GOVERNMENT health warnings are making me ill. I'm suffering severe stress and anxiety wondering what is harmful. Who can I sue?
Some days I hardly dare leave the house. But there is probably some polyunsaturated substance oozing out of the wallpaper in the lounge to strike me down, so I'd be better off outdoors - so long as I don't head for the pub.
Britain's biggest brewer, Scottish Courage, has decided to label its cans and bottles with health warnings and an alert on just how many units they contain. This applies particularly to its Newcastle Brown Ale, the Geordie champagne. They do say that in Tyneside, only the cissies don't pour it on their cornflakes.
So you go into a pub, ask for a bottle of Newkie brown and study the label as you throw it down your neck. I'll bet. The first one is drunk so quickly, the bottle is a blur. After two or three, the room's a blur and you can't even make out the little 'his' and 'hers' pictures on the loo doors, so how can you read a health warning? And if it is dangerous to the health, why didn't they warn us before? Who can I sue?
Just like smokers idle away those nicotine moments studying the warnings on fag packets: Smoking kills, smoking causes premature ageing of the skin, smokers die younger, smoking reduces your sperm count, smoking sends your ceilings brown.
I see one supermarket chain is planning to use coloured logos on the front of food packs to help shoppers decide if products are healthy. Surely, if food products were not healthy, why would they sell them? Are we being over-nannied again?
What confuses me is they don't put warnings on things that are really dangerous.
Car doors never have a panel painted with a huge warning: "This is a lethal weapon. It can make you a killer." Guns don't have the barrel engraved full length with: "An itchy trigger finger costs lives" or "Guns can't kill - but bullets can."
When you travel on buses or trains, the small print on the ticket never says "This journey can be fatal. Give it up."
When are they going to start painting a warning on the edge of pavements proclaiming: "Step off here without looking and you die!"
Perhaps they realise we have the common sense to know all that. So why can't we be grown-up enough to know that drinking 20 pints of Newcastle Brown Ale and smoking 60 cigarettes every day can also be injurious?
If you manage to tread through the minefield of life long enough, you can see the trends come and go. What is considered healthy in one decade is declared a hazard next - and years later it is welcomed back to the fold of healthy eating.
Take sugar (one spoon or two?). In the 1970s it was virtually outlawed as a heart risk.
On a trip to France at that time, I discussed it over dinner with a French doctor as he chewed his way through 15 sugar lumps waiting for our hors d'oeuvres. The real risk was when he drove us to the airport for the trip home. I'd never been so scared in my life. He must have been high on sugar and in desperate need of new patients.
Dairy produce has been in and out of favour for decades. At school we were given free milk every day to improve our health (even though the teachers always placed the crate on a radiator to warm it up - yuk). It was high-octane, full-fat, unskimmed straight-from-the-udder stuff.
Years later we learned that our welfare state had been trying to poison us all that time. Milk, cheese and butter could play havoc with cholesterol and do nasty things to the arteries. Who can we sue?
Trouble is, do without all these things and you can go down with calcium deficiency, sleeping sickness, galloping foot-rot, beri-beri and armpit lice.
We were brought up to believe that red meat built fine healthy bodies; chips were cooked in lard; and what was nicer than a bread-and-dripping sandwich?
Even nuts - just one crumb - can kill these days (and not just when you get them firmly lodged in the windpipe).
Nuts? Nuts? It's all driving me nuts. I need a drink.
Updated: 09:27 Tuesday, November 16, 2004
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