Whoopie, we're all gonna die -- so they tell us

Let’s say you got up this morning and you were feeling pretty darn good. The sun was shining, the birds were singing in the trees and that cup of fair-trade coffee (that you recently switched to, just to show your concern for those less fortunate than yourself). All was fine. Your health was decent enough. You’d done the Atkins, South Beach or Weightwatchers thing and knocked the old avoirdupois down last year. You weren’t drinking too much; you’d quit smoking, and were eating nice healthy foodstuffs with no trans-fats contained therein. Oh, maybe the odd donut, but not enough to worry about. Meanwhile, you were happy in your relationship, or equally happy in your chosen single status. The kids were doing well. Staying in school, not pregnant, not on drugs, not in jail. Yep what could be better?

And then you picked up the morning newspaper and it all went to hell. Your pleasant mood flew away as you found that not only was the world suffering from a surfeit of Iraq, Afghanistan and international terrorists but, and maybe more importantly from a personal perspective, you were doomed. You were on your way out. That’s right. Healthwise, according to today’s paper, none of us stands a chance.

Doom-and-gloom is the order-of-the-day in our anal, self-obsessed paranoia that can only be fuelled by yet more items telling us how these ‘good days’ will not be lasting much longer because researchers have found that everything we are doing is wrong, and the papers believe it is their mandate to let us know this.

I include in this screed some 'real' items that I picked up from this morning’s paper. Items that have made me want to take to my bed, pull the duvet up and wait for the ‘end’ – which will no doubt be soon. As a long-time newspaper guy I feel compared to share with you some of these items – all of which are true – just so you can feel as bad as I do. I mean, it’s only fair.

Consider the following threats to your health and well-being and be very, very afraid:

1) Don’t be smug about all the pounds you lost – You may have knocked that tummy down to a pleasing girth – for you. But, it wasn’t enough for Arya Shanna of the Canadian Obesity Network who tells us that three out of four adults are way, way too fat and that coronary is just around the corner. So, if you’re a woman and your waistline exceeds 31.5 inches, or a male and you come out over 35.5 inches at your beltline well you are, in Arya’s view, a big fat slob who is going to die sooner rather than later. Nicole Ritchie, on the other hand, is going to live to be 178. OK, I just made that last part up.

2) If the fat doesn’t get you, then your teeth will – Here you had been fastidious about cutting the crap in your diet, and exchanging Twinkies for nice fruit and vegetables – nice leafy vegetables like spinach. Well, you know how far the spinach thing got you. But, fruit. At least fruit is good; an apple a day, and all that. Nope. Our dentists have told us as a result of one of ‘their’ research surveys, that the acid in fruit knocks the enamel off our teeth faster than a full-blown crystal meth habit. You might think that fizzy soft-drinks would be the culprits in this case, and indeed they are. But, so are apples, oranges and fruit juices. So, screw vitamin C if it means your teeth are at stake, you might be excused for thinking. “Bobby, put that apple down! There are Oreos in the cupboard.”

3) Antacids are worse than heroin – By now you are feeling so stressed that you are feeling in need of a Rolaids or a Tums. Uh-uh. Put that bottle down, unless you are prepared to court ‘C. difficile.’ “What in the fuck is C. difficile?” you might be excused for asking. Don’t ask me. I am just reporting what I read, and what I read was that ‘researchers’ at McGill University have found that widely prescribed antacid drugs may be bringing about the dreaded C. difficile in some patients. I guess the staffer that pulled this story together thought that C. difficile was so commonplace that we all knew what it was, so he didn’t need to tell us.

4) But, maybe you really have that desired waistline – You are an older lady or gentleman and you are finally as trim as you were at 20. You’ve checked it out. You have no life-threatening illness, so everything is cool – right? Well, maybe. It might also be that you are losing your marbles. In this case, a long-term study as reported in the Archives of Neurology reports that if average weight loss doubles over the course of a year, this could be indicative of pending Alzheimer’s.

5) Well, at least there’s sex – Nothing like a good roll in the hay to take one’s mind off the bad stuff, you can be excused for thinking. After all, virtually everybody likes to get laid, right? Wrong again. According to a survey taken in the UK, four out of 10 Britons are so afraid of an early demise that they would eschew sex if a celibate life meant they would live for a century. Well, maybe this one just depends on whom the four of 10 are living with. In this case I’ll happily join the ‘active’ 60 percent and snuff it early.

6) And spare some compassion for the very pretty – You might think that the Angelinas and Brads of the world have far less to worry about than you, what with being gorgeous and all. Not so says researcher Rick Wilson of Rice University. While it is accepted wisdom that the good looking amongst us get better breaks in life just by dint of their esthetics (hardly fair, but what’re you gonna do?), society also expects more of them, and they can suffer emotional stress because they don’t always live up to expectations. So, if you think it’s all just hunky-dory in the world of George Clooney and Gwynneth Paltrow, you might find that they have more sleepless nights than your average shmo or shmo-ette.

So, what was my point in laying all this doom and gloom on you? Was it to make you feel as frightened and threatened as I now do? Well, sure, partially. But really it was to point out how self-obsessed with our mortality and well-being we have become as a society. We are looking for the keys to the immortal kingdom more than possibly any generation since the beginning of time.

That is, we in overprivileged North America and Western Europe are doing that. Go and offer your plaints to the folk of Darfur or Haiti and you just might find their priority list is a little different from our own, as in ‘living through today might be nice,’ rather than obsessing about what will happen to my arteries 20 years from now.