EDITOR’S LETTER

THE PURSUIT OF HEALTH IS NOT A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD

As a rule, we try to take a positive line.

Men’s Health is about proactivity. We exist to arm you with the tools and tricks to make the most out of life, to realise your physical and mental potential and to… well, you’ve heard all this before, not least from me boring on. But sometimes, we stumble across stories that demand to be published, whether or not they fulfil the wholesome, feel-good brief. At the end of the day, we are a health magazine – and not all health is good. On page 86, you’ll find a feature titled The Great Divide. It concerns life expectancy. But more specifically, it’s about the unprecedented directional change in which life expectancy is heading. In September last year, after more than a century-long trend of Britons growing steadily older, the Office for National Statistics reported that a man born in 2018 to 2020 could expect to live for 79.0 years – seven weeks less than the average man born between 2015 and 2017. But this wasn’t the really shocking news. Such averages mask a far starker reality in the fortunes of the country’s rich and poor. If you’re a man living in the vicinity of Sloane Square in the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea today, you can expect to live to be 95. However, if you’re a man living in central Blackpool, one of the poorest neighbourhoods in the country, your life expectancy is 68 years. And the gap is widening. Read that twice if you have to. I certainly did. In fact, I’ve read it far more times than that and I still can’t quite fathom how we live in a society where a man’s time above terra firma can be 27 years different by dint of your postcode. If anyone was ever in any doubt of the inequality in Britain today, it’s written there – not in political propaganda, just cold, hard statistics. And it’s not all down to Covid, either. In 2010, Sir Michael Marmot, the founder of the UCL Institute of Health Equity and one of the world’s leading experts on public health, identified six areas that would need to improve if we were to close the health gap between rich and poor. These were: early years development; education; working opportunities and conditions; income; housing and environment; and lifestyle (vices, virtues, exercise, nutrition, etc). Almost all of the services that worked to address these issues had their funding cut under the austerity programme implemented by the coalition government that came to power in 2010. And while the present administration has declared an ‘end to austerity’, none have had their funding restored. Marmot also notes that local government funding in the least deprived areas went down by 16% per person under austerity; in the most deprived areas, it went down by 32% per person. The more you crunch the numbers, the less impartial it’s possible to be. The picture is clear: income inequality leads to health inequality. As King’s College London economist Jonathan Portes says, ‘If you really want to do something about it, you just have to make Britain a more equal society. Simple as that.’ The real reason I struggle with placing such a message on the pages of Men’s Health has nothing to do with politics. It’s that the solution, however apparently ‘simple’, is beyond the likes of us, with our 30-day plans and ‘inspirational’ transformation stories. Still, I hope you’ll agree it’s worth reporting – and repeating. So, if you only read one feature in this issue, make sure it’s The Great Divide. It might not put a spring in your step, but it demands notice. But if you decide to read a little more than that – and dear God, please do – then allow me to make another recommendation. This issue marks the inaugural publication of a new profile franchise called Talking Heads. It features our new contributing editor, Alastair Campbell, a man known as much for his brutally honest accounts of his own mental health struggles – not to mention his strident campaigning for greater awareness and parity of esteem – as his erstwhile political career. Talking Heads will see Alastair in conversation with various and wide-ranging public luminaries on the subjects of psychology, mindset, and both mental strengths and weaknesses. As he says in his opening salvo, ‘Don’t worry, this isn’t just an excuse for me to bang on about mental health – though there will be a bit of that. It’s a series of interviews with fascinating people, with special focus on the psychological side of what they do.’ To coincide with the start of the Six Nations, Alastair’s first interview takes place in the living room of England and British Lions star, Maro Itoje. When I first set out to make Men’s Health a magazine that dealt with the physical and mental aspects of good health in simpatico, this is precisely the sort of thing I envisaged. I hope it resonates.