At last. I’m doing something right. I drink more than 14 cups of tea a week which, researchers report, reduces my chances of having a heart attack. More specifically, if I should survive a first heart attack and continue to drink more than 14 cups of tea a week my chances of having a second heart attack are reduced by 44 percent. I have calculated that I drink about 56 cups of tea a week. How long before some more research comes up with “14 cups a week good but 56 bad”?

I have the same problem with alcohol. One set of “experts” tell me that a few glasses of red wine a day will protect me from heart attacks and strokes. Another group tells me that drinking one glass of red wine a day dooms me inevitably to cancer. Actually I’ve had it anyway because I sometimes eat bacon, ham and sausages (not usually all at the same time) – a certain way to get cancer.

Where do they get these figures for increased/decreased risk from? How do they separate out the effect on an individual of eating bacon from all the other influences on his/her health? And then come up the confident statement that “bacon is best avoided”?

Recently it was reported that one of the scientists involved in setting the alcohol limits at 21 units per week for men and 14 for women admitted that these figures were just plucked out of thin air. Some other “expert” claimed that male drinkers would have to drink 65 units a week just to make themselves as unhealthy as a someone who totally abstained from alcohol.

I am bemused by all this but pleased that, at least for the time being, I am doing myself nothing but good by consuming large quantities of tea. I also twiddle the tea bag with a spoon which, apparently, releases even more of the heart attack preventing qualities of a tea bag.