Michael Law writer for the New Zealand Sunday Star Times echoed the feeling of countless individuals worldwide in a recent column titled: I’m in Health Warning Fatigue.

According to Law…

“Bacon is the gender equivalent of chocolate. Where women find the aroma of dark, milk or white something exotic and alluring, men have similar olfactory palpitations about smoked, honeyed and natural. A week without bacon is a week without the culinary connubial.

So it is with a degree of disaffection, even dismay, that this week we learned that virtually all processed meats are bad for you. Bacon, ham, salami and sausage. The four basic food groups condemned as cancer-inducing and corrosive of liver, bowel and virtually every organ between the esophagus and the ordure.

The World Cancer Research Fund has reviewed 7000 scientific papers on the causes of cancer, and decided that cancer is not a fate, but a matter of risk. It then outlines seven steps to safeguard one against the rotting disease. And every one of them combines the self-sacrifice of Christian Lent with Muslim Ramadan - except they are permanent.

Which is the problem with all public health surveys these days. Frankly, we’ve given up - the reason we are obese, don’t exercise and have descended into slobdom is relatively simple. We are tired of being lectured by weedy nerds and chicks who have had liposuction, that we are eating our way into an early grave.

Besides, we are not dumb. We look at the mortality statistics and they all indicate that this is the longest-lived generation in the history of humanity. That despite the carcinogenics pumped into our food sources, despite the insecticide and pesticide residues, despite the eschewing of exercise in favour of electronic entertainment and McFries, our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents all died younger.

And we have company. It is not as if we blob alone. As smokers congregate and take comfort in their social isolation, so too do fatties embrace their fellows and fellow-ettes and reject the thin world.

Thin people, we argue, are like joggers, you never see a happy one - just plenty of stress, strain and sweat. If that’s what it takes to fit the body mass index, then we have a simple solution. Get a new one. Make Size 12, 14 and 16 the new standards - XL and XXL the post-modern definition of svelte.

And therein lies the fatal flaw in the obesity epidemic argument. There is no proof that being fat reduces life expectancy. Even if it did, it would only trim years in the nether regions when the quality of life is crap anyway. So if I die at 89 instead of 93 - then wearing adult diapers and dribbling over nursie for another four years is not exactly fulfilment.

Of course, I’ll probably have a different view of that equation when I’m 89. Depending upon what nursie looks like. But the truth is that most of us prefer to indulge in the present, rather than deny ourselves because we’re death-averse. We prefer not to think about it: death happens to other people.

As for the list of things I must give up: dear God, what’s left? Steak, the booze, bacon and ham, and fizzy drinks are mandatory swerves. But I must match this with a daily regime of exercise, a refusal to gain any kilos over the age of 21, and the breastfeeding of my kids. Male breastfeeding - is the world really ready?

No mention of smoking, though. When a packet of pork becomes more dangerous than a packet of Rothmans, then I know I have reached public health warning fatigue. Besides, the last scientific study into cancer- causing compounds identified genetic heritage and stress as the twin stalkers.

There is bugger-all that I can do about the DNA that has been twisted within, and I drink, eat and don’t exercise as deliberate stress reducers. All the world needs now is a bunch of unhappy, middle-aged men going for a jog. Who then clog up A & E after suffering a heart attack.

And there’s the point. Risk avoidance in one area only tends to promote chance in another. Take the plight of Generation X and Generation Y parents.

They are currently being lauded after Census figures revealed that men in their 20s, 30s and 40s are working less overtime, and spending more time with their kids. Apparently us baby-boomers had it the other way around - another hour at work was one less nappy we had to change, one less toddler tantrum to confront. And we had the extra dosh for the holiday, that new car or the tickets to the footie. Yes, but you could read these latest stats a different way. That the Gen X and Y-ers are just bone, bloody lazy. Bugger-all of Gen Y has babies and they spend most of their time binge- drinking, taking party drugs, and moaning about their student debt. While Gen X are hardly ideal parents, if their teenage kids are any indication: a collection of YouTubers and Facebookers aping their parents’ drinking habits and growing fat in front of the PC.

As a baby-boomer, all I want to know is that someone will be working and paying tax when I’m of retirement age. My parents’ generation has been living off my generation’s labour - getting inflation-adjusted super, clogging up the hospitals and now even getting a discount Gold Card simply for being an old fart.

Fine: so long as I get the same when I’m an old fart. And this Gen X and Y slacking is hardly instilling we baby-boomers with confidence. Which means we can kiss goodbye to the idea of the seaside retreat at 65, and all those languid days doing nothing. Which is why that cancer survey is so doubly depressing. We are not only risking our mortality, but our kids’ attitudes are likely to lessen its quality. Ah, stuff it: give me that bacon buttie.