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Private Notes
We've all seen the headlines about mobile phones. If you believed everything you read, you'd throw your mobile away immediately for fear of everything from cancer to infertility. And that's before we even start to think about mobile phone base stations. Forty percent of people surveyed believed that masts can cause health problems. So what's the truth? Should we worry about our mobile phones?
It's the nation's favourite dinner. But have you ever wondered what lurks inside the great British sausage? Why can you buy some bangers for less than the price of dog food? Is the humble sausage a heart surgeon's nightmare? When the chips are down, should we be worrying about our sausages?
If you've ever worried about British hospitals, here are some scary stats for you: In the last year 100,000 people who went into hospital got an infection there. Of those 5,000 died. Perhaps the question is not 'Should I worry about MRSA?, but 'How much should I worry?'
It's a market worth £600million a year. Adverts, magazine articles and health reports tell us we should be consuming more. But is the water industry just tapping into our desire to look young and healthy? So how much do we really need to drink? And what sort of water should it be? Can we trust the stuff from our taps? Or should we be worrying about water?
We're the most stressed out nation in Europe. We have the longest working hours and the shortest holidays. What does eight hours a day for 40 years do to your health? Could your office be making you sick? Should we be pushing ourselves to longer and longer hours, or should we be worrying about the office?
Salmon: a healthy food bursting with wholesome oils? Or a death trap full of dangerous chemicals? Earlier this year a scientific paper reported hazardous substances in salmon. Within hours, the headlines were warning us that we should be feeling fishy about fish. But is this just another groundless health scare? Or should we worry about salmon?
Ask almost anyone what the safest form of transport is and they'll say it's flying. So how come a third of us say we're frightened of it? The trouble is, it's easy to imagine what might go wrong. What if your air traffic controller is having a bad day? What if the plane's broken? And if all that doesn't get you, then what about deep vein thrombosis? So should we worry about flying?
Everyone wants us to spend more. We remember the lovely shoes, the fabulous holiday and the fantastic car and try to forget about the credit card bill. But what happens when your debts get out of hand? In a society where we're all encouraged to buy now and pay later, should we worry about spending?
Richard Hammond, the presenter of Should I Worry About...?, loves his takeaways and eats them at least twice a week. The average family will eat up to 10,000 of them over a lifetime. But what exactly is in them? Should we worry about curries, chow meins, burgers, kebabs and pizzas?
After the last series, we received hundreds of emails from people telling us about things they were worried about, and food additives were top of the list. People wanted to know what additives are and what they could be doing to us.
We are constantly bombarded by images of beautiful bodies and exhortations to sign up to the latest exercise fad. But what does it mean to be fit? And how much exercise do we really need to do?
It's hard to miss news reports about the three-in-one Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine, which has some parents worried. The media is saturated with stories about a controversial study, which links the MMR jab with autism and a bowel disorder, and anecdotal evidence from parents who say their children became ill after they were immunised.
In the UK, we drink nearly twice as much as we did in the 1950s, according to a report by the Academy of Medical Sciences. The price of alcohol has fallen and there are more places to buy alcohol, at any time of day, than ever before. What effect is all this extra booze having on our health?
We live in an age that is obsessed with youth culture, so the prospect of ageing fills us with fear. Should we worry about ageing? Richard gets worried about ageing when he sees photos from his mother's 60th birthday party. He embarks on a journey to see if we should worry about getting older and to find out what provision we can make for our old age and why society tends to undervalue the over-60s.
