The News: A User's Manual

Health News

Green tea and red wine have long been touted as possible weapons against cancer, now new evidence shows that compounds in both may help fend off Alzheimer’s disease. University researchers have found that natural chemicals – EGCG in green tea and resveratrol in red wine – may disrupt a key step of the Alzheimer’s disease pathway. Researchers were able to interrupt a process that allows harmful clumps of proteins to latch onto brain cells using purified extracts of EGCG and resveratrol.

CTV News

1.

WHILE MOST OF its energy is devoted to briefing us about the gruesome ways in which various individuals have recently met their end, in the area that it terms ‘health’, the news takes on a very different project. Here it collects information to assist us in the task of living for a very long time or possibly even, though it doesn’t ever come out and say this directly, forever. It introduces us to scientists who are permanently poised to reinvent existence. They are busy inventing microscopic robots that will travel through our veins; synthesizing drugs to regulate our moods; mapping our genes; cloning our organs and limbs; and reassessing the life-and-death-giving nature of everyday foodstuffs and medicines, especially wine, olive oil and aspirin.

2.

TO LIVE IN modernity – an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news – is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory.

In pre-modern societies, by contrast, people thought of time as a wheel. Life was ineluctably cyclical. The most important truths were recurring; the cycle could not be avoided or broken. Even if having regular access to news had been technologically possible, it wouldn’t have been very psychologically necessary. Societies that see time as a wheel rather than an arrow feel no pressing need to check the headlines every quarter of an hour.

3.

WE ARE MORE impatient – and optimistic about the future. The underlying, unmentioned promise of health news is that science might one day discover a cure for everything, death included.

It might be simpler if this unspoken claim were categorically untrue. The reality is more complicated. We will one day, perhaps in 780 years’ time, crack the mysteries of ageing and disease. But it will be too late for you and me. The fundamentals of our lives are fated to adhere to the same cycle known to all our ancestors.

Despite its general interest in the macabre, the news refuses to be grim or dark enough in its reporting on ‘health’-related matters. It continues to treat the latest findings about red wine, gene therapy and the benefits of eating walnuts with a superstitious reverence not dissimilar to that which might once have inspired a devout Catholic pilgrim to touch the shin bone of Mary Magdalene – in the hope of thereby securing ongoing divine protection. Rather than face up squarely to the unqualified inevitability of decay, the news prefers to flog the newly discovered health advantages of drinking grapefruit juice and wearing tight cotton socks on long-haul plane journeys.

Amidst its appetite for murders and explosions, the news remains unhelpfully squeamish with regard to ordinary mortality. Its proclivity for turning death into a climactic spectacle dissuades us from accepting it as a daily reality. We are whisked from the bomb site to the smouldering plane crash; we are rarely shown the everyday business of an octogenarian heart giving out.

Before they were displaced in our consciousness by the news, religions placed the task of preparing us for death at the heart of their collective missions. The needs and fears that we once brought to our places of worship have not disappeared in the secular age: we remain tormented by anxiety and a longing for comfort in relation to mortality. But these emotions receive little public acknowledgement, being left instead to haunt us in the small hours, while in the more practical and functional parts of the day the news keeps drawing our attention, with deranged zeal, to the newly discovered anticarcinogenic properties of blueberries and a daily teaspoonful of walnut oil.