Well Darlings,

Writers and critics today have a lot to be thankful for - there are so many idiots and idiotic schemes, surveys and deductions around these days they can never be short of something to write about. The latest £4.5 million study by 21 international "experts" on behalf of the World Cancer Research Fund (they should have known better!) is the latest excuse for me to trot out yet once more my e

If your teeth are as long as mine you will still no doubt remember the experts of the day in the fifties. They told us we should eat fewer potatoes, eat as much red meat as we could afford, and eat far less bread in order to stay healthy. Just one medium-sized potato was suggested for a dinner, and no more than a couple of slices of bread a day, which should be wholemeal. A kid loving my bread and jam (US: jelly) sarnies at that time, I complained bitterly. But this was the advice of the then experts who believed they knew everything, and our family stuck to it. Today those experts are considered to have been nothing more than a bunch of idiots. But were they? Perhaps it is today's experts who are the real idiots - but that can and will only be known for sure on one of our tomorrows. However something worth considering: those who survived the fifties are the ones living to great ages today, whilst we already suspect the blobs of lard being raised lately are unlikely to see anything like a similar number of years. In the fifties fat was funny, not fashionable.

The experts of the fifties, just like those do today, were convinced they were at the pinnacle of knowledge. There was nothing more for them to know, and their findings were absolutely indisputable. But apparently they were not, and later ideas crept in telling us that red meat and animal fats were bad for us. This revelation led to the food industry producing some very dubious alternatives. Our friends in America won't need reminding about the artificial fat, Olestra, worked on by Procter & Gamble in the sixties and later released as being "safe". Technically safe it may have been, so far as we know to date, but it was not without its side effects. It was arguably responsible for inserting: "anal leakage" into many an American's vocabulary, and perhaps more alarmingly into their underpants!

Hardly a year goes by now without some new idea, one that overturns all previous ideas, of what we should and should not be eating. Here are just a few: fish was good for us, and then it wasn't because the seas were polluted and the marine life radioactive. Chicken, once a treat, became a mainstay food - until salmonella necessitated it being so incinerated that all the goodness from it was obliterated. Eggs have been in and out of favour more times than I care to remember. It was once believed they were good for you, but too many gave you jaundice. Then we were told we could not digest them, so they weren't worth eating. Later on that was said to be wrong by a panel of different experts who suggested we should be eating them. We did, and it took an outspoken Conservative MP, Edwina Currie, to prevent us all dying from the dreaded salmonella that was rife in them, but unspoken about at that time. And perhaps the only thing to have been in and out of favour as much as the "stuff" served up at burger joints - once revealed to be of less nutritional value than a tin of cheap dog food! - is the good old-fashioned fish and chips, providing they are cooked correctly in a reputable vegetable oil and not the axle-grease that once gave them their unique flavour!

Knowing all this, why should we consider this latest advice to be any more accurate, reliable, or beneficial to us, than that of all its predecessors? Much of it will still have come from drones sitting behind their desks number-crunching, where only the computers employed today are different. That is the way these bodies come up with the statistics that are supposed to sway us. But there are statistics, and there are statistics. These, linking obesity with cancers, and attributing both some of the obesity and the cancers to what people buy from their supermarket, appear to be generalising and sweeping conclusions. They prompted the Daily Mail to ask in front page headlines: "So what IS safe to eat?"

According to our latest experts, meats such as salami, ham, bacon and sausages should be avoided. In fact, it seems any food that is processed could be risky - and when you come to supermarket food, what food isn't processed? Even the "fresh" produce will often have been treated with preservatives. Folks, with the amount of it we have to consume, I doubt we now rot in our graves like we used to!

Statistics are often meaningless, and frequently used to mislead - or to take your mind away from current failings by giving you something else to worry about. Extremely plausible ones can be produced to convince or mislead the public about anything. It is easy to do, and our government, police, health service etc, and their associated cronies are particularly adept at the task. Those who believe them without question do so at their peril.

Did you know that more men who mostly wear black shoes will suffer from cancer than those who mostly wear brown ones? It is a fact, I promise you. But of course, before you rush out to change your footwear, the cancer has nothing at all to do with the shoes. It is simply that black shoes are the more popular - and it is playing with the statistics. So when nearly all the food we eat these days comes from supermarkets or fast-food joints - it almost has to, as there is little alternative left - and when anything we wish to put into a sandwich or a meal has had to be processed to include all those various additives, I have to ask: did we really need to spend £4.5 million to find out that the people who eat it are more likely to succumb to some form of cancer? As opposed to whom?

