Gratuitous advice?

Well, the health lobby aren’t going to be too happy about the results of the poll on eating “five-a-day”. This was another one run jointly with Mark Wadsworth, and achieved an impressive 160 responses. A mere 19% of respondents actually succeeded in eating five a day, while 56% - over half – only managed two or less, and 14% said they didn’t have any at all. There might be some element of making a point in that voting, but even so the conclusion is pretty telling. The original poll results can be seen here – the comments are worth reading.

As I’ve said before, while this isn’t bad advice as such, it is something that was plucked out of the air and has no scientific basis. It tends to be presented as something that is essential to healthy living rather than a nice-to-have ideal, and the consequences of not adhering to it are greatly exaggerated. Also, made-up “rules” of this kind are likely to undermine the credibility of all health messages, however sound their scientific backing. When you were a small child, if you were told not to do something, but given no better reason than “because mummy says so”, you would never have found it very convincing.

I have also reported in the past that a large-scale study found that adhering to this guideline only reduced cancer risk by 2.5%, which is statistically insignificant.