You do sometimes wonder whether it mightn’t be easier to move to a desert island and subsist on berries and fresh air. Except no doubt the berries would be found to be carcinogenic, the fresh air would age you prematurely (assuming you hadn’t contracted skin cancer from the sun), and living in isolation would probably increase your chances of getting some unpleasant and uniquely female kind of illness.

I used to think it was just the Daily Mail that specialised in identifying ailments and diseases that affected only women — there was a period of several years when it seemed predictably keen on identifying special illnesses that only affected working mothers. Now, though, female diseases are everywhere. From what you eat and drink to where you live, there’s a special sickness lying in wait just for you if you have the misfortune to have two X chromosomes.

Which isn’t to say that men aren’t susceptible to disease, but I don’t know that they live in a permanent state of health-siege like we do. Even the sunniest, most smugly organic person starts feeling a bit beleaguered after a while. It’s impossible not to.

Take last week. One: HRT has led to 1,300 extra cases of ovarian cancer in the period between 1991 and 2005, according to the Million Women Study, whose findings were published on The Lancet’s website. Professor Valerie Beral of Oxford University, the research leader, said: “These worrying results show not only does HRT increase the risk of ovarian cancer, it also increases a woman’s risk of dying from it.”

HRT, she reminded us, has also been linked with an increased risk of breast and womb cancer. In fact, according to the study, HRT appears to raise the risk of breast, ovarian and womb cancer by a hardly negligible 63%. (The research also says the risk of ovarian cancer returns to normal within a few years of stopping HRT, which is something.)

Two: eating red meat also apparently ups your risk of breast cancer. Findings at Leeds University, which tracked 35,000 women aged between 35 and 69, found that even 2oz a day — half a lamb chop — can raise the risk by up to 42%. The effect was more pronounced on postmenopausal women, but young women also had a raised risk.

The research is corroborated by similar findings at Harvard University. Imagine being a carnivore on HRT: you’d think your goose was cooked. Especially if you liked bacon.

Three: a team at Columbia University in America published findings in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine last week that showed cured meats can cause chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. The study of 7,352 Americans showed that those who ate cured meats at least 14 times a month were 78% more likely to have the disease, an umbrella term that covers conditions such as bronchitis and emphysema.

Admittedly, cured meats usually contain nitrates and there has been a question mark over the safety of nitrates for some time, and it is possible to buy nitrate-free cured meats, and thereby presumably sidestep the problem. Still, though, what with the health stories in the news — last week was stuffed with them and I don’t think it was a particularly unrepresentative week — it’s a wonder we don’t all just stay in bed, munching desultorily on evil BLTs and waiting for death.

Oops, I nearly forgot salt. It kills you. A 15-year study by a medical team based at Harvard Medical School, the results of which were published in the British Medical Journal, offered clear evidence that cutting salt consumption saves lives by reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease (an equal opportunities illness, you’ll be pleased to hear). People who don’t eat much salty food have a 25% lower risk of cardiac arrest or stroke and a 20% lower risk of premature death.

Cutting back on salt ought to be easily done in theory, until you look at packaged food, particularly packaged food targeted at children, and discover that one such small snack-type “meal” contains all the salt a child’s body can cope with in a day.

It doesn’t look good, frankly. Where is the nanny state when you need it? And I’m not even going to get started on aspartame, which is present in many so-called “diet” fizzy drinks and in food aimed at slimmers or people keen on cutting down on sugar, because a) I’d get sued and b) it would take me about two days to get my feelings off my chest. And now I think of it, aspartame is the tip of a considerable iceberg.

On the plus side, what many of these findings cause you to think, once the waves of despair have washed over you, is that production methods and the grotesque way in which so much of our food is fiddled with must be to blame — after all, our ancestors existed on red meat, and there is no evidence to show they all died of breast cancer .

A steak isn’t always a steak; a chicken isn’t always a chicken (yes I know it’s white meat. I won’t drone on about the abomination that is battery farming; instead I refer you to Hattie Ellis’s new book, Planet Chicken, which it might be an idea to read on an empty stomach).

It seems so blindingly obvious to me that organic food and farming is the way forward — the only way forward, in fact — that it hardly seems worth saying it, except that I am because I still come across people who think that organic foods are for gullible hippies. I say, tell it to your oncologist 20 years down the line.

What is also obvious is that, as I was saying the other week with reference to the Prince of Wales, pills have their uses in extremis, but it’s time we woke up to the fact that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, or even a free menopause. The HRT findings apply particularly to menopausal women who have also been on the pill for a long time — that is, the Sixties’ sexual freedoms are coming home to roost.

That isn’t meant as a judgmental comment, merely a factual one. You are what you eat; and you are what you ingest; and all your actions have consequences, some of them supremely unwelcome. And yes, you could get run over by a bus tomorrow, but chances are the bus wouldn’t cause you a slow and agonising death.

We’re surrounded by metaphorical buses these days, it seems, when it comes to health, but at least we can see them and they’ve been identified for us. Surely, in such a situation, it makes sense not to play in traffic.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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