According to a story in The Malta Independent on Sunday last week, a recent survey in an Italian psychology magazine about what people view as the worst of human sins, revealed that overeating is considered to be a far worse sin than, say, remaining faithful to your partner! Respondents were asked to rank the seven deadliest sins, and gluttony came out tops, while infidelity came out as the one sin the Italians feel least guilty about.

So, at this time of the year, when our bank accounts are drained and all businessmen and women are worrying about the lack of customers and hope that things will improve soon, when incidents of infidelity are just a memory from the party season and the majority of women – and some men – are worrying about the excess kilos being lugged around on their thighs, pendulous bellies and over love-handled hips... we must all be feeling very guilty... at least that part of the Maltese nation that subscribes to the Italian way of being, and method of reasoning out life’s priorities. I somehow think a survey of the Brits would have a slightly different scale of priorities.

Mind you, the Italians have always been very concerned about all things relating to appearances, and the results show. Walking around the streets of most Italian towns and cities is visually incredibly pleasurable. Not only does this nation boast the best and the most numerous of beautiful towns, many of the residents walk around as if they have walked out of a fashion magazine, and the men bother as much as the women.

Even if we look at the native football players of UK and Italian football, so many of the Italian footballers are swarthy superbrats; they were never my type at all but there is no denying their immense good looks. The English have improved over the years but a look at the large pear-shaped Brits (men and women!) compared to the slimmer than slim young Italians, does seem to indicate that the English are not quite as worried about gluttony as the Italians say they are. Whether that makes the British more faithful is doubtful, but they would probably be more concerned about infidelity than gluttony, even though this in no way means they don’t practise infidelity any less ardently that the Italians.

The survey also considered what the mechanisms are that make the Italians feel guilty and, not surprisingly, only seven per cent of those surveyed felt guilty because of religious rules. The main so called drivers of guilt were “the judgement of loved ones or the disapproval of society as a whole”. And, of course, if you overeat it shows, but if you have an affair it often does not, at least not for a while and usually not immediately.

Before the days of the proliferation of detectives, you would just have to imagine your partner’s infidelity. Now, of course, thanks to secret cameras, etcetera, you can choose to be witness to infidelity, though why anyone would want to see this with their own eyes beats me. A whole TV series called Cheaters is actually dedicated to this whole sad scenario, and you do wonder if anyone is left being faithful when you see the variety of types that lead double, or triple, or whatever, lives

At the same time, Sky News was running a story on how we are eating our way to far more mental illness. A bad diet is not just bad for your appearance, apparently, but is believed to be contributing to the greater incidence of mental illness, particularly among young people. The Brits are apparently eating 59 per cent less fish than they were in the 1950s and 34 per cent less fruit and vegetables – staggering when you consider how much more affluent we now are and how stocked supermarkets are with wonderful and new foods.

Yet a recent study showed that junk food and our over-bingeing on it, or eating too many takeaways or prepared meals is affecting the structure and function of our brains. The UK’s Mental Health Foundation is taking this study very seriously, and is condemning our bad diet not for the excess pounds we are piling on, but because it does affect how we think.

Of course, as far as children are concerned, this is incredibly serious, and it seems that all us working supermums are going to have to put even more effort into avoiding too much of the junk food or prepared food culture that is immensely harmful to our children’s brains.

So there you have it. The Italians may be right in the long term to worry more about gluttony than infidelity because gluttony not only makes you look bad in terms of excess kilos, it makes you feel bad in terms of an increased propensity for all forms of mental illness, not least the stress we all suffer. Perhaps if we ate less and better we would be happier and less likely to cheat on our partners? Unless, of course, you are Italian – where the need to cheat is almost a national pastime…