Beer - It Does a Body Good
IF YOU'RE ANYTHING LIKE ME, which is to say overweight and
slothful, then you had to be happy about the news coming out of the
health sciences this summer.
First of all, let me say that I try to stay as far away as I can
from the health sciences. I don't even know precisely what the
health sciences are. For all I know, I am making up the phrase.
What I do know is that there is health and there is science, and,
taken together, they are a horror movie. If one of my eyes should
happen to land, like a wayward fly, on a headline with the word
exercise or
diet in it, I immediately divert my
attention to something a bit more uplifting, like the price of
gas.
Yet for those of us who disbelieve scientific studies in the
expectation that they will be reversed in a few years anyway,
ignore medical advice when disbelief no longer works, and
procrastinate when ignorance fails, here, finally, is some good
news. Researchers have discovered that disbelief, ignorance, and
procrastination help a body fight
cancer and live a longer, happier
life.
Take, for example, the study that showed the English are healthier
than Americans.
The English?!
The news was met with an audible intercontinental gasp.
The English?! Healthier than Americans?
As a report on
National Public Radio put it: "A new study in the
Journal of the American Medical Association comes to a
conclusion that has surprised even the researchers who conducted
it." It went on to say that a researcher on the study, Michael
Marmot of University College in
London, was "astonished" by the
results. "It was a bit of a big shock," he was quoted as
saying.