Saving the NHS means forcing us to change the way we lead our lives | Nick Cohen It’s not just Big Macs that would have to go: M&S, Waitrose, transport and sport must be rethought for the common good
If you imagine a healthy future for Britain, or any other country that has put the hunger of millennia behind it, you see a kind of dictatorship. Not a tyranny, but a society that ruthlessly restricts free choice. It is a future that views the mass of people as base creatures jerked around by desires they cannot control. Expert authority must engineer their lives from above for their own good and the common good.
That we need to change radically was shown by a mass study of the health of 300,000 people that was at once entirely shocking and wholly predictable. Newcastle University found obesity and the lack of exercise (the two go together, of course) in the middle aged mean two-thirds will have more than one chronic illness when they reach 65. These bleakly titled “multiple morbidities” will afflict them simultaneously. (For in the future, illnesses will not come as single spies but in battalions.) Most are the natural consequence of our high calorie/low exercise world: arthritis, cancer, diabetes, dementia and strokes. Continue reading... The Guardian
If you imagine a healthy future for Britain, or any other country that has put the hunger of millennia behind it, you see a kind of dictatorship. Not a tyranny, but a society that ruthlessly restricts free choice. It is a future that views the mass of people as base creatures jerked around by desires they cannot control. Expert authority must engineer their lives from above for their own good and the common good.
That we need to change radically was shown by a mass study of the health of 300,000 people that was at once entirely shocking and wholly predictable. Newcastle University found obesity and the lack of exercise (the two go together, of course) in the middle aged mean two-thirds will have more than one chronic illness when they reach 65. These bleakly titled “multiple morbidities” will afflict them simultaneously. (For in the future, illnesses will not come as single spies but in battalions.) Most are the natural consequence of our high calorie/low exercise world: arthritis, cancer, diabetes, dementia and strokes. Continue reading... The Guardian
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