For John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me!, our emphasis should be on what gives you a better life while you're living it, not what will end it all...
Hey you! Drinking tea? Well don’t; according to today’s news, drinking seven or more cups of the brown stuff makes you 50% more at risk of prostate cancer. Tea is a freakin’ killer, dude!
What do you mean, ‘but Johnny, I don’t have a prostate, I’m a lady’? Look, I’m sure it’ll be declared to knacker you in some other way darlin’; either that or it’ll soon be declared actually bloody great for you, and guaranteed to lower anything bad and raise anything good. You know how it goes.
Jaded by all the endless drip-drip-drip of this so-called advice? Yeah, me too. Who isn’t?
If you read the responses under such pieces which appeared in the Daily Mail, you’ll see that the common response is to all intents and purposes, – ‘sod off, I’m eating and drinking what I want: you’re all mad.’ And I sympathize totally.
The problem is, all articles on food and health tend to be expressed in terms of life and death. So today, drinking tea increases your risk of prostate cancer; tomorrow it will be a 14 % increase of heart attacks for those eating badger meat, the day after, a 10% increase in likelihood of growing a second head and dying of brain ache if you eat three kilos of rhubarb every hour for forty nine years. Every day brings a new way to die at the hands of your life.
The problem with selling this info on the back of a life & death scenario, whether it is right or wrong, is that we already tend to discount death, as it’s inevitable. We know no-one gets out alive. So it doesn’t scare us, or rather, it does, but you can only die once and we know sooner or later, it’s our turn. You can’t threaten us with death by food because we already know its going to happen; it is just a matter of when.
You will often read people who say ‘well I’ll trade five years in my 80s for 20 fags and two bottles of red wine a day thanks.’ Life isn’t that simple of course but the zero sum game of trying to use death as a salesman for a diet or a specific food leads to this feeling that it really is that clean cut. Eat this and die. Don’t eat it and live.
However, what a rubbish diet and lifestyle does more typically is kill you slowly over many years, making you feel like crap for maybe twenty or more years, making life less and less fun. Making you feel sluggish, without energy or joy; make you dull and sleepy. Making you too fat to move without your thighs rubbing together or making you short of breath. Who wants that? Not many people. Death we can handle, but no-one wants a more crap life.
It became clear to me when writing The Meat Fix that warning of death is too abstract; warning of a much worse quality of life is surely a much more persuasive argument to take a look at your food intake. And that’s what I’ve emphasised in the book. The quality of my life has improved exponentially since I learned what to eat and un-brainwashed myself about what is natural and healthy.
My health changed massively for the better when I radically changed my diet and I may live longer because of it but that is not provable. The really important thing is that it makes life better now. Forget longevity. Stop thinking about what will kill you and focus more on what will make your life more brilliant.
As Sammy Hagar once said, ‘all we have is right here, right now’ and that is what matters most. Trust me, I’m not a doctor.