The health stories came on like a rash last week. Kitchen
sprays cause COPD, yoghurt
stops heart attacks, processed
food gives you cancer.
The outbreak was partly the result of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science conference, always fertile hunting
grounds for ‘things that will kill or cure you’ stories. But the fascination of
these stories for the media never seems to fade, even though they miss two big
issues.
The first is, without getting too Lenten about it, we are
all going to die. Every person saved from a heart attack – where rates
have dropped dramatically in recent years – is one more waiting in line for cancer or
Alzheimers. While dying before your time
is a tragedy, the slow drawn-out processes of decline that accompany diseases
of ageing are miserable too.
But perhaps more seriously these stories peddle a myth of
control, suggesting that we can cheat death through our behaviour. We do, of course, know much more than we used
to about the damage done to health by our own behaviour – smoking, drinking,
poor diet and inactivity – as well as by environmental factors like air
pollution.
But these behaviours only load the dice; they don’t determine
the outcome. Bad diet, for example, is
associated with about 15 per cent of deaths from cardiovascular disease,
smoking and inactivity with another 10 per cent. So three out of four deaths from
heart attack and stroke have nothing to do with any of these. Of course, we
shouldn’t neglect health, or downplay its impact on the quality of our lives as
well as the manner of their ending, but most people dying from ‘diseases of
lifestyle’ are just unlucky.
There seems to be a certain ironic obtuseness in the amount
of effort we put into trying to influence the one thing that is beyond our
control – our mortality and its means – while neglecting the huge threats posed
by climate change, or any number of social evils, which are firmly within our
grasp collectively if not individually.
