Blog Archive

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

HERE TODAY, GONE YESTERDAY.

I've blinked twice at the daily health news that my simple pleasure or petty vice was unhealthy or even fatal.

First, there were cigarettes. Once touted by doctors and athletes as a relaxing even healthful habit they became an early target for those who would save humanity. Then came the warnings about coffee, chocolate, coca cola, fast food, palm oiled popcorn, and a long list of other goodies.

Scientists armed with rat test subjects, prophesizing computers, and endless government grants have labeled many foods and habits as deadly. To emphasize the badness of some products, our government has required scary warning labels and even gruesome pictures on packages of fags and other deadly pleasures.

Now, new studies from Australia and Taiwan have assigned the minutes of lost life one gets from staring into a TV or computer screen. They report an hour can shorten ones life by 22 minutes which according to the experts is the exact effect of smoking two cigarettes. Will smoking and TV viewing result in sudden death ? These same white jacketed medical experts cheerfully counter that 15 minutes of exercise can add 3 years of life. Does this mean if I discontinue TV and do six hours of daily exercise I will live to be 187 ?

Even notable bureaucrats such as ex mayor Bloomberg have become experts in healthy living by limiting the size of soft drinks in their jurisdictions and railing against the use of salt.

I find the new scientific method of assigning lost or gained minutes, hours, and years of life not so cheerful. I've done some serious math. According to my calculations, and given all the eating, slurping, smoking, and video screen staring I have enjoyed over the last seventy years, I should have died in 1987.

For life's simple pleasures are we here today and gone yesterday ?


 

1 comment:

  1. I have wonderful news for all your readers. After all these years it had been discovered that Laboratory Rats Naturally die of Cancer. So all that stuff that was tested upon the rats is actually perfectly harmless. So light up, order some french fries and sausage and top it off with a bowl of chocolate ice-cream with whip cream on top.

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