What’s the point of worrying?

Isn’t it irritating, the way we are told one thing about the stuff we use and eat now, often totally opposite to what we were being told just a year or so before! For instance, I remember a time, not too long ago, (can’t have been too long, I still remember it!) when we were suddenly informed that eggs were not good for us because they were apparently all loaded with e-coli or similar, and this was just after Edwina Curry in the United Kingdom had been telling the world to “Go to work on an egg!” I don’t know if that phrase arrived in Australia too, but it certainly caused a bit of a stir in England. Then, no sooner had we absorbed this wisdom before we were told eggs were bad and for years hundreds of UK egg producers went broke, recipes for eggless cakes and sponges were invented and eggs themselves were used for little more than animal feed. Then we went full circle and the little oval beauties are now reckoned to be good for us again!

Similar treatment has been dished out to animal fat, (supposed to clog our arteries), non-organic vegetables, chocolate, sugar and salt, among many others. Yet it was only a hundred years or so ago that you would honour a visitor into your house by giving him the fattiest piece off the side of bacon hanging in the rafters. This was because the fat offered valuable protection during the winter months, helping to keep the people of the house warm and reasonably healthy at a time when all food was scarce. To give some of that to a visitor was a compliment indeed! We are told organic vegetables are the only ones good for us, yet now some experts are telling us there is little, if any difference between organic and non-organic, except that the non organic has been treated to remove bugs, using chemicals that are fully washed off long before the product reaches our tables. Chocolate was going to rot our teeth for a while and do all sorts of other dreadful things to us, yet now we’re told it’s OK to eat the stuff, in moderation and it must be dark, not milk! Sugar is going to give us diabetes and salt will harden our arteries, though you also need both of these, just to stay alive.

But what amazes me is that the human race has been indulging in all these so-called dangerous products and many others I haven’t mentioned, for hundreds if not thousands of years and yet we still survive, bigger, better and longer lived than ever before! And don’t forget that all this bad stuff still produced Winston Churchill, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Lord Nelson of Trafalgar, to name just a few.

Another thing that bothers me is the danger we are supposed to be in if we use mobile phones, live anywhere near radio masts, watch too much television or spend too much time in front of a computer. Yet if you stop to think about it, the air around you is always absolutely packed with radio waves all the time, from radio stations, television stations, mobile phones and many other sources, including space itself, all passing right through our bodies as if we didn’t exist at all, and all apparently, doing us no harm at all.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that I might just as well get on with living. If the food doesn’t kill me the sun’s rays will eventually, or the radiation from atomic plants, or all that radio energy passing through my body, or just plain old age!

We all have to go sometime, so we might as well enjoy it while we’re here, and you really can’t enjoy anything if you worry about it too much.

Have you made the conscious decision to stop worrying about something? How has it made you feel? Do you enjoy life more? Share your stories in the comments below…