I CAN think of nothing more likely to guarantee Irish people hitting the drink even harder than the fact that British MPs have urged their own population to abstain from alcohol two days a week.
We can take pride in the fact that our parliamentary representatives are too smart to give similar advice; they know what would happen to them. Thankfully we still live in a country where it is regarded as rash to issue guidelines on alcohol consumption while having access to a lounge bar and a super pension both underwritten by the taxpayer.
Yes, now that dentists have issued a statement that the much-vaunted “five a day” is actually bad for you, we are back to the When Good Health Advice Turns Bad situation. WGHATB is a game in which the narcissistic and gullible public (guilty, your honour) tries faithfully to follow quite tricky health advice – two litres of water per day, anyone? – only to find out that the advice is either arbitrary or rubbish. Or both.
In the latest round of WGHATB, it will be remembered that the five-a-day slogan emerged from the food policymakers in the US, and soon bestrode the English-speaking world. The mantra “Strive for Five” was urged on the ignorant public, encouraging us to get “at least” five portions of vegetables and fruit a day. We thought this advice was based on scientific evidence that the said five portions were vital in preserving our lives. But it has recently been revealed that, on the contrary, the number five was chosen on the irrefutable grounds that it rhymed with the word “strive”.
Now, in a blow to the conscientious everywhere, the dentist’s professional association has advised against eating fruit as a snack between meals and, in a sensational development, against brushing your teeth more than twice a day. Have these people no shame? Apparently dentists have been advising against the nearly sacred “five a day” advice for a while. Darned if I ever heard them. But they have now come out as implacably opposed to citrus fruit and fruit juice, on the grounds that both destroy tooth enamel. My healthiest friend drinks freshly squeezed orange juice every morning. Her dentist told her she should give it up at once. “But I’m trying to prevent cancer,” she said.
After some heated negotiation, in the end they settled on the fruit juice being diluted, and had a bit of laugh at the madness of it all.
Wheat, that mainstay of the healthy fibre campaign, has also come under pressure. An American cardiologist called William Davis has published a book called Wheat Belly, which holds modern wheat responsible for obesity, diabetes, inflammatory conditions like arthritis, Crohn's disease and eczema, and, as Dr Davis would say himself, a whole lot more. In the book, he argues that health advice of the past 20 years, under which the carbohydrate-laden, wheat-heavy food pyramid, produced and promoted by the people who believed that a fatty diet was killing America, has actually made America fatter and more diabetic than it has ever been. The enemies now are gluten and sugar.
The roundabout of health advice seems to be spinning rather rapidly at the moment: both fruit and yoga have been thrown into not just disrepute but outright disgrace. And what a fall. Who would have thought that fruit and yoga, those two pillars of the modern health regime, would become outcasts overnight? Meanwhile, old villains, such as egg yolks and butter, have been rehabilitated and are going about their business in public, completely unabashed.
These are hard times for skinny chicks and chaps in leotards who dutifully chomp their way through cantaloupe melon for its cleansing properties, and are trying to do everything right; poor old things, the health police has let them down very badly. Suddenly fruit, once so healthy and harmless, damages your teeth and sends blood sugar skyward.
The rest of us, who constitute that silent but obedient sector of the population known as the worried well, are a bit confused too. Take yoga, for example, an alternative practice so universally approved of that general practitioners recommend it for everything from depression to obesity. Now yoga is being investigated in the New York Times, and exposed as causing everything from horrid injury to inappropriately elevated libido. The inappropriately elevated libido is allegedly caused by yoga raising endorphin levels, and also increasing the blood supply to the pelvic region. I hope I have read the New York Timescorrectly on this, but the worried well do humbly wonder if most physical exercise would not have these two results.
In any event, watch for a marked increase in the number of husbands very kindly waiting in the car park to pick up their wives after yoga class.
It’s an ill wind, you know. No one would say that gullibility is the best policy when it comes to health information, but perhaps selective gullibility is no bad thing. The House of Commons science and technology committee, which came up with the recommendation of abstaining from alcohol for two days a week, also said that the protective effects of alcohol had been oversold, when “any protective effects would only apply to men over 40 years and post-menopausal women, yet the guidelines apply to all adults”. Perhaps, sometimes, it’s better to be a believer.