Did you see the headlines this week? We should be eating at least SEVEN portions of fruit and veg a day. Otherwise, we'll die (early).
And you can't take the easy option, slackers, of guzzling down litres of fruit juice to cram the portions in because that's even worse than not eating any at all.
Australia, apparently, already recommends 7-a-day (5 veg and 2 fruit), and their portions are bigger, so equivalent to more than EIGHT portions for Brits. Crikey.
In fact, one ''expert' (I parenthesise that because I don't know what he was an expert in, probably head of 'Scaring People With Numbers') said that we should be recommending the government to increase their guideline recommendations to TEN.
TEN? Is there room after ten portions of fruit and veg to eat anything else? Or is that the point? It's now so difficult to tell whether we should be eating proteins or carbs or marg or butter or this meat or that meat or no meat or horse meat that it's probably best just to cut the rest out, isn't it?
No, of course it's not.
After reading this news at the airport my two subsequent purchases were 1. A Healthy Green Juice Thing from Pret and 2. A massive bar of Green & Blacks butterscotch chocolate.
And I bet my split response is typical. Or that the splitting is typical anyway: such news motivates some people to eat more portions and puts off others completely.
The fact is that 75% of people don't get to 5-a-day, never mind 7 or even 10. And any of them that are trying to get to 5 (but not making it), when they see the figure going up, will probably go 'F**k It', and reach for the chocolate.
Or maybe seeing it going up to 7 forces us to do better. Maybe we generally have 4-a-day but think we've done okay because we're nearly there... and that raising it to 7-a-day would now make us eat 5 or 6.
Who knows? They could probably predict the effect of such news quite easily - my guess is that those who really care about their diet will try even harder, and eat more fruit and veg, and those who don't care so much will shrug and eat even less.
As in many areas of modern life the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer (in this case, nutritionally speaking).
Incidentally, one thing I bet 99% of readers missed about this bit or research (because it wasn't included in most stories, or was hidden near the end of the story) is that the researchers weren't confirming a causal link. What that means is that, though it's clear that people who eat more fruit & veg are living longer, it's not certain that it's the fruit & veg that's causing it (in this study at least).
It could be that those people who eat lots of fruit and veg have knobblier knees. And having knobbly knees has two effects in life - to give you a predilection for fruit & veg, and help you live longer. When this is discovered as scientific fact, people will be rushing off to surgeons to have their knees knobbled.
I could go on about this. But F**k It, I, like you, am busy. Too busy now buying, washing and preparing more frickin' vegetables actually.
So we'll stop there - eat your greens, and your greens and blacks, and, the biggest thing, don't worry too much about any of it.
That's the F**k It way.