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Diets & Dying The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
The French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or Americans.
CONCLUSION: Eat and drink what you like. Speaking English is apparently what kills you.
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The serious point to the joke being that this is in fact a reasonably good portrayal of the fact that US- and UK- style flexible labour markets will reliably give you a stress heart attack.
Further to this, Carroll (and a few others) suggested that, if I paraphrase correctly, "working class people don't have time to think about their diet". Which is on the face of it a plausible explanation, but I don't think it can be the right one. The reason I think there has to be more to it than this is that we have the control experiment of the UK.
In the UK, thanks to The Greatest Tabloid Newspapers On Earth, we regularly have feeding frenzies, so to speak, on the subject of food safety. I'm thinking of a particular incident in 1988, when our then Health Minister, Edwina Currie (now a novelist) happened to mention in an interview that around 80% of chickens in the UK were infected with salmonella. For some reason, the tabloids picked it up.
It caused the most unbelievable shit-storm (so to speak). It was one of those stories that just built and built. Currie ended up having to resign. The story was on the front page of the Sun every day for a week. And this was classic, Kelvin Mackenzie-era Sun, selling getting on for four million copies a day. It was on the TV and everything. You could not _possibly_ have been unaware of the issue, unless your life was utterly bizarre. Sales of eggs halved, and sales of chicken went through the floor.
For about a month.
Then everyone got bored of being frightened about eggs and chicken, and went back to eating the same stuff. Surely everyone must have been, intellectually, aware of the fact that they were being fed 15% fecal soup, but they didn't care. There is something more than rational going on here.
L'affaire Currie, btw, has left a fairly significant mark on British politics. It's only possible to understand the beef-on-the-bone policy, the foot-and-mouth disease debacle and even the government's policy on MMR vaccine, by looking back to the experiences of 1988. It was the first time the tabloids had a go at creating a real national food panic by linking it to government policy, and it planted the thought in politicians' heads that what was always necessary was to "maintain the confidence of the public in British food" -- analogous to a known military pathology in which commanders fail to erect worthwhile physical defences for fear of it being "bad for morale". I think a few of the later series of "Yes Minister" referenced it.
dd
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