Scientists prove that your five a day make you more attractive – by subtly altering your skin colour

Most of us know that eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day will do us far more good than 20 minutes on a sun bed or two hours basted with factor 10 and sprawled on a Mediterranean beach in high summer. But new research suggests that it will also make us more attractive to the opposite sex. Consequently, it seems far more likely to affect the dietary habits of the young than any amount of hectoring from the Department of Health.

Long gone are the days when New Zealand sauvignon blanc commanded a premium. Has it lost its mojo?

In the price war zone that is 2011 wine retailing, the favoured weapon of choice is New Zealand sauvignon blanc. Regularly discounted to around £5 the bottle, it's all a far cry from the heady days when a wine bearing that name automatically commanded a premium. How, you wonder, can a bottle that travels that far and sells for that little be any good, given that tax and duty on a £4.99 wine now amounts to £2.52 (according to a nifty little app called UK Wine Tax Calculator)?

Natural wine is big in 2011

The best way to approach the new trend in wine is to think about cheese. Which kind do you prefer? A slab of plasticky, pasteurised, supermarket cheddar, a cheese that you know will taste the same every time you buy it? Or something produced by a farmer on first-name terms with his cows, someone who uses unpasteurised milk and traditional methods to make characterful cheese that tastes slightly different from batch to batch? Or, to put it another way, do you prefer your cheese processed or au naturel?

Fancy a change with the evening meal? You could do a lot worse than switch to one of the new breed of artisan ciders

If you're feeling flat after a fortnight back at the grindstone, this weekend presents an opportunity for more carousing – 17 January is the old Twelfth Night, according to the Gregorian calendar, an occasion marked in traditional cidermaking areas by the pagan festival of wassailing, which involves banging apple trees with staves to make them more productive, creating a cacophony of noise with shotguns, drums and whistles to scare off evil spirits and, of course, knocking back a fair bit of mulled cider (for details of events, go to real-cider.co.uk).