Experts are encouraging us to take in sunshine, coffee, alcohol and vitamins, until they decide they’s bad for us again.
There’s been more bad news lately from The Institute of They Say, the experts who are always telling us what’s good and bad for our health.
Apparently a vitamin supplement millions have taken for decades to increase their health and longevity could conceivably be shortening their lives instead, “they” say.
But I say: Don’t worry about whatever they say. It’s just part of the ever-reversing health news cycle where anything “they” say is good for you today will be bad for you tomorrow — and vice versa.
Take sunshine. When I grew up, experts all said nothing was healthier than the sun’s golden rays, so mothers everywhere chirped: “Go play outside in the sunshine, dear,” while parents on balconies baked their skin with aluminum reflectors.
Then, everything changed in the late ’70s when “they” discovered the sun was actually a skin-scorching villain.
Meanwhile at school, kids sang “sun, sun go away, come again another day!”
Why the constant health reversals? In recent decades, it’s become the full-time job of many academics and bureaucrats to study every substance on Earth to determine whether it might add a week or month to our lives, or reduce them by an afternoon.
Part of the problem is that in today’s attention-competing world, any study without a blaring headline-making conclusion isn’t likely to be noticed, or get renewed funding.
So The Institute of Whatever It Is They Happen To Be Studying must declare which side of the good or bad divide it falls on.
That’s why my own philosophy is to enjoy whatever you can while they say it’s good for you, because you never know when they’ll suddenly find it’s bad for you.
For instance, it was definitely more fun to drink wine when I was younger and “they” said it was good for you — part of a Mediterranean diet that would let you live to 143.
But after 1,257,739 additional studies by the Institute of There’s No Way Fun Is Free, they now say wine is definitely bad for you.
It’s best to drink in wine-producing Austria, where government health guidelines still suggest up to three drinks a day for guys and two for women, so you can drink more and feel healthy, too.
It’s all enough to drive you nuts, which incidentally cause water shortages in California and human rights abuses in Asia.
On the flip side, coffee has experienced one of the great rehabilitations of recent decades. It was long thought to be bad for everything from asthma and heart disease to jittery nerves.
Coffee is now practically a health food, according to recent studies from the University of Even More Studies. They say that caffeine also helps prevent gallstones, colon cancer and memory loss — and may even reduce drowsiness.
But according to the Institute of Equal and Opposite Studies, caffeine can also cause nausea and high blood pressure in mice who’ve ingested 30 cups of double espresso a day since birth. So be a man, not a mouse, when it comes to coffee.
Still, now that word is out that a grande vanilla café latte is supposedly good for us humans, I’m sure 7,000 (tea-financed) researchers are out searching for reasons coffee is actually bad for you.
So enjoy your health latte while you can and don’t throw out those multivitamins yet.
In 10 years, they’ll probably be good for you again.