal overdose of ginseng. It can't be done.

And it's plainly madness for lawmakers to prevent us from taking supplements intended to improve our health, products by which millions of people swear, when it's completely legal for any adult to buy a packet of cigarettes in any corner shop. We've known for certain since the early Sixties that cigarettes kill, and kill horribly.

They don't only kill the smoker, but threaten cancer and respiratory disease for the smoker's family, friends and colleagues. You can't give your co-workers cancer by chewing multivits. You can give them cancer by smoking close to them.

But the EU wants to ban pills, not death-sticks. I have always believed that what I eat is a matter for my own conscience. This was true even when I suffered from a severe eating disorder in the mid-Seventies - I was gorging myself in public and purging myself horribly in private, if you can call restaurant bathrooms private.

I was bulimic, and there was nothing the law could do about it. It's insanity for a government to think it can prosecute a man for stuffing an entire black forest gateau into his face, unless he forgets to pay for it.

And while it's not nice to stick two fingers down your throat, it must be a basic human right.

If you can't legally make yourself sick, where does it stop? No picking your nose? No scratching your head? No yawning? This may sound ridiculous, but it's a serious point - if bulimia is legal, how can vitamin supplements possibly be against the law?

There are laws which apply fairly and intelligently to what we eat, but they are not man-made. They were given to us by God, and they define what we call kosher.

These spiritual, rather than criminal, regulations are more than good faith - they are also good sense. The worst kinds of food poisoning, especially in the heat of the Holy Land, are caused by pork and shellfish - God was looking after the Jews' digestion as well as our souls when He laid down the Law.

I am sure that bulimia transgresses against our dietary restrictions, though I'd be grateful if someone could quote me chapter and verse. I am equally sure that, if the Israelites had possessed vitamin supplements, God would have expressly made them kosher.

''Go forth and stock up on B vitamins,'' He would have insisted to Moses. ''They will keep your nervous system healthy.

''Because frankly Moses, one thing your people will need over the next four thousand years is strong nerves.''

Email him at urigeller@compuserve.com

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