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Jamie Oliver is right to call for higher taxes on junk food and fizzy drinks, says DR ELLIE CANNON

By Dr Ellie Cannon for The Mail on Sunday

Published: 16:09 EST, 29 August 2015 | Updated: 03:33 EST, 30 August 2015

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Jamie Oliver has again been saying all the right things: that junk food and drink should be prohibitively expensive

Jamie Oliver has again been saying all the right things: that junk food and drink should be prohibitively expensive, highly taxed, and shouldn’t be advertised on prime-time television where impressionable youngsters can be dazzled into wanting them.

As a doctor, and a parent, I couldn’t agree more. But do sweets have any place in a nutritionally balanced diet? Well, yes, they do.

The celebrity chef said his children, Poppy, 13, Daisy Boo, 12, Petal, six, and Buddy, four, have grown up drinking water or diluted fruit juice – like mine – and only have Coke at the cinema. It’s a sensible approach.

Like Jamie, we don’t have fizzy pop at home – although my pair, Lottie, 11, and Jude, eight, were allowed to chew their way through a mountain of sugary rubbish on holiday in Disneyland.

Haribo, ice-cream and Krispy Kremes exist. We can’t pretend they don’t.

I want my children to see that fake plastic foods have their place – in a cartoon world, far from everyday life.

Can I stop taking aspirin?

When I turned 60, a decade ago, I decided to have a private health MOT. I’m fit and jog regularly but scans revealed a build up of calcium on the arteries around my heart. I was prescribed a daily dose of 75mg aspirin and a statin. Recently I have heard that taking aspirin regularly causes stomach bleeds. Considering that I don’t have high blood pressure, have never had a stroke or a heart attack, I am now wondering whether I should stop taking the aspirin but keep on with the statin. What do you advise?

Disease prevention, particularly in the case of heart disease, can be a minefield – weighing up the risks of an attack with the risks of the preventative measures decided upon.

Anyone considering stopping medication should discuss it with their GP – one would definitely consider a treatment review after a decade, especially if the patient is in good health.

It might seem at first that we should all take every preventative measure and screening test in order to avoid disease, but then we risk the medication’s side effects, false positives and increasing anxiety for the ‘worried well’.

WHY SHOULD I TAKE ISOFLAVONES

Soy products – from beans to tofu – contain beneficial compounds called isoflavones, which have a variety of effects in the body.

Supplements, which are a purified capsule or tablet form, may help reduce blood sugar levels in those with diabetes.

A daily dose of 50mg to 100mg is suggested.

There is also evidence they can help reduce risk of and treat kidney disease in those with diabetes.

They may also help lower cholesterol levels – although the evidence for this is shaky – and boost bone health.

For this reason, national screening programmes are usually carefully selected – we carry out those that are not only the most accurate but also for diseases we can prevent or catch at an early stage.

Calcium scanning for the heart looks for evidence of heart disease with the build-up of calcium deposits. It is most useful for those with at least a moderate risk of heart disease, rather than someone with no predisposing factors.

Calcium scanning would not be recommended for someone with no risks of heart disease as it is used to decide which at-risk patients need treatment.

Once disease or potential disease has been found, then of course treatment will be initiated.

Both statins and aspirin come with side effects, and aspirin, as you say, can cause bleeding from the stomach, although the risks are small.

This is why many doctors avoid offering scans to the worried well.

Exercise, maintaining a normal weight and avoiding smoking also help to prevent cardiac disease without the potential side effects. Of course if someone is at high risk of disease, the benefits gleaned are worth the small risk of side effects.

The scales are not so favourably balanced if the risk was not there to start with.

When I was a child (I’m now 80, and fit, playing golf three times a week) I had chickenpox. During my 20s I contracted shingles and developed blisters in a small area around my waist. Last year, I had the shingles inoculation, but two weeks ago, I developed shingles again. What is the reason for this?

Shingles is caused by the same virus as chickenpox, known as herpes zoster. After you have had chicken pox as a child, a small amount of virus stays within the body in a nerve cell lying dormant in wait.

The virus reactivates at an opportune moment, often when the body is stressed or run down through illness, and this is when shingles occurs.

As we get older the chance of getting it very much increases as the immune system weakens with age, so over the age of 80 is certainly not uncommon.

The shingles vaccination programme for those in their 70s was introduced to protect our elderly population from the effects of the virus, particularly the after effects which can be severe pain.

The vaccine contains a weakened chickenpox virus and, very occasionally, people develop a chickenpox-like illness following vaccination – this is fewer than one in 10,000 individuals.

Also, we know from trial data that the vaccination efficacy is only about 50 per cent in this age group, which would surprise many patients opting for it.

So it reduces your chances of having shingles, but it certainly doesn’t eliminate the risk totally.

If it does reoccur, hopefully it’s a milder form with less risk of long-term consequences.

An age-old error by gyms

Middle-aged people collectively spend over £130 million a month on gym membership, equipment and sportswear, according to a survey.

So those gyms that seem only to cater to 20-year-old gym bunnies, with the odd Pilates and aqua aerobics class here and there, are missing a trick.

Middle-aged people collectively spend over £130 million a month on gym membership, equipment and sportswear, according to a survey

It is time that the major chains sat up and took notice of the over-50s, as they’re the ones with the money and the time (as well as need) to prioritise exercise these days.

American drug regulators have approved the first treatment for female sexual dysfunction.

I would offer a note of caution: women taking the drug every day will notice only one more sexually satisfying experience a month, compared to taking a placebo.

I doubt that Viagra would have been so popular if men had experienced such feeble results.