The clock that strikes thirteen

Let us applaud a small but significant victory in the never-ending battle against those who think – no, who are sure – they know what is best for us. I will remind you about this a little later.

It is a great problem, this claim by others to determine exactly how we should live our lives. At a most important level, of course, such a claim has led historically to the imposition of various kinds of autocratic rule causing untold misery to countless generations. The ill-fated attempt in the Soviet Union to control and direct men’s lives “for their own good” only came unstuck after more than 70 years. The implacable resolve of a self-selected few to give the mass of citizens what they, the few, considered best for them, the masses, led to one of humanity’s more deadly misadventures. And, sadly there never will be a time when unshakable convictions of this kind are out of fashion.

And, what is more, we forever live with the same problem in a minor key. It is the problem of the deluge of “advice” we receive from this, that, and the other “expert” about what is and what is not good for us. We are constantly instructed to do what, they say, is good for us or not to do what, they say, is bad for us. If all this was delivered in the form of mild advice from a friend it wouldn’t be so bad, but what is objectionable is the increasing tendency to subject our individual preferences to a kind of intimidatory dictatorship. Eat eggs and you will DIE! Fried food KILLS! Reduce your cholesterol or you will have a HEART ATTACK! Beware BUTTER! Ban RED MEAT! Junk food is FORBIDDEN! You are WARNED under pain of this, that or the other DEATH! Mind what you do, whatever it is. Take great and fearful care before you eat, drink, and are merry.

There are all sorts of things that irritate me about this campaign to order us what to do for our own good, ordain what is best for us.

The first is that fashion seems to dictate what is being ordered – fashion, moreover, which I suspect is often linked remarkably closely to the profit motive of big business. Surely not long ago dairy products were good for you – then they were anathema – now they are back in favour.

This year’s forbidden fruit, I am convinced, will be the darling of another era. And we will have gone to all that trouble because an advertiser thought up a good campaign for some dreary product measuring zero on the pleasurable eating or drinking scale.

And that brings me to a second thing that infuriates me. What do the dictators of what is good for you or me always choose the sweetest, most delectable, most enjoyable items to ban? Chicken fried in deepest, sizzling fat, luscious chocolates, calorie-filled cakes with thickest icing, roasted cashew nuts, lamb chops with the crisp fat left on, avocado pears at their ripe and succulent best, gorgeous pastries filled with savory meats, piles of rice with spicy curries hot enough to make you sweat – all prohibited. There is a Puritanical streak in these small-time dictators of taste which makes them determined that we should not enjoy anything we eat or drink. I believe in fact what they really want to say to us is “Enjoyment increases your cholesterol levels,” but they don’t dare, so they find another “scientific” way of achieving their dismal objective.

Thirdly, it annoys me to think how much of all this stems from the peculiar modern American fad which I can only describe as a conviction that a person can somehow live forever.

Only one thing obsesses them more than living forever and that is looking younger than they are. They make ordinary mortality their most bitter enemy.

Americans are so terrified of dying that they have convinced themselves that if only they eat and drink the right things – or refrain from eating and drinking the wrong things – they will somehow become immortal. (Where else but in America could there be people willing to pay $50,000 to deep-freeze themselves in the hope that a hundred years from now some treatment for what killed them would raise them from the dead?)

However, the right diet does not confer eternal life. All those people glowing with health in the advertisements proclaiming the wonderfulness of fibre-rich this and cholesterol-free that – they die too, I’m afraid. The only advice about life-style which I think is always valid and need not take anything away from the joy of living and yet will undoubtedly make your life healthier and longer is very simple and can be summed up in my best-selling treatise which consists of just a four word title ‘Consume Less, Move More,’ a treatise which at once renders unnecessary all existing diet and keep fit books.

It is good to know that all right-thinking people have a small victory. After a four-year study, testing 45,000 subjects, the Harvard University School of Public Health declared that their findings “do not support the hypothesis that coffee or caffeine consumption increases the risk of coronary heart disease or stroke.” Indeed, the study finds that while there is no reason why you should not drink six cups of coffee a day, if you drink even two-thirds of that amount of decaffeinated coffee you may have anything up to a 60 per cent greater chance of getting heart disease.

Let us enthusiastically consider the implications of this. What about all those advertisements warning us about the need to drink caffeine-free coffee? Are we to receive an apology? Can we even, in good American style, sue somebody?

And if they were wrong about coffee, might they not also be wrong about all the other things?

As the man said, “Hark! The clock has struck 13 and that last chime has put in doubt every one of the 12 strokes that have gone before!”