Just what exactly is good for us?

So says the World Cancer Research Fund, which may have thought its new report on how to prevent the Big C would be welcomed with open arms but is now enduring a well-deserved backlash.

Why is it well-deserved? Because, coming as it does on the end of 10 years of the super-sized nanny state, it's just about the last straw for those of us who are sick to death of living in Bad For You (and Banned For You) Britain.

If you didn't have the time to plough through the cancer report, here are just a few choice gems: being fat (classed as having a waist measurement over 31 inches if you're a woman) is as bad for your health as smoking.

There is NO safe level of drinking.

Having a fat tum gives you bowel cancer.

And five fruit and veg a day won't necessarily save you from anything.

The report's compilers reckon that being tall gives you cancer - the vertically unchallenged are at an increased risk of getting bowel and breast cancers by nine per cent for every extra (and what is extra?) inch or two of height.

Great news for shortstuff?

Well no, because the report also reminds us that shorties are at a greater risk of heart disease.

To call this report cobblers is a disservice to people who repair footwear.

In my opinion, it is total and absolute bunkum.

My kid sister was a marathon-running, mountain climbing, cycling, near vegetarian who hardly drank a drop and never touched a fag in her life. But she got cancer.

So did the vegetarian's vegetarian, Linda McCartney.

So did any number of the seven young mums in our parish who have all succumbed to cancer.

They are all slim, non-smokers who breastfed their children and whose consumption of alcohol was low.

It didn't save them.

The fact is that this report and all the other reports with which we are bombarded on an hourly basis are the most dangerous thing of all.

Instead of helping us become more healthy, they make us think "Oh, what's the use?".

In the past few weeks we've been told that middle-class people who crack open the Lindemans after a hard day's work are at risk from "hazardous drinking", even as scientists from another era were cheerfully telling the Sunday Times that the "safe" drinking limits were plucked out of the air some 25 years back.

Sleeping is bad for you, too.

In 2003 scientists in California "discovered" that people who sleep eight hours a night or more died younger than those who didn't.

Sunbathing gives you cancer but not sunbathing can give you cancer as well because you won't get enough cancer-preventing vitamin D.

Or so it was thought until our friends at the World Cancer Research Fund reported yesterday that Vitamin D wasn't as good for you as had been previously touted.

Last month a study revealed that "women who use make-up on a daily basis are flooding their bodies with as much as 5lb of chemicals a year".

But Joan Collins is still alive, isn't she? And it's not just our health - it's everything.

Even as the media was digesting the unpalatable cancer report, the Institute of Public Policy Research's prescription for a better life in Britain was leaked to the press.

The report appears to say that if we can't "expunge" Christmas from our national life we should ensure other religious festivals are celebrated too.

Why? Because it would "improve" race relations.

Inflame them, more like.

Why can't they see it?

I'm only amazed they didn't try and claim that Christmas gives you cancer.

After all, it was only two years ago that hospital chiefs in Leicester wanted to ban The Bible from bedside tables because they said it could spread MRSA (and later admitted it was actually because they feared it could be "offensive").

Of course, what none of these killjoys and busybodies ever tells you is this - giving up everything that is pleasant in life won't guarantee that you live longer.

But it will sure as hell feel like it.

• Don't miss Faith on Saturday in the Daily Echo.