You know it’s good for you

I went to see a friend earlier. On his kitchen table was a copy of the Daily Express.

Today’s front-page scare-story was this one.

Apparently ‘fizzy drinks’ (unspecified) are as likely to cause liver damage as alcohol.

So, apparently, is fruit juice.

These are to be cut out of the proles’ diet immediately. All they are to be allowed to drink is water.

Of course, several dozen health scares ago there was the one which resulted in the institution (reminiscent of the nastier kind of nursery school) of the ritual chanting of the socialist-hyphenated newspeak “Five-a-day!”.

Now my understanding is that this particular bit of nannying relates to the consumption of fruit and vegetables.

I am not a botanist but have some experience of small-scale market-gardening and I am comfortably certain that fruit juice, far from being made in a stainless-steel vat by the cackling minions of some pluted bloatocrat, is extracted from fruit.

So it is OK (in fact, more or less compulsory) to eat fruit, but to extract the juice thereof and to drink it separately could cost the NHS money.

Just how stupid do people have to be to maintain their voluntary suspension of disbelief in the face of such egregious piffle?

I have a theory about this. The ‘Five-a-day’ thing will be modified. It will in future relate only to vegetables. Not fruit. It never did relate to fruit. Everyone knows fruit juice is dangerous. And that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

So: no fruit juice. No bottled water, either; apparently that causes global warming, or paedophiles, or something. No fizzy drinks of any kind. No alcohol.

Leaving only tap-water, to which more or less anything might be added by those who know best what is good for us.

Vegetables and tap-water.

Could it be that we are being conditioned to accept for the sake of our ‘health’ the only diet which the Comrades of Proven Worth (with their dachas and Party shops) are prepared, for the sake of their continued comfort despite a global food crisis, to allow us?