How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [20]
Pricking science’s silly sausages
There are food riots in Haiti and Bangladesh. In Kenya hunger has driven half the population to set fire to the other half. In Bolivia they are fighting over vegetables. And even in Italy people took to the streets to complain about the price of pasta. So you might imagine that all of the world’s scientists are currently in their bunkers, desperately trying to figure out why the world is running out of food all of a sudden and, more importantly, what can be done. For sure, they had a stab a while back at genetically modifying wheat so that it would grow – with no water, sunlight or soil – into a pre-packed, pre-sliced loaf. Sadly, though, the whole thing had to be abandoned when some anti-GM food activists turned up in white boiler suits and rolled all over the experiment.
And now, it seems, the world’s boffins have got more important things on their enormous minds. Last week, for instance, as the fires in Haiti burnt, a group of eggheads at Yale University announced that, after some exhaustive research, they’d proved women who eat chocolate five times a week are 40 per cent less likely to get pre-eclampsia than those who indulge only once a week.
Meanwhile, in Britain, scientists at Manchester and Newcastle universities announced that if you eat two tomatoes a day you are less likely to get sunburnt when on holiday this year. And that you will have a lovely complexion well into old age.
What’s more, on the very same day that the Americans were making their announcement about chocolate and the Brits about tomatoes, leading scientists in Germany published a report that says if you have a dog in your house your children are less likely to develop hay fever. I promise I am not making any of this up.
And then we learnt that a popular osteoporosis drug will break your heart, that hair dye will give you cancer and that those pots of friendly bacteria, which look like jars of sperm, will stop your kids getting eczema.
Furthermore – and I’m still only giving you the scientific news from Tuesday – we heard that women who take HRT will have a stroke; that smokers get depressed more easily; that Range Rovers cause global warming; and that if you take pills for high blood pressure you will become stick-thin and, I don’t know, fall through grates in the street or be taken away by a stork.
I thought we’d reached a new pit of scientific balderdash when they announced last month that anyone who eats one sausage a day, or three rashers of bacon, increases their chances of getting bowel cancer by a fifth. But no. Scientists in California decided to go one better and announced last Monday, wait for it, that if you send your children to a playgroup you cut their chances of catching leukaemia by 30 per cent.
Honestly, if you believed everything these scientists say you’d never dare get up, go outside or dip your celery into even the smallest pinch of salt. You’d be terrified that a tomato might turn you into Joan Collins. You wouldn’t smoke or drink or go near a pylon in case you caught ebola. In fact you’d spend your entire life in a playgroup classroom, fearful that at any minute the door would be broken down by a swarm of cancerous sausages.
Happily, of course, we pay not the slightest bit of attention because we think we know exactly what’s going on here. We reckon, for instance, that if a scientist says a playgroup will cure the common cold he’s being funded by a company that owns playgroups. And similarly we suspect that when a scientist stands up and says you have to eat tomatoes, his clothes, hairstyle and house may well have been paid for by someone with a greenhouse.
And then there’s the sausages business. Do they really expect us to believe that a scientist woke up one morning and thought, I know, I’m going to see if a pork chipolata does anything nasty to my bowels. All of which brings me on to a bunch of boffins in Australia who are warning people not to flush their tropical fish down the lavatory. I know several people who keep such fish in England and none has ever felt the