Everything Is Bad for You!: An A-Z Guide to What You Never Knew Could Kill You

Warning:

You've heard about the latest studies and you've read the conflicting reports. You were very right to be suspicious--the strange reality is that everything is bad for you.

Everything from carpets to camping to water to Norman, Oklahoma, endangers your health, your sense of well-being and, ultimately, your sanity. Discover the disturbingly amusing truth: sunscreen is bad for you whether you us it or not--and everything else is too

Everybody knows that cigarettes can kill you, but studies show that, in fact, everything is bad for you: food, vitamins, the city you live in, optimism, air conditioning, rain, being a man, being a woman, breathing. The way it's looking, you're lucky to be alive! You might as well just stay in bed — except that bed rest is bad for you and the covers are infested with dust mites.

Everything Is Bad for You is a comprehensive catalog of everything that's bad for you and why, complete with references for supporting documentation. The entries are listed in alphabetical order from Air Conditioning (pollution inside an air-conditioned room is likely to be two to five times as great as in the air outdoors) to Writing (writers have an unusually high risk of dying from pulmonary tuberculosis).

With tongue-in-cheek humor, David French points out that the world of risk has become one in which you are constantly encouraged to be fearful about things that don't much matter, and to remain ignorant of things that do.

An A-Z Guide to What You Never Knew Could Kill You