SOME things are so obviously unhealthy that you hardly need public warnings about them.
Voluntarily filling your lungs with smoke, for example, is clearly not going to aid longevity.
"Smoke inhalation" is the phrase frequently used to describe how people die in blazes and we've all seen the scary fire brigade films which show how fumes given off when the wrong sort of settees catch alight can kill you in a matter of seconds.
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Common sense also tells you all those food-snacks with labels listing more chemicals than you ever learnt about in school chemistry lessons cannot be as good for you as plain, healthy fruit and and veg.
Although you do wonder what kind of insecticide tomatoes and apples might have been sprayed with while they were growing.
And by the way, is anything put on those supermarket green beans to keep them fresh en route from Mexico or Tanzania or the asparagus that travels all the way from Peru?
Then there are the apparently incontrovertible claims that fried food (including the famed full English breakfast) will clog up your arteries and lead to heart attacks and premature death.
You begin to feel like a leper these days if you have to take sugar in your tea or coffee (decaffeinated of course). People sigh and begin searching their kitchen cupboards muttering: "I know I've got some somewhere."
But if that's an established health hazard are we really sensible to instead use an artificial so-called equivalent concocted chemically in the enormous factories of those multi-national drug companies whose turnovers dwarf the gross national products of many third world countries?
Salt has been off the menu, and most restaurant tables, for some time since we are all conscious of what it is supposed to do to our blood pressure. If you use it at all it should be flakes of sea salt not the old-fashioned stuff we spent years adding to every savoury dish.
And then there's the great wine debate. A regular glass or two of red wine strengthens the heart and helps prolong active life - just like in the PAL dog food adverts! Oh no it doesn't, oh yes it does, oh no it doesn't.
If you believe it is healthy there's still another elephant trap awaiting you.
Most pubs, we are told, have slyly increased the size of their glasses in the last few years. The quantity they now serve up "will almost certainly shorten your lifespan if you indulge on a regular basis."
Then there's this week's news.
The vitamin tablets you have been knocking back for years to try to counteract all the potentially harmful items mentioned above are going to shorten your life as well!
I think I know what all this is really about.
Too many of us are living too long.
Health and care services are strained to the limit by hordes of old folk and today's over fifties are doing nothing for the mental wellbeing of those who want to make big profits from in the pensions industry.
It's as if someone, somewhere has decided the only way to bring average life expectancy back down to three score years and ten is to stress us to an early grave worrying about everything we eat and drink.
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