Living dangerously

..... researchers have calculated the effect that TV can have on life expectancy.
Actually, it’s not so much the TV as the sedentary lifestyle that’s the killer. If an hour of watching, say, washed up celebrities attempting to survive in the jungle will fast-forward your heart attack, so will reading for hours on end. But the health authorities won’t tell you to get rid of your books and go for a walk instead.
One of England’s Chief Medical Officers, Sally Davies, said: “The UK’s Chief Medical Officers recently updated their advice on physical activity to be more flexible, right from babyhood to adult life. Adults, for example, can get their 150 minutes of activity a week in sessions of 10 minutes or more and for the first time we have provided guidelines on reducing sedentary time.”
Right from babyhood? I wonder who among us began exercising so young. Babies are supposed to be sedentary. They’re supposed to lie back and guzzle their milk and take long naps. What do the experts expect? Twenty pushups every morning?
And who needs guidelines on reducing sedentary time?
Instructions: Remove derriere from sofa at least five times every day. Put one foot in front of the other. Repeat.
Are we getting dumber as well as lazier? And if we are getting dumber, it might be because we’re taking way too many holidays.
Another piece of research, this time by Siegfried Lehrl of the University of Erlangen in Germany (see story on Page 5), indicates that sunbathing and relaxation can cause your frontal lobes to shrivel. So if you’re planning a two-week trip to the beaches of Penang, or Nice, or Australia, you can expect your IQ to fall by 20 points – the difference between a bright and an average student – or an average and a dull student.
It seems that all that lounging around can reduce the supply of oxygen to your brain, causing certain nerve cells to degrade. Throw in some mild dehydration brought on by the heat and/or too many shots of tequila, and your brain cell volume may “decrease by up to 15%.”
Your vocabulary will also shrink, and you might experience changes in your personality. So if you see your husband ogling bikini-clad bodies on the beach, downing way too much alcohol at the bar, talking to everyone about his haemorrhoids (a condition that he can no longer pronounce properly, never mind spell), and generally acting like a total moron, it’s probably because he is a total moron.
But there is a solution to this temporary problem: physical exercise and mental stimulation.
But if going for jogs on the beach and playing a game of chess are not part of your holiday vocabulary another simpler solution is at hand: gum.
“The part of the brainstem that keeps us alert is constantly stimulated by chewing, as a result of which the attention level rises, as does the flow of blood to the brain,” claims the good Professor.
So all you have to do is lounge around like a cow in Speedos chewing cud. Or you can lie back, soak up the rays and enjoy your stupidity, confident in the knowledge that four days after returning from your vacation, your IQ will return to normal.
This information might also prove to be helpful if you have to undergo major surgery of any sort. I mean to say, the last person you want performing open-heart surgery on you is a physician who has just returned from two weeks on a sun lounger in the Indian Ocean. I mean to say, after such a holiday, he might not be able to tell his ventricles from his testicles.
Read the full text at http://thestar.com.my/columnists/story.asp?col=butthenagain&file=/2011/8/22/columnists/butthenagain/9325890&sec=But Then Again