Large bacon sandwich, please...

Regular visitors to the Throne may recall that I entertain a healthy scepticism as regards the opinion of certain ‘scientists’, as they always seem to be described, as to what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for our health.

That scepticism has been significantly reinforced this weekend by the publication of two wholly contradictory reports (here and here) as to the possible health risks – or otherwise - of eating too much red meat.

Why on earth should we entertain the opinions of the merchants of doom, who claim that eating more than one bacon sandwich a week will result in colorectal cancer, if heart disease doesn’t kill us first? Weren’t they saying the same things about the cholesterol content of eggs a decade ago, (don’t eat more than two a week or you’ll have a heart attack!) only to see that ill-founded scare story comprehensively repudiated?

And what about the campaign to get people to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day? I actually do so because I happen to like them, but other countries recommend eating far more – the Japanese for instance recommend the consumption of quantities in the teens; so who’s scientists are correct, if any?

We’re also told, at interminable length, that drinking more than a thimble full of alcohol a week will leave us with livers resembling a use teabag, whilst simultaneously urging us all – but especially middle class, middle aged wine drinkers, for some reason - to sign the pledge or face a slow, painful death. At the risk of repeating myself for a third time, the much-vaunted numbers of ‘Units’ of alcohol we are ‘allowed’ to drink each day or week (without supposedly catastrophic consequences for our health) were the result of completely unscientific, finger-in-the-air guesswork by people who should (and probably did) know better.

Moving on, I am not and never have been a smoker; in fact, I have never held a lit cigarette to my lips, let alone suck on one. But whilst acknowledging that smoking cigarettes is very likely to damage the health of the person doing it, I utterly reject the hysterical nonsense surrounding the issue of second-hand smoking and even more ludicrously, third hand smoking: I simply don’t believe it.

I am a firm believer that there is no such thing as a ‘bad’ food, only bad diets and in closing, can anyone tell me why, if we are eating and drinking ourselves towards ill-health and an early, painful death, we are now living longer than we have done in the history of mankind?

Missed your six month check up Mark?

Watching the news this evening, I saw an interview with Mark Serwotka, the General Secretary of the PCS union, who was expressing his outrage at the suggestion of 40% cuts in some Whitehall budgets; but that’s not the point of this post.

Forgive me for being personal, but what struck me was the state of his teeth; because he’d either been eating liquorice (and large amounts of it) minutes before his interview, or he has shockingly neglected his dental health for some years.

Unfortunately, I can’t find a picture of him which adequately shows the state of his teeth, but from what I saw of him on the television, his mouth resembled the inside of an Eccles cake.

Quite the worst set of railings I've seen for many a year.

No wonder the Americans have a thing about the poor state of ‘English’ teeth, even though Serwotka is actually Welsh...

Another excellent blog...

As I've written here on a couple of occasions previously, not only have I never smoked a single cigarette in my life, I've never even held a lit one to my lips, and what's more, I'm absolutely certain that I will never do, either.

That said, I'm becoming increasingly irritated by the militant 'health' lobby, who not content with turning smokers into pariahs, doomed to huddle outdoors in all weathers to enjoy their admittedly dangerous habit, are now training their guns on the overweight, those of us who 'fail' to take enough exercise (neither of which applies to me) and those who - whisper it dark - have the temerity to enjoy drinking alcohol (of whom I'm most certainly one).

My take on them is that, far from being concerned about improving the health of the nation, their chief driver is the wish to control the very minutiae of our lives; nothing more, nothing less.

I despise their dishonest, holier-than-thou sanctimoniousness and their nauseatingly judgemental finger pointing. Indeed, in my view, their increasingly strident triumphalism leaves people whose lifestyle choices they disapprove of - the 'fat', 'incorrigible' smokers, and 'problem' (i.e. all) drinkers - just one short step from the tumbrel in which they would be dragged around for the 'righteous' to harangue and disparage.

Anyway, enough from me; but all of the foregoing, and the excellent writing, are just some of the reasons I am linking to this excellent blog, both in this post and in my sidebar.

Please give him a visit: I'm sure you'll enjoy his jottings as much as I do...

Is that thing sharp?

Apologies for the even thinner than usual level of posting; I'm recuperating from what I like to describe as minor (and elective) abdominal surgery.

More when I can it at my keyboard a little longer...

Heart attacks and the smoking ban...

I read this article from The Times (it also appeared in a number of other papers, notably the Daily Mail) with more than a little interest.

The reason for that is quite simple; my father died at the age of 47 – younger than I am now - of a heart attack, having suffered his first two such episodes at the incredibly early age of 38.

Up until suffering those first two attacks in the mid-sixties, like the vast majority of his contemporaries, he had smoked about twenty-five untipped cigarettes a day, in addition to regularly smoking a pipe. After those early attacks, however, he never smoked another cigarette, nor touched his pipe again for the rest of his life – all nine years of it.

As you might imagine, losing my father to heart disease at such a young age (I was 14) has had what I now understand to be a significant effect – and ongoing - on my psyche; in fact all the more so as I grew older. For instance, odd as it might sound, turning 39 without having suffered a heart attack or another, related condition was an important milestone for me. More important still was the day on which I actually surpassed my father’s age; a date, moreover, that I had calculated months in advance. And just in case you think I’m a little odd, I took a great deal of comfort from the fact that my elder brother (five years older than me and still hale and hearty, I’m glad to say) did exactly the same.

I also have no doubt whatsoever that my enthusiasm for keeping fit and maintaining a healthy weight similarly arise from my father’s (and therefore my family’s) experience.

So, as I observed in the first sentence of this post, the article in The Times suggesting that the ban on smoking in public places has led to a 10% fall in heart attack rates in England was of the greatest interest to me, irrespective of the fact that I have never so much as put a cigarette to my lips.

But having read it more than once, a nagging doubt about the accuracy of the story occurred to me.

I cannot think of a single person who has stopped smoking because of the ban of doing so in public places; all they do is simply troop off to the smoking area-cum-shelter-cum-lean-to where they are allowed to indulge their habit. What’s more, I can personally vouch for the fact that non-smokers tend to join them, in order that the night out, and whatever conversation is taking place, isn’t unduly interrupted, or in some cases, ruined.

What’s more it has been my experience that smokers deprived of the right to indulge their habit inside buildings – chiefly pubs, of course – have taken to doing so in the comfort of their own homes, lubricated by large quantities of cheap the supermarket beer I have written about before.

So why have the heart attack statistics reportedly gone down by such a significant percentage?

The simple answer is, I simply don’t know; but I would be very sceptical of any suggestion that, given the absence of any significant evidence proving the wholesale cessation of smoking by those engaging in it ‘first hand’, the reduction was exclusively due to non-smokers no longer being exposed to the deleterious effects of ‘secondary smoking’, a concept on which the jury is still out.

I am not an epidemiologist, and nor do I claim any medical expertise, but if there has been a ten percent reduction in the national heart attack rate, could the fact that people may be taking more exercise, or eating more sensibly, or advances in drug treatments not be partially responsible for it, too?

Sadly, I remain unconvinced by their theory that the smoking ban alone has been responsible for this reduction, because hand in glove with that claim comes the suggestion (or should that be demand?) that the ‘ban’ should be extended still further, into cars carrying children, or most sinisterly of all, into private houses where there are children present.

I’m afraid to say that I see the use of this as yet unsupported statistic as more emotive grist to the bansturbators’ mill and as much as I would like to do so, I simply don’t believe it.