T. GAMBLE: Screening out health reports

According to the latest scientific reports, I am down to eating only spinach and kelp and, furthermore, need to live in a filtered, sunlight-free pod.

There is apparently nothing left under the sun — which, by the way, you should never be under, but I’ll get to that in a minute — that does not cause cancer.

Or, if it does not cause cancer, it destroys the environment. And we all know, if it so much as harms the hair on the neck of a snail darter, we cannot use it, lest we be damned to eternal ridicule by the New York Times, Greenpeace, PETA, and Gwyneth Paltrow. Her daughter Apple will also join in, but only in an organic apple sort of way.

You see, scientists just released a report saying that sunscreen is killing the coral reef system across the globe.

Yes, your mother is slathering you in sunscreen so you look like the Pillsbury Doughboy in the ocean, and it is washing off killing the coral. I guess it is blocking the sun from them, but who knows?

Don’t worry, most mothers could not be convinced to reduce sunscreen if a report said it would make you grow hair like Donald Trump and act like him, too. I’m 56 years old and my mother believes any venture into the sunlight should also include enough sunscreen to block the noonday sun. It can be pouring rain like a scene from “Twister” and 12 degrees outside, and my mother would say, “Did you put any sunscreen on the kids? Do you have any sunscreen on your ears and head?”

Never mind that reports also show that by blocking all sunlight most Americans are now vitamin D deficient and vitamin D stimulates the immune system to fight cancer. We will not get skin cancer; maybe every other cancer known to man, but not skin cancer.

So, now I am in a real dilemma. Kill the ocean or kill the kids? No one ever said raising kids would be easy.

Adding to the misery is the even newer report that says processed meat causes cancer. Yes, that is right, sausage, packaged ham and — God forbid, I cannot believe I am even writing this — bacon causes cancer. Well, just go ahead and take the last damn thing on Earth I might still enjoy and throw it on the scrap heap of other undesirables, like driving without a seat belt, riding in the back of the truck with the tailgate down with your feet bouncing off the dirt road, and riding a motorcycle without a helmet.

This report says you have a 5 percent percent chance of getting certain cancers but, if you eat bacon and sausage, the odds go up to 6 percent. That’s right — five out of a hundred goes to six out of a hundred.

Well, well, well. I believe I’ll just become a thrill-seeker and eat an entire package of Hormel bacon topped off by two links of sausage and a can of Spam. Long ago, people paid to see folks like Evel Knievel jump the Snake River Canyon on a motorcycle. Now, eating a bologna sandwich is considered dangerous.

If I become the other one out of a hundred with cancer, then so be it. I will not go to the breakfast bar at Holiday Inn and eat a fruit bowl. I will take my shirt off at the beach and go where no man now dares to travel — into the water without a single drop of sun screen. The coral reef will thank me, Apple Paltrow will thank me, and my t-shirt will thank me. I will go to the breakfast buffet and eat enough bacon to immediately require an AED shock treatment. I will tan like George Hamilton.

And, I promise to quit reading any more government reports on my health.

Email columnist T. Gamble at [email protected].