Silly statistics on salt and sugar.

The Telegraph has a double scare in store. Salt and sugar in the same food! Oh, how can we survive? What will we do? Who will save us from this terror of essential nutrients that invade our body when we least expect it? Keeping us alive in defiance of Righteous diktat, these terrible foods stain our very souls with their sugary saltiness of Satan. Sweet and sour sinning - shocking.

If you believe this nonsense, if you succeed in cutting out all salt and sugar from your diet, you are going to die. Not quickly, it will take a week or two of intense agony before you succumb, but you will die much faster than a beer-swilling smoker who lives on pork scratchings and pizza.

If you eat too much sugar you will get fat. You will not necessarily end up with no teeth, that depends on whether you are familiar with the term 'toothbrush', but excess energy in any form will get converted to fat. The solution? Eat less and/or exercise more until you are at a weight you are happy with. Note: A weight you are happy with, not the weight the State demands you should be.

If you have too little carbohydrate in your diet you will first experience ketosis. Your breath will smell like acetone. That's because your body will burn fats for energy if it has no carbohydrate. It's an easy way to spot Atkins diet followers. It is not a good metabolic state to be in for too long. Your body is not supposed to work like that. Fat is there for those times when you don't get enough carbohydrate. You are not supposed to run that body on zero carbohydrate intake. You will break it. Reduce your carbohydrate intake to burn the fat off slowly and you'll feel better, you'll lose weight naturally and you won't end up with bat-wings and saggy folds because your skin will have time to contract as the weight goes down. If you want to be thin by tomorrow, that's up to you but you are going to do far more damage than you realise and you are going to end up looking as if you are wearing a sack.

If you run out of fat (which, as a good little drone, you aren't eating either), your body will burn proteins for energy. Since your brain needs glucose and a lot of it, your liver will have to work like crazy to turn protein into glucose and will end up with a lot of nitrogenous waste and that is going to do some damage to both your liver and kidneys. Both of which will, by now, be full of holes from ketoacidosis. It takes time but it takes considerably less time than alcoholic cirrhosis. Boozing yourself to death actually takes a lot longer than death by Righteous advice and it's more fun too.

If you eat too much salt, your kidneys will extract it from your blood and put it in your urine. If you eat far too much, you risk a kidney stone but eating enough to kill yourself would require serious, pathological dedication and astounding willpower in order to avoid drinking any water. On the plus side, if you do eat enough to kill yourself, your body will be pickled and will not need embalming. Suicide by salt is a very difficult path to take.

If you have too little salt, you'll die in pain. Ideally, there should be salt in your urine. It means your body has all it needs and has dumped the excess.

There is no need to measure your sugar and salt intake unless you have a medical condition that requires you to do so. All it takes is a bit of common sense and not getting silly about it. Eating sugar or salt by the spoonful is not going to be good for you. Not eating either at all will kill you.

So scare stories like this can have only one possible purpose. To kill as many idiots as possible.

Now, while I am not averse to a bit of stupidity-reduction in the population - there is far too much of it at present - I would prefer to reduce the stupidity levels by educating people rather than by making them even more stupid and then killing them. The State has evidently decided on the easy option.

The article is most definitely aimed at the stupid:

An analysis a number of popular breakfast cereals – many of which are marketed as being nutritious – showed that in many cases each bowl contains more than a quarter of the recommended daily sugar intake for an adult.

So? The five-a-day fruit and veg thing has been proven to be a made-up number, the booze units limit is a made-up number, the second and third hand smoke scares are entirely fabricated, and everyone is different. Someone working in the fields all day needs much more energy intake than someone sitting at a desk all day. A big guy needs more than a small guy. And then there's that magic word - 'adult'.

I am an adult. Nobody 'recommends' what I eat. I decide for myself. If I don't like it, I don't eat it. If I eat something that makes me feel ill, I don't eat any more of it. If I start to put on weight, I eat less and if I start to lose weight, I eat more. I count no calories and gauge my intake by whether my clothes feel too loose or too tight. These are not hard decisions for an adult to make. Adults do not need Nanny any more. Sadly, Nanny has prevented most people from becoming adult these days.

