The latest pronouncement was about the one-a-day aspirins many folks take to try and stave off strokes and heart attacks.

And when warnings start with the presenter intoning “a new study has found”, you know they’re about to upset your breakfast calm.

Apparently taking these aspirins may lead to increased risk of stomach bleeds – which is something it doubtless says anyway in the "directions for use" leaflet we all file in the waste bin when we liberate the tablets. But hey, why not scare the lieges whenever we can?

The problem is not with issuing perfectly sensible health advice – always welcome. Part of the problem lies with the shorthand often used to report it.

A typical broadcast item or tabloid headline will tell you that popping this pill or including that in your diet doubles/triples the risk of breast cancer/heart problems/more brittle bones or whatever.

What they rarely bother to do is put the figure in any kind of context. If the risk doubles from one in a thousand to two in a thousand, you may well conclude it’s hardly worth changing your choices. If it’s going from three per thousand to 300 per thousand that’s different!

This lack of background info often freaked out women on the contraceptive pill who didn’t know whether continuing to pop it was more or less dangerous than being pregnