Living is Killing Us

Eating red meat regularly increases your chances of heart disease and cancer.

The idea red meat is bad for you has been around for ages. Along with virtually any other foodstuff you care to mention. Diets have changed over the decades. Our diet now is much healthier than it was but that is because it needs to be. 100 years ago, or really before that, we needed the calorific input. Day to day life was was energetic, both for men in employment and for women in the home. Nowadays we obviously have little to move for. Other than nipping to the loo you can pretty much spend an entire evening without moving. Remote controls, laptops, mobile phones, every convenience for you to sit on your backside for hours on end.

And so now we investigate everything we can about what we eat in order to make ourselves healthier. And what have we found? Food isn't particularly good for us. In a lot of cases though it is the same food we have had for centuries. True, the amount of processing has increased and the additives are a problem. So it becomes whether red meat is bad for us or whether the aftermath of how the cows are raised is bad for us. But then not all food was healthy in the old days.

The problem isn't with what we eat but in what we expend in calories. The less you move, the less calories you burn and, in addition, your digestive system doesn't work as well, which means food residues and the chemical compounds within spend longer in your body.

Now, I admit, exercise is not something I enjoy. And the older I get the less I fancy the look of it, but if I am to shake off some if this weight, I am going to have to do some because you can only cut so many calories out of your diet. But when I was young, of school age I was for ever out and about playing some game or other. We'd spend hours playing tennis or football or anything we could make up. But more and more, young people don't play out. Whether it is because it is perceived as not safe or whether kids have already learnt that a sedentary life is an acceptable life I'm not sure.

So perhaps in looking more and more at the food perhaps we need to work out how much more exercise we can get into peoples lives. But how we do that Lord only knows.