Many cereals also contain high salt levels, with the ten top-selling brands in Britain all containing more salt than a Cadbury Milk Chocolate Cake Bar or a Magnum Classic ice cream.

I don't know about you, but I have never considered chocolate or icecream to be particularly salty. So finding that a savoury food such as cereal contains more salt than icecream or chocolate comes as no surprise at all. How does that cereal compare with a bag of pork scratchings, I wonder?

Jonny Steel, (You're kidding. A Spandex-clad Food Avenger?) a spokesman for MySupermarket.co.uk, said: “Consumers can end up thinking they are choosing a healthy cereal, often because some sound healthy or simply look healthy because of how they are marketed.

Adults choose foods they like. I'm not a big fan of cereals but I have been known to eat them, but only the ones coated in sugar or preferably, honey. I'm not even a big fan of breakfast. A cup of coffee will keep me going until teatime if I'm busy, as long as it has sugar in it. Some people like a bowl of cereal for breakfast. They are adults, it's their responsibility, leave them alone. The analysis is written on the sides of the packet and if someone doesn't like what's in there, they can choose not to buy it. It's not difficult. It's not as hard as deciding what colour to paint my pergola.

“Yet, as with any product bought, shoppers need to make sure they read the nutritional information on the packet to understand the content, otherwise they could accidentally be consuming more sugar or salt than planned.”

Anyone who plans their salt and sugar intake without a medical reason has no life at all. They might as well just lie down and die. Those with medical reasons to do so are already checking the labels and do not need to be reminded by Jonny Steel, The Masked Breakfast Man from Planet Dubious.

I am sure there are many perfectly fit and healthy people whose health has been wrecked by tailoring their salt and sugar intake to Righteous approved levels, instead of letting their body decide what it needs and listening to it. If it says 'drink water', drink water. If it says 'salt and sugar', eat them. If it throws something back or rushes it through to the other end, don't eat that again.

Unlike the makers of Buckfast, who responded to Righteous demand that they change their product-that-people-like into a product-those-people-don't-like with 'Awa' an' bile yer heid, ya wee bawbags', Kellogg's have caved in.

Kellogg’s said it is working to reduce the salt content of its cereals, which it said also contain iron, fibre, fortified vitamins and folic acid.

If they reduce the salt it will affect the taste. People who like the taste now will not like the taste in future. They will buy something else. Something with salt in it. As for the rest of their cringing exuses, they will cut no ice with the Righteous. They don't care about the good parts. They are only concerned with salt and sugar. Which are also good parts but the Righteous don't want you to have any. They don't want to let you decide for yourself, they must control you in every minute detail. If that kills you, tough. You obviously weren't sufficiently standard.

The way things are going, it'll soon only be we smokers who are left alive, because we ignore all this crap. Hell, if we can ignore the threat of lung cancer, we are not likely to worry about the threat of getting a little bulgy in the middle or of peeing brine (although that might sting a bit, and would probably induce us to put a little less salt on our deep-fried black pudding in batter with chips next time. A little lifestyle adjustment. Adults can do that without being ordered to).

If you're following all this nonsensical advice to the letter, you're going to suffer really badly and might even die. But then that's the price you pay for abdicating adulthood and letting the Righteous decide your life for you. I mean, I can see where people might want to let someone else decide whether to fire a missile or whether to let a terminally-ill patient die. Those are very hard choices indeed.

But to let someone else decide what you can have for breakfast? That hasn't happened to me since long before I left my parents' home. It is not going to happen to me now.

It's my life, I only have the one, and I will decide what to do with it, thanks. If I mess it up, that's my problem. I certainly don't want anyone else messing it up for me.

It's really, really time this country let go of Nanny's skirts.