Terry Wogan: Scientists keep moving the goalposts

Now they say asprin may do more harm than good - and it's not the first about-turn.

I have, in the past, expressed doubts here not just about what “research shows”, coming, as it usually does, from obscure American universities in need of funding, but also whether we should believe a blind word about anything we’re told, particularly about what is supposed to be bad or good for us. It’s the goalposts, ref - they keep moving.

And if it comes to that, it’s time they levelled the playing field as well, as we appear to be playing both halves uphill.

Take the old medical chestnut, the aspirin. A few years ago, medical science extolled the virtues of what, up to then, was regarded as a simple medication, helpful for the headache and the common cold. However, the plain, everyday aspirin, beloved of your granny, turned out to be a boon for the old ticker, thinning the blood, keeping the arteries pumping away. Hurrah!

Not so fast. For now they tell us that the little miracle pill may be doing more harm than good, and may cause internal bleeding. Thanks, guys, back to the drawing board. Meanwhile, do I take the pill to help the heart and risk the bleeding? No answer, comes the stern reply.

Then there arose an even more miraculous medication, the all-purpose cure-all, the great statin. Over the past couple of years, the only claim not made for this little pill was the promise of eternal life. It did everything, from dispatching your cholesterol to fighting the onset of dementia.

Now, not from the University of Nebraska, but the very grove of academe itself, Oxford, comes the startling news that the benefits of a daily statin to people over 50 are about the same as eating an apple or a handful of Brussels sprouts a day. And the Harvard Medical School thinks that science may be barking up the wrong artery with statins, anyway, and heart specialists might be better off keeping an eye on calcium levels in the blood.

And you thought calcium was good for you. All that stuff about strong teeth and healthy bones. Anybody feel akin to the pushmi-pullyu in The Story of Doctor Dolittle? “Nuts!” I hear you cry, and you’re right, particularly if you’re pregnant. For years, expectant mothers with a craving for a peanut have been warned that their indulgence might harm the unborn child and cause an allergic reaction to nuts in later life. Turns out that it was a load of medical tosh, and nuts could well be the new aspirin.

They’re still advertising the added health-giving advantages of vitamins in your daily diet, although it has long since been shown that you’d be better off eating Smarties. Recent, almost cataclysmic, warnings of the dangers of sugar in our diet put me in mind of a Woody Allen movie about someone frozen stiff around about now, revived in the far distant future, who finds that the new miracle food in the next millennium is… sugar.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Graham