Writing for life

Published in the WOW! supplement of the Evening Echo 12/12/2007

Not too long ago the World Cancer Research Fund published a report. In it they presented the findings of 221 cancer experts who analysed more than 7,000 academic papers over a period of five years, dating all the way back to the ’60s. The report reveals that lifestyle, and the conscious choices that people make, could account for up to a third of all cancer cases – making it the most significant contributory factor after smoking.

It also offers a series of recommendations on how we can alter our lifestyles to significantly reduce our cancer risk. Which sounds like great news… until you hear some of them. The thrust of it is pretty conventional stuff: eat more healthily and do more exercise. No surprises there – but it’s when you delve into the specifics that things start to get ugly.

The 30 minutes of vigorous exercise a day I could probably live with – even learn to enjoy in time. Come to think of it, I probably get that running around after the four-year-old most days. Moving on, drinks with added sugar are taboo… no problem there, but apparently even fruit juice, with its natural sugars, should be limited to no more than a glass a day. Red meat should be constrained to no more than 500g a week; alcohol, they say, is a no-no as far as cancer is concerned, but because it can lower the risk of heart disease – the other big killer – they relent and allow no more than two drinks a day for men, and one drink for women. Processed meat is, they say, off the menu in all its many forms. Yikes! That means no bacon, no sausages, no pudding, no ham, no salami and no cured meats.

So is this the death knell for my Sunday morning full Irish? Will it see me forgo the occasional purchase of its fast-food evolution – the wonderfully tempting breakfast roll? Will it make us radically re-evaluate what we feed to our children? The truth: no, not really.

Obviously a healthy, balanced diet and plenty of exercise is important – especially for the kids – but within that it’s also important to enjoy life and to have the occasional treat. The recommendations in this report are just that – recommendations, not absolute rules. Sure, if you follow the spartan existence it outlines to the letter you may live a little longer… then again you may not – and even if you did, would you really want to?

It’s ironic that I’m reading about this report now, in the run-up to the biggest annual example of collective overindulgence known to man. Over the Christmas period we’ll all be letting our standards slip, and partaking of a potentially deadly hedonistic cocktail of food and drink that, given what we know now, must surely kill us all.

Believe it or not the prospects aren’t as gloomy as all that. You’re not in fact, taking your children’s lives in your hands every time you pack them off to school with a ham sandwich – and they’ll probably even survive the occasional rasher and a sausage or two.

When you delve a little deeper into the statistics, it seems that eating 50g of bacon a day may increase your risk of bowel cancer by 21% – which sounds like quite a chancy affair, until you realise that under normal circumstances there’s only a 0.06% chance of contracting the disease. Eat your bacon and that risk rises to a staggering 0.07% – probably even less, when you consider that the 0.06% figure is likely to includes bacon eaters.

I can live with those odds… make mine a jumbo breakfast roll, and heavy on the brown sauce!