Health, food, booze and smoking

One of the things in that title is of no interest to me even though I seem to have a lot of it. Dentist, doctor, even the optician have been surprised that I appear to be in rude health despite years of smoking, drinking, eating what I feel like eating and ignoring every bit of medical advice ever issued.

I keep some Paracetamol and Ibuprofen around the place just in case, but the packs often go out of date before I open them. Plasters and bandages get quite a lot of use though. I just bought a pack of glass drilling bits in Aldi. I’ll restock with bandages before testing them.

I’m still sending a bottle to JP’s Workshop to be made into a lamp properly. It’ll take me a little time to learn this new skill and I have books to deal with before I risk losing fingers. So the next ‘bleeding again’ post should be some time away.

I do proper home cooking too but a quick microwave lasagna or curry is always on my menu. Especially if I’m in a hurry. Salt… I have several kilos of it at all times. It never goes off, it’s just sodium chloride. Nothing grows in it and even mice won’t steal it. Salads have no taste without a good dose of salt. Of course you need potassium as well as sodium and I get most of my potassium from bananas, which I’m quite partial to once they turn spreadable.

Booze is limited only by what I have to hand and whether I feel like nipping down to Local Shop in town here. It’s only two miles along unlit winding country road, populated by maniacs in Audis and Range Rovers, some tractors and a rare bus. A brisk walk… Nothing can go wrong.

Smoking is still the biggest demon, although the others are catching up. Vaping is… well, it’s smoking according to Taxpayer Funded Hate Machine that successive governments have nurtured.

They are still insisting that nicotine is addictive and that nicotine is the harmful part of smoking (picked up via Twitter). Both of these assertions are lies.

They actually had to change the definition of addiction to get smoking classed as one. That change meant that a shoe collection was a shoe addiction and that anything you enjoy doing – and so do it often – is now an addiction.

You might not even enjoy it. If you have a job where you get home at 9:30 pm, a quick microwave meal might be the only sensible option. No time to peel potatoes and gut and pluck a passing pigeon for a fine repast. You’d be eating after midnight and might turn into a gremlin. Who wants to risk that?

Yet, if you have those meals often, you’re a junk food addict. Yes, they had to set the addiction bar so low to get smoking included that they included absolutely everything.

Nicotine is not addictive. If it were I could not have gone on that flight to China years back because it was a nonsmoking flight. I wasn’t climbing the walls at the other end, I waited until we were clear of the airport and at our destination (The University of Beijing in case anyone gives a shit) before sitting in the smoking room with the other smokers (almost everyone) and enjoying a relaxing puff.

That was the point at which I realised it could not be an addiction. An addict could not go without a fix during an airport wait, a 20 hour flight, getting through passport and customs control then a drive through the traffic of Beijing. I should have been a wreck. I was totally calm throughout – well, as long as I didn’t look at what the Chinese drivers were doing. It’s the only place I’ve ever seen a traffic control policeman just throw up his hands, give up and walk away.

As for nicotine being dangerous, how many times does that need to be debunked before the ‘experts’ get it?

They are either blatantly lying or they have no fucking clue what they are talking about. Take this ridiculous sentence from the first link…

AUGUSTA, Ga. —  Did you realize that nearly 90% of adult smokers started using cigarettes before they were 18?

The 18 age limit is recent. Before that it was 16 so yes, most current adult smokers will have legally started before they were 18 and a lot started even before that. Going back further, when I was small my dad sent me and my brother to the shop to get his smokes. The day we came back and said they wouldn’t sell them to us any more, he went down to that shop in a hell of a rage.

My brother and I were pissed off too. We used to get sweets with the change and that stopped abruptly.

So either they have no memory of the past or they are lying. Either way, having those people in charge of anything at all is not a good idea.

“The adolescent brain is much more addictive to nicotine than if you try tobacco for the first time in any form when you get to college,” explains Dr. Martha S. Tingen, Charles W. Linder, MD Chair in Pediatrics and associate director of the Georgia Prevention Institute at the Medical College of Georgia.

I started smoking at 21. I started with cigars, not cigarettes. As for the horrible grammatical construction of that sentence, oh I can’t be bothered. You deal with it.

It’s utter, utter bollocks. Totally made up. Not a grain of truth in there at all.

So is this –

“E-cigarettes are not a healthy alternative. They also contain nicotine and nicotine is what us damaging to your body. Nicotine is what is so addictive. So, even thought they think they’re now smoking a vapor and ‘it’s not as bad for me, I’m not inhaling,’ all the evidence on e-cigarettes is not in, but it is NOT a healthy alternative.”

I have come to doubt the health claims around smoking, largely due to the work  of Junican and Frank Davis but also from my own experience. The warning pictures on cigarette packets are all lies, we’ve known that for many years, but even the cancer claims are suspect now.

Smoke might well cause cancer. But humans have lived with smoke forever. In caves, in thatched cottages, in houses up until the 70s and in my current house – now. We have always breathed smoke.

So why is lung cancer such a recent thing? Why is it not the leading cause of death among Apaches or Comanche or all the other American natives who had this stuff long before we did? Come on, tobacco control. Let’s hear it.

Why did lung cancer show up big time at the introduction of diesel fuels and not at  any time in the 400 years of UK smoking before that? Come on, tobacco control. Answer that.

It’s a slow developing disease? Really? Four fucking centuries?

I have several electrofags and they are all fun but I’m not getting away from real smoke any time soon, or indeed ever. I have a wood burning stove and two other fireplaces now. I have real fire inside the house like in the old days and I love it.

Some still believe smoke will kill them even though humanity has lived with smoke since its origins. We might well get sick from smoke deprivation now. We’ve lived with fire since we began and smoke comes with it. We adapted to it, we’re used to it, and we might struggle to adapt to its absence.

Well you might. I’m fine over here.

In the smoke.