Assistant Editor James Wills takes a look at the current health trends (From Gazette)

Being healthy is fine - but live a little too

2:23pm Wednesday 8th July 2009

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The British are a people full of obsessions. We endlessly go on about the weather, even though we have just about the most boring climate on the planet.

Let’s face it, countries where important body parts fall off in the winter because it is so cold, or where houses have to be hurricane-proof, have a little more to chat about.

We have scientists and scholars who are changing the world but we are obsessed with C list “celebrities” who fall out of their blouses or into prison cells.

However, there is one obsession which is growing stronger by the day.

Apparently, we are all meant to live forever.

Governments, councils and Health organisations endlessly pump out information telling us how to extend our lives.

And every day, the national press carries stories on what is killing us faster than nature intended.

If you eat bacon sandwiches four times a week you may as well become a human mine detector because your life expectancy will be about the same. If you don’t exercise five times a week, you might as well lie down and wait for death to come calling.

As a smoking binge-drinker with a lifelong commitment to eating McDonald’s and Wendy burgers, I should be thrown before a war crimes tribunal.

The recent report by the Association of Public Health Observatories made interesting reading.

It looked at health statistics from across the region and reached some startling conclusions, like children in Braintree are getting fatter but more people smoke there than Chelmsford, presumably to try to keep the weight off!

A higher than average number of people die on our roads and children in Colchester get a higher than average amount of exercise – and that’s before they have to walk miles to get to classes as they will after the schools re-organisation.

However, perhaps the most startling statistic was in Clacton’s Pier Ward, where on average men live until they are 70, while just ten miles up the road in Alresford, they reach an impressive 83.

That’s surely an angle Pier Ward estate agents are missing – “cheap houses and no need to worry about a pension”.

In all seriousness, it’s obviously no laughing matter.

Life is valuable and should be cherished, but at the same time we are endlessly bombarded with conflicting detailed “medical advice” about how we should live, to the point that the stress of worrying about it will probably kill us.

In his book Bad Science, Ben Goldacre pours scorn on much of this advice.

Take the MMR jab, for example. Based on apparently flimsy scientific evidence, suddenly the papers were packed with stories about how the jab was causing autism and stomach conditions.

Most of the people writing these stories in the papers knew as much about science as they did about thermo-nuclear molecular physics, but that did not stop them.

The medical establishment was united in its condemnation of the claims, but before you could say “I don't like needles” parents were refusing to give their children the jab.

Eventually sanity was restored and the doctor responsible for the claims faced a General Medical Council charge of professional misconduct, which was denied.

Unfortunately, the number of cases of measles, which can be potentially fatal, has dramatically risen in Essex and elsewhere.

Of course, we must all be sensible, eat healthily, not smoke, and exercise, but the nation’s obsession for health fads, eat-nothing-but-tripe diets and the benefits of seaweed flagellation are turning us all mad.

As folk star Joan Baez sang: “You don’t get to choose how you’re going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you’re going to live.”