Surprised at you swallowing that one whole! You don't think that just possibly the word has come down from on high, that is, the H.M. Treasury, that costs must be cut somehow, someway? And why all this grovelling at the feet of so-called experts? It might be difficult to argue with them because we lack the expertise but don't assume that they're always right. I can remember being told on adverts and bill-boardings everywhere, backed by the informed medical opinion of the day, to 'go to work on an egg'. Now, I'm told by another set of experts that such a practice will either poison me or put up my cholesterol. Can I sue?

Well, when the government do make such decisions for financial reasons, they're quite open about it, so I see no need to suspect sneakiness. Yet. But that's hardly the point. I wasn't writing about the real debate; I was writing about the presentation of the story by the media. I am well aware that there may well be proper arguments against this new ruling from NICE, but Channel 5 News certainly weren't mentioning them, and neither has any of the other coverage I've seen.

Cholesterol in your blood can be bad for you. After making that discovery, scientists assumed that cholesterol in your diet would cause cholesterol in your blood. They tested this hypothesis for about forty years before finally admitting that the total lack of evidence meant that it probably wasn't true. Eating eggs will not raise your cholesterol, in much the same way as eating pork scratchings doesn't give you extra skin.

However, that and other blunders aside, it is often the case that our state of scientific knowledge changes. The sensible and rational thing to do is to act on our current knowledge. Else what? Don't eat vitamin C in case we discover in 2050 that it's bad for us?

Nice post. I read the first silly comment and it was a delight to see it so appropriately answered.

Steve, you're too kind. Really. People will think we're in league.

I am sorry 'Steve' thinks my comment "silly" but there ain't much I can do about it except to point out that when my cholesterol was found to be high the first thing pressed on me by my doctor ("an expert") was a diet sheet. I scanned it quickly and remarked that it seemed to be a very tasty diet and was told rather sharply that that was the list of foods I should no longer eat. I binned it!

A little later, the entire government machine (more experts!) went into overdrive to tell me that if the cholesterol in eggs didn't get me the salmonella food poisoning would, as zillions of chickens were put to death. Our host suggests that "[t]he sensible and rational thing to do is to act on our current knowledge". As this appears to change and contradict itself every ten years I would urge evryone to ignore it and instead to eat and drink what the hell they like and remember that as "we all owe God a death!" we should enjoy what we can of the life.

Anyway, as the late, great Auberon Waugh pointed out we are all living far too long and proving to be an intolerable burden to our 'kids' (God rot their selfish little souls!), so our duty is to eat as much fatty food as possible, to drink everything we can lay hands on and to indulge in as much unprotected sex as we can either get or manage, but above all, to die quickly!

Those are all ways to increase your chances of dying slowly, not quickly. You want to die quickly, jump off a bridge.


> the entire government machine (more experts!)

Is that supposed to be as funny as it is?


> Our host suggests that "[t]he sensible and rational thing to do is to act on our current knowledge".

Yes, but I also pointed out that the whole cholesterol thing was bollocks. Avoiding eggs in order to keep your cholesterol down was never a part of our scientific knowledge; it was a scientific hypothesis with a giant stack of evidence against it, that was inexplicably clung on to by scientists. Scientists aren't perfect.

You also appear to have missed the irony that, in acting according to your personal experiences of the fallibility of scientists, you are acting according to your current knowledge. That doesn't contradict my point; it backs it up.