Has health guidance gone a tad too far?

In the last few days, Britain’s Food Standards Agency has compared being around cake in the office to passive smoking. The Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction has concluded that no amount of alcohol is safe. Yes, our wellbeing is important, but can’t we have fun anymore?

Barely a month into 2023, and we’re already being bombarded with a variety of new ways to take the fun out of life.

As if January and all its restrictive trends weren’t bleak enough, alarmist headlines vilifying the little joys we have left are beginning to make the rounds.

Britain’s Food Standards Agency has compared being around cake in the office to passive smoking, with chairwoman Susan Jebb arguing that, although it’s not identical, it still inflicts harm on others.

‘We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time, but we undervalue the impact of the environment,’ she said.

‘If nobody brought cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Yes, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.’

While the FSA recognises it is indeed a choice to eat sweet treats, it also wants us to help each other out by urging us to provide more ‘supportive’ surroundings.

In the context of tackling the obesity crisis the UK currently faces, this sounds all well and good.

Unfortunately, it’s Jebb’s phrasing that’s the problem. Her outlandish claim that a slice of gateaux is killing us as quickly as second-hand cigarette fumes has, unsurprisingly, encouraged a heated response from the public.

At its core, the statement is heavily shrouded in diet culture jargon and points toward a future where we can’t even celebrate a colleagues birthday without apparently needing to worry about carcinogens.

I have a strong inkling I won’t be rushing to add this to my January resolutions, folks.