Basically nothing is as bad for you as smoking. Short of fairly obvious things like blunt-force trauma or falling out of buildings, anyway. That is a fact worth keeping in mind when you read newspaper headlines about health.
On the front page of the Telegraph’s print edition on Friday ran the headline: ‘Lazy lifestyle can be as deadly as smoking’. The Mail runs the same story, saying: ‘A lack of exercise is as dangerous as smoking.’
Now, remember: Nothing that you do in your daily life, even if you are a lumberjack or an oil-rig diver or whatever, is as deadly as smoking. I pretty much promise you that. Serving with the British Army in Afghanistan is, on one admittedly superficial reading of the statistics, not as dangerous as smoking. (As far as I can work out, rather more than 10,000 UK men and women have served in Afghanistan; fewer than 500 have died; odds of death less than 1 in 20.
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