I received a letter telling me to make an appointment for my regular medical check-up the other day. Now I’m concerned about what they’ll say about my heart. As a 38-year-old father of two who eats too much and exercises too little, and takes no heed of books telling me not to sweat the small stuff, I feel like a case study in a cardiac disease doomsday report.

It appears that we in the 35-44 age group have forgotten that endlessly talking about healthy lifestyles is not the same as actively pursuing them.

The reports of the steady decline in heart disease have left us complacent to the danger it poses. Rising levels of obesity and diabetes are said by experts to be significant contributing factors to the new upturn in heart problems, but are not the whole story.

Clearly, the amount of food we shovel inside us is key. We are told we are heading for an obesity epidemic and the headlines are about ten-year-olds who look like they are on steroids. But check out those of us in early middle age, the first generation for whom eating out and ordering in became as natural as breathing.

We have greater access than ever to rubbishy, artery-clogging, fattening food and high-class, artery-clogging, fattening food. And boy, do we know how to eat. It’s all very well dining on organic beef from a farm where the cows had their own shiatsu masseuse and a string quartet lulling them to sleep. But when you’re devouring half a pound of the stuff, smothered in cheese, it should come as no surprise when you look in the mirror and find you’re the size of a small bungalow.

Our guts have never had it so good and it’s beginning to show. physically and statistically.

One of the great euphemisms of the late 20th-century restaurant boom was “comfort food” to describe a huge plate of stodge. “I need this,” I say as I find solace in sausages. Which brings us to stress, something that I assume, in a purely anecdotal way, must be a factor in this tale of dodgy hearts. Let’s start at work, where the job for life has gone and many more Britons are working on short-term contracts and trying to service the interest on mortgages that used to be taken on only by those with bank accounts in Liechtenstein.

Whereas in the past people expected to reach the peak of their career in their late 40s or even later, now chief executives, like policemen and leaders of the opposition, seem to be getting younger all the time.

If you are not at the top or on your way there by the time you are in the 35-44 bracket, then you can stop worrying about getting there. It can’t be long before someone does a study to find out if these less experienced young guns show higher stressometer ratings than older execs.

This is the time when men have young families. There is a greater expectation than ever (not always realised, it is true) that we go to work and then come home and do our share of tackling the two-year-old tyrant. And quite right, too. No one should feel sorry for us, but it would explain why more men are suffering from stress that could play a part in heart disease.

This is also the prime time for divorce. And it probably doesn’t help that, although we are a much more confessional society, men still lag behind women when it comes to talking through their problems. It will take more than a couple of decades of Oprah to overcome centuries of conditioning that ensure that the majority of us bottle things up in an unhealthy and potentially explosive fashion.

Exercise would help enormously. At least it might stop us becoming enormous. But you need to get only half a dozen men of this age group sitting round the holiday pool to see how little this is happening. It’s like a meeting of Man Boobs Anonymous. Men may be kept on their toes by their kids, but they don’t find enough time to exercise properly.

Until a year or so ago I was a member of a swish gym and health club. I used it exclusively to take the kids swimming on a Saturday afternoon.

There were men of my age there who were athletic, but very few of them were working on their pectorals in order to attract a partner who came with a womb.

We all know that we need to exercise if we are to see our children’s children. But we seem incapable of imagining our own ill-health vividly enough to become motivated in the cause of self preservation. Perhaps because so many in this age group still have living parents they don’t yet recognise their own mortality. By the time we do, our children may be gone and our our working lives over, so we’ll have plenty of time to get in shape. Unfortunately, it may be too late.

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