Three things, I "learned" yesterday, are liable to increase one's chances of heart attack. Social smoking - that was in Grazia. Heartbreak - in the Telegraph. It didn't specify whether this had to be the meaningful loss of a loved one, or whether any old fruit loop with an unrequited crush might find a picture of Brad and Angelina triggering myocardial infarction. And yo-yo dieting - in the Mail. This one is particularly unfair.
Obesity puts pressure on the heart, so dieting is expressly encouraged. Yet if you fail, you wreck your muscle that much more, and so are enjoined even more forcefully to diet - only you will even more comprehensively injure yourself should you fail again. I could have used the time spent reading medical scare stories in some more beneficial way, like doing Ashtanga yoga, but if long-termism were a dominant feature of the human condition, which of us could truly say we'd be alive today?
I suppose there is academic interest to be had from the heartbreak finding - stress hormones at the point of a catastrophic event flood the heart, causing chest pain, breathlessness and, possibly, heart failure. It gives a rational explanation to what has hitherto been a more poetic observation. And when a medical factette like the one about yo-yo dieting contains a profound irony, it's always good to know. But in the end, this is just like all other medical news: it is either a very slight variation on something we've known for ages (the social smoking); or it can be filed squarely under "can't do anything about it".
I have a relative, let's call her my mother, who has developed an annoying habit since she had a heart attack. Whenever she eats anything salty, she says ominously: "This is very salty." If you ignore her she continues: "It's not good for your heart at all." My stock response is: "You've got to ask yourself how long you really want to live." She probably finds me as annoying as I find her, but at least she has the boon of being deaf and only hearing me one time in four.
What prophylactic measures are we prepared to take? Many of us prefer the prospect of a long retirement to ready-salted crisps (though I'm not one), but how many of us would sever our meaningful ties to avoid the possibility of dying of a broken heart? I just pulled the second switch of mainstream cod-medical discussion. After "worrying about things that are self-evidently out of your control", the other great media swizzle is "rhetorically comparing two risks that are massively different in scale".
Salt is way more dangerous than emotional catastrophe, and smoking is 20,000 times more carcinogenic than using a mobile phone, but you wouldn't know it from the coverage. Again, the upshot is a feeling of powerlessness. You'd hope that this constant bombardment with a sense of one's own impotence would engender a sense of fatalism, make us more outward looking, less self-involved, more altruistic. That is never the way it works. The more powerless we feel, the more feverishly we believe in doctors; the more superhuman the authority we vest in them, the more cranky and litigious we become when they let us down.
In other words, these tactics benefit neither the ill nor the healers. They don't benefit our organs, or alter our behaviour. They possibly decrease overall happiness, which diminishes the immune system, but for God's sake don't take that to heart, since there's nothing you can do about it apart from be more happy. There might be a solid psycho-physiological reason why a broken heart and yo-yo dieting cause heart attacks: it might be your body asking itself "how long do I really want to live in this vale of misery?" and answering, "not very long". Perhaps, when researchers have exhausted the carcinogenic properties of arguing with one's spouse or living in a house, they could investigate that.