Common sense tells us that to gorge like a pig is detrimental, and that obesity is unhealthy and life-threatening. We know by experience that fatty foods aren't good for us, and we suspect many of the additives in food today are bad for us in the quantities we can easily accumulate them by eating just a simple mixture of processed foods, so farm fresh produce is always best if it is at all obtainable. To come to these conclusions none of us has had to spend £4.5 million - we have simply listened to our stomachs and our bodies, remembering when they have complained, and how we have felt after eating certain foods. It doesn't take much intelligence to work out which food one is eating, or quantity of it, is responsible for putting on weight, making one feel bloated, flatulent, exhausted, or producing the restless legs feeling in bed that is becoming so common today. It is not rocket science. It is simply called living your life - that thing we did before the Nanny State. Anyone remember it?

Homo sapiens has slowly evolved from being an herbivorous species to becoming an omnivorous one, and as proof of that we have our canine teeth and the now long-defunct and sometimes troublesome appendix. Like it or not, as a species we have evolved to naturally eat both meat and vegetable matter, so it is quite strange for the experts to say meat is bad for us. But of course, it is not the actual meat so much as what is done to it (both alive and dead), what is added to it, and perhaps how old it is before it gets to our mouths that is the problem. Best before and sell by dates are now totally meaningless, and they don't give any indication of freshness. Under current law, when the date arrives the product can simply be irradiated (again and again?), given a new date, and put back on the shelf for sale without any obligation on the supermarket to state that has occurred. Mary had a little lamb - and they'd both been on the shelf for years!

Why this damning report has not been specifically aimed at the government and food industry, but has instead seemingly been targeted directly at the public, I have no proof - but I have my suspicions.

With all the recent "statistics" on smoking still fresh in our minds, those that were rammed down our throats at a tremendous cost and in nothing short of a mad frenzy, where those who smoke have now because of them been turned into noticeably second-class citizens, I would like everyone to take just a little time to carefully consider this statement from one of the world's leading experts, Professor Sir Michael Marmot, professor of epidemiology and public health at University College London, and the chair of the World Cancer Research Fund survey:

"With smoking, we know that if you smoke you increase your risk, but most smokers in the end don't get cancer, so it's not a one-to-one relation. With obesity and overweight, it is very clear and it is a graded phenomenon. The more overweight you are, the more obese you are, the higher the risk of cancer." He also goes on to suggest the direct link between increased weight and increased cancer risk is even stronger than that which links cigarettes with cancer.

If you are surprised by that statement, then you are one who has succumbed to all the spin and brainwashing about smoking we have been subjected to in recent years, but don't feel ashamed - most people, including eminent doctors, have too. The link is there, but it is not that strong - a smoker is still unlucky if they get cancer as most smokers will not get it, and for passive smoking those that actually did the research will tell you the risk is insignificant and their findings were "sexed up". Where have I heard that one before?

There is no denying that smoking can give a person cancer, that is why the tobacco companies have had to cough up substantial damages - it is undoubtedly an unhealthy pastime that was often promoted by them as being good for you, but the relationship between the number of smokers and the number of cancers has never stood up to scrutiny. After four hundred years, with the number of smokers falling dramatically in the last half of the 20th century - previously everybody including kids smoked heavily on far stronger untipped cigarettes, and that was at a time when few people even in old age died of cancer - the disease has since escalated alarmingly. Something had to be done to appease the public, so worldwide the smokers have been singled out. However that will have as much affect on the number of cancer patients as taking a piss was in the recent Californian fires. They know that, but it will be decades before it becomes publicly apparent. To take note of, and to follow up, the correlation some scientists claim to have found with the automobile is far too much of a hot potato for any government of any country to pick up, and in an "oil is king" world it will remain so for many years to come.

Knowing this, would anyone need forgiving for suspecting this attack on our food and our fatties is yet another smokescreen to prevent us dwelling on the appalling inadequacies of both our government and health services? There is little more to be gained from pursuing the smokers much further, they have won the battle there, so our health organisation, that which would prefer not to be a service and have to treat us at all as it much prefers to be a "bossy-boots" ruling our lives, has found a new target - the obese. Smoke? Sorry, no treatment. Obese? Sorry, no treatment. It is quite obviously what the health service is aiming for, and we have to wonder who will be targeted next?

Having seen, and personally had to suffer, what has happened to the smokers in the UK where the laws regarding smoking have become some of the most severe in the world - and for what we are now told has been based on far less evidence and for a much less need - I can only say: May God help the lard-asses! Their time of reckoning is nigh.

"The Bitch!" 2/11/07.

About the Author

"The Bitch!", a weekly UK News Review column, is hosted by the author and columnist Michael Knell. These articles appear on the Blackpool Gay Directory website, but are not usually specifically gay in content. More information on the author: http://www.michaelknell.com and on the directory: http://www.astabgay.com.