"Microlives": I'm pretty certain this is utter tripe...

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...from the Guardian (where else) with some people's wonderful new 'live forever' theory:

The Norm Chronicles, a new book by journalist Michael Blastland and Professor David Spiegelhalter that has a neat idea which turns all these abstract dangers into a concrete figure.

It centres on this idea: once you hit adulthood (or, being more precise, 22 for a man and 26 for a woman) you can expect to live for around 500,000 more hours – or a million half-hours. Each of those 30 minutes of life is a "microlife".

By working out the average effect of, say, smoking or eating red meat, we can figure out a cost in microlives for different habits. A portion of red meat, for example, costs you a microlife – in the words of Blastland, it's "a 30-minute chip off your stock of adult life".

This seems to me to be ignorance squared - taking averages (I guess 'norms') and using them as a predictor of individual life expectancy is not either good maths or good science. Maybe that's not what the book says - the good professor is, after all, a statistician. But it is what the Guardian says the book says - essentially that we can quantify the effect on our individual health of actions where the effect is based on estimates of how much the action adds or subtracts from our lifespan.

The problem is - and if we thought about it for a second we'd know this - that the estimates are open to question. We really haven't much of a clue about the impact of eating red meat on life expectancy even if we do have a general (if challenged) idea that a diet of red meat isn't ever so healthy. For sure, where there's a known dose-response effect (e.g. with smoking - note the word is smoking not tobacco - or alcohol) there's perhaps a bit of a case. But for things such as exercise there is little evidence that getting sweaty on the treadmill extends life - the the adding of microlives on the rowing machine is probably nonsense.

What we have here is extending the general to the specific (from the whole population average to little old me or you) combined with evidence that, to put it mildly, is open to question and perhaps not epidemiologically sound.

But I guess that the gullible Guardianistas are looking for a 'Spirit Level' for personal health and these authors have delivered! However, such tripe is best served with onions and accompanied by a good claret.

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A little contrast...

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Yesterday, amid great fanfare, the Parliamentary Science & Technology Committee announced the latest push to 'denormalise' alcohol featuring the "have two days of booze" in a week argument. An argument that presumably applies to Mildred who has one small glass of white wine with the dinner she eats in front of the telly every evening as well as to the toothless street drinker.

Alcohol is bad - look at the drain on the economy, look at how many people (using our lunatic method of calculation for such things) are filling up casualty! So up goes the duty, the nasty nationalist, lefties in Scotland bung in a minimum price and the result is:

The investigation by HMRC uncovered the unregulated and fire hazardous industrial unit at Moscow Farm, near Great Dalby, during raids in September 2009. They seized nine thousand bottles of fake vodka, branded as Glen’s, 25,000 litres of pure denatured alcohol (enough to make around 100,000 bottles of vodka), manufacturing equipment, bottles and counterfeit packaging – labels and cardboard boxes.

Evidence showed around 165,000 bottles of the fake vodka had been distributed across the UK for sale. 

Today, in contrast, £30 million in extra public funding was directed towards another cause of lifestyle-related admissions to hospital (over 250,000 of them each year) - sport. But unlike alcohol, exercise is a good thing so merits a celebratory press release:

The Centre will be truly national – promoting sport and exercise medicine – made up of three network partners around the country. The Health Secretary made the announcement today while visiting Loughborough University, one of the network partners.

The Centre will help more people to be more active, treat injuries caused by exercise and conditions associated with lack of exercise.

If the consumption of alcohol by adults was treated the same way, I'd like to bet we'd have much less of a problem.

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Do we need a jogging tax?

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On the logic that people should be discouraged from engaging in lifestyle choices that damage their health - that these things should be "denormalised" - we should take action about jogging. Especially given the burden such inconsiderate activity places on the the NHS.

MRI scans on 40 athletes training for challenging sporting events like triathlons or alpine cycle races showed most had stretched heart muscles.

Although many went on to make a complete recovery after a week, five showed more permanent injuries.

The researchers told the European Heart Journal how these changes might cause heart problems like arrhythmia. 

I know the industry - let's call it "Big Gym" - says these are minor considerations and that "endurance training isn't unhealthy" but surely something must be done.  And remember that it's not just this increased risk of heart disease, there are over 250,000 admissions to hospital resulting from sports injuries in the UK alone.

Perhaps we should set up Exercise Concern?

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Should we 'denormalise' sport?

We’re told – rightly so I believe – that taking part in sport and exercise is good for us. However, in the spirit of understanding and, with a wry couch potato smile, I thought I’d have a look at the problems with exercise.

Back in 2005 a survey was done for “Spaces for Sports” looking at the incidence of sports injury.

New research by Barclays Spaces for Sports has revealed that just under a third (30 per cent) of the nation pick up 22 million sporting injuries per year.  The major causes of these injuries are over-exertion, lack of preparation and general clumsiness, with third party involvement and slippery surfaces also blamed. On average a person regularly participating in sport will pick up 1.65 injuries every year and will take up to five days off work or college due to incapacity and/or treatment.

Stop for a second and calculate the cost to business of all those sprained ankles, broken collar bones and ruptured Achilles tendons. Consider, if you will, the burden these selfish people are placing on our National Health Service – over a quarter of a million emergency admissions every year. Our accident and emergency departments are, quite literally, clogged with sports men and women and their injuries.

Yet we never read of the dreadful burden all this indulgence brings upon society, there are no campaigns to ban rugby or football, to stop people doing lasting damage to knees and hips by running on hard roads. Indeed we praise those super-fit individuals for their dedication, their healthy lifestyle and their sporting prowess.

Contrast this with the new assault on the couch potato – following on from attacking smoking, drinking and the humble burger, we must now condemn TV:

Dr Lennert Veerman, from the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, and colleagues report their findings today in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

"If our estimates are correct, then TV viewing is in the same league as smoking and obesity," he said.

Last year, another Australian study by Professor David Dunstan and colleagues from the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Melbourne found an hour of TV viewing a day led to an 8 per cent increase in the risk of premature death.

Oh dear. Not that I believe a word of this – seems like an exercise in conflating all sorts of behavioural traits and then adding a cute bit of arithmetic to get an ace headline.  TV is bad – is killing us.

The point here is that the argument – or one of them – for introducing bans, pricing controls and other nannying nudges is that these sinful behaviours cost society loads of money. We’re forever being regaled with the cost of drinking or smoking or obesity. Yet it seems to me that, for all its goodness, sport and exercise is a huge cost to society in lost work time, in treating injury and in caring for the long-term consequence of sporting injury and strain.

Maybe, for the sake of consistency, we should tax, ban or nudge sport as well – starting with the really dangerous sports such as riding horses or playing rugby and then moving to protect people playing football. More padding, less physical contact, short game time, a smaller pitch and a softer ball – these things will protect those playing and will reduce the cost to society of sports injury.

Just a thought!

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