I RECENTLY read about a scientific study telling us it was beneficial to eat chocolate for breakfast.

I treated it with suspicion, knowing that I would soon enough read about another 'definitive' study that contradicts this science.

Sure enough, another article a few days later found that chocolate is so dangerous, it could carry a health warning in the future.

Cadbury's is thinking of putting the warning on sweets and fizzy drinks to try and quell the backlash against companies accused of feeding the country's supposed obesity epidemic. I am not convinced by this 'deterrent'. As with the tobacco industry, if they really disapproved of the dangers, they would stop selling it.

From the punters point of view, I don't think a sticker with a few words about minding your weight is going to influence the nation's sweet tooth. Children are not going to read it and women know chocolate makes them fat but it also makes them happy.

I wish whoever commissioned these scientific studies would stop it. We are seeing a growth of pop-science which is overwhelming us with contradictory evidence and underwhelming us with any sound revelation about health or nutrition.

People choose to drink florescent blue fizzy drinks that light up their stomach lining not because they don't know it's bad for them but because they are addicted to refined sugar and are too busy to buy a healthy, satisfying alternative.

Perhaps sweet shops in Britain should start stocking mangoes and guavas on their shelves instead of Mars bars, like they do in South Africa. But then again, some scientific study would probably tell us that mango was the new killer.

I HAVE decided that women's magazines are a pestilence put on this earth to patronise and humiliate otherwise well-adjusted people. I have never been a regular buyer of glossy magazines but I have always regarded them as barometers of popular culture. So I bought a couple the other day to find out what young women's pre-occupations are supposed to be.

I don't know whether it's because I am no longer in the mid-20s market, but I was appalled by the shallow content of them all. Almost all seemed to want to give you an insight into what men think you should be (Men Unzipped - read the truth of what men want in bed, claimed one mag), yet they also try and sell you the message that they are writing for empowered women who don't need men in their lives as long as they have Jimmy Choo shoes and perfect nails.

They are not writing for the post-feminist woman, they are creating the 21st century's Stepford Wives.