Why health warnings are making us sick

As we’re told even the light on our phones is bad for us, JOHN NAISH reveals a new peril facing us all...

Run for the hills. Hide behind the sofa. Our Chief Medical Officer, Dame Sally Davies, says a new Horseman of the Apocalypse is heading our way. Galloping alongside Death, Famine, War and Pestilence comes a new pale rider — Blue Light From Mobile Phones.

She says that staring at our smartphone, tablet and computer screens could raise our risk of heart disease, cancer and diabetes if we use them too close to bedtime.

This is because the light emitted by these devices affects the body’s ability to produce the sleep hormone melatonin, which makes it harder to nod off, which can disrupt our body clocks and throw our metabolism off kilter.

This interference in the body’s natural rhythms could, supposedly, leave us vulnerable to all sorts of killer diseases. Well, that’s the theory, anyway. Out in the real world, the risk of getting ill due to looking at your smartphone is statistically so tiny that nobody — not even Dame Sally and her researchers — can properly quantify it.

It is only in laboratory studies where small animals have been persistently subjected to sleep deprivation that this effect has become apparent. To extrapolate from that and to say that using a phone in bed puts you at risk of cancer is absurd.

Instead of lecturing us on every aspect of our daily lives, perhaps Dame Sally ought to spend some time looking into the threat of ‘Death from official advice’.

Respectable research has shown that when officials constantly nanny us about unquantifiable threats, something genuinely dangerous happens: we just stop listening to what the experts tell us.

This effect is so powerful that people can end up ignoring truly important health advice that really would make a difference.

This was highlighted last year by South Korean researchers. They discovered that when people are exposed to contradictory health information, rather than simply mply letting it pass them by, they become so contemptuous ontemptuthe that they throw all caution to the wind.

When people are nagged with conflicting information about what they should d be eating, for example, a phenomenon occurs rs that the scientists called ‘nutrition backlash’. h’. THuS, the general mishmash hmash of advice about whether one should eat ‘five a day’ — or six, or four, or ten — resulted in people ple eating less fruit and vegetables than they ever did previously.

In similar fashion, an Australian n study of 58,000 women has found that they hey are so overwhelmed with health messages ges about what they should and shouldn’t do when they fall pregnant that they simply ignore all of it.

Bombarded by advice such as: ‘Avoid soft cheese. Avoid deli meats. no pate. no bean sprouts. Eat well- cooked meat but not burnt. Don’t eat stuffing,’ they tune out completely.

So completely, in fact, that they end up ignoring the (wise) advice to avoid drinking and smoking, says Deborah Loxton, deputy director of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health, which collected the findings.

This is why official health warnings should themselves come with an official health warning.

And it doesn’t help that these lectures are so often insulting and unnecessary.

In one particularly patronising example three years ago, the Government issued a health alert warning that people shouldn’t walk around after firework night because the air might be polluted by all the pyrotechnics.

Then there was the serious alert issued by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) last year, warning that eating slightly burnt toast could raise our risk of cancer. The potential cancer ‘risk’ came in the form of acrylamide, acrylamide a chemical that is created by cooking starchy foods such as bread at high temperatures.

The longer and hotter such foods are cooked, the more acrylamide forms.

But there was absolutely no need to be panicked by the FSA warning. Your toast doesn’t mean you’re toast.

The risk is purely theoretical. When we look at real- world examples — studies of people who work in food factories where there is lots of acrylamide, for example — they show no increased rate of cancer.

nevertheless, the health nannies love to brandish threatening words such as ‘cancer’ and ‘heart disease’ — the sorts of dreaded ailments that make people take notice.

until, that is, people start to suffer from anxiety fatigue. You can shout ‘Fire!’ in a packed theatre only so many times, before everyone starts to ignore you. Just as annoying is how much of this health-warning silliness is founded on sheer arrogance arrogance.

Those responsible for dishing out advice blithely continue to do so while ignoring the fact that some of their loudest decrees have turned out to be wrong. MOST notorious of all is the official dietary advice — which held sway for nearly 40 years — that we should shun natural fats such as butter and eggs, and instead live on margarine and other low-fat fare.

These guidelines were based on flawed statistics from American physiologist Ancel Keys. He examined data for six different countries and claimed to have found a firm link between saturated fats and coronary heart disease.

But Keys’s research ignored evidence from European countries such as Italy, Spain and France, where traditional diets are heavy in fats such as olive oil, eggs, butter and cheese, but the rate of heart disease is low. low

The uK Government’s official low-fat guidance was reluctantly reversed only two years ago, after mounting evidence showed, for example, that people who ate eight or more portions of high-fat dairy products a day had nearly a 25 per cent lower risk of developing illnesses such as type 2 diabetes than those who ate only one portion or less.

We still await an official apology for all those who were steered away from natural healthy fats for decades and were instead encouraged to eat fattening carbohydrates and factory-processed ingredients.

For anyone who likes a drink, the current swirl of conflicting guidance is enough to make your head spin. In 2016, for instance, Dame Sally declared that there can be ‘no safe level’ of drinking.

Of course, that didn’t kill off the uK alcohol industry. It merely

made Dame Sally look like a spoilsport and intensified the contempt felt by ordinary people for official health guidance.

Scepticism only increased

the following year, when a study of nearly two million UK health records showed that people who drink in moderation have a lower overall risk of dying early.

The Sheffield University researchers responsible for that study defined ‘moderate’ as around three pints of beer a day for men, and two glasses of wine for women.

As recently as the Sixties, official UK health advice suggested a bottle of wine a day was fine. It may still be fine if you’re French, because its Government does not have official alcohol guidelines.

And while UK health advisors tell men to drink no more than 14 units a week, in Spain the upper limit is more than twice that — at 35 units.

No wonder alcohol causes confusion — and no wonder most of us have stopped listening. With her latest warning about phones, Dame Sally risks creating exactly the same situation. It may come as an astonishing revelation to her, but we do know that we shouldn’t be gazing at our phones in bed. We should be getting some sleep.

But her over- the- top warning will not change the fact that we are too heavily in thrall to our electronic toys to stop playing with them.

Nor will it help the growing number of people who are so tied to the 24/7 world of online work that escaping the screen is immensely difficult.

If we are continually guilttripped by officialdom over such matters, we will simply switch off our ears and stick to our bad habits.

This as true for the supposed dangers of phones as it is for eating badly or drinking too much.

The proliferation of these warnings is a tragic shame, because the only truly life-enhancing, researchproven health advice that we need is short, simple and memorable.

To make a difference: don’t smoke, keep your weight in check, get a bit of exercise, take all things in moderation . . . and don’t worry too much.

Anything else is merely the sound of health nannies trying to justify their salaries.