Taking on the health fascists

No doubt the most junior member of my family would have been thrilled: television, as we all know, confers instant, if fleeting, celebrity, and last month Granada hauled me from my summer haunt in the south of France to discourse on the good that certain controverted substances can do. I am told eight million people watch Get A Life, and I can only say I hope none of my readers were among them.

The format of this half-hour pop-health show consists of a studio audience, a set out of Star Trek, and two pretty faces, Richard and Judy, who are, again I am told, hugely popular icons. In this half-hour they manage to get through four segments, commercials, chit-chat and much human warmth: a brave family whose infant was brain-damaged through hospital negligence; a Zimbabwean girl come to England to recover her health; Roy Connolly on hypochondria; and yours truly.

I went because the cause (Arise, Associates in Substance Enjoyment, a group of academics seeking to counteract the tyranny of food fascists) was good, and because it seemed to me high time that some countervailing view about coffee, chocolate, fats in general, cholesterol and so on, be heard.

It is, in fact, a good story: there is as much evidence for the benefits of moderate consumption of many substances as there is for harm in excess. But while you will have heard a great deal about the harms, you will only with great difficulty find out about the benefits, for there is nothing about which censorship is more absolute than pleasure. For some reason, governments and health activists feel threatened by pleasure, and whereas pain is much studied, pleasure is hardly at all.

It is quite obvious that if people drink coffee, eat chocolate, smoke, drink alcohol, it is because they feel they derive some good from it. In the appropriate doses, these substances relieve stress, they comfort, they calm, they give pleasure. It equally obvious that too much of any one thing is bad for you, and that if you ingest too much of anything, your body is going to tell you so in no uncertain fashion - your digestive system will react appropriately, with vomiting, diarrhoea, constipation and a dozen other unpleasant symptoms.

Alas, such is the power of health-scaring that positive research is rare. Thus when pretty-face Richard closed off my segment saying, "Well, you would think that, wouldn't you? You're sponsored by...", I could only just forbear from punching him on his finely sculpted nose.

For television, the most corrupt and corrupting of the media, there is no story except denigration. Anyone but the government sponsoring research is clearly wrong, because the motivation is wrong. To which any reasonable person could only answer, look at the research, and prove it wrong if you can.

Some of the research I would have liked to mention, though it would have consumed the time given on the programme to the inexhaustible self-congratulation that takes up so much of presenters' time, indicates that:

Coffee, in moderation, not only calms, but increases manual dexterity by some ten per cent and reduces depression; chocolate improves mood and strengthens immune responses; alcohol reduces the chance of coronary disease; nicotine increases efficiency and relieves stress; some fats are good for you; bread does not fatten but, as a carbohydrate, it provides a source of quick energy.

Moderation is the key word here. A chocolate binge is no better than an apple binge. Four squares of chocolate will do you good; more than that and the positive reaction is reversed. Moderation in coffee equals about three espressos in a day; and if you don't think it will keep you awake, it probably won't. Moderate alcohol consumption is something like three to five glasses of wine a day.

Arise's viewpoint is that worrying about what you eat or do - part of our search for an impossible immortality - simply increases stress; if you break the health authorities' "rules", you feel guilt, and guilt is stress. Why is it that the public so readily accepts all indications that a particular substance is noxious? The answer lies, I believe, in our loss of belief in our powers of self- regulation. Given contradictory scientific evidence (and on many substances, the official evidence is full of internal contradictions), we fail to rely on the best indicators of health that we have: the reactions of our own bodies and minds.

Thus, while I admire the opportunity supposedly offered by Granada to discuss the other side of the question, I am ashamed to have participated in a programme which never got around to its subject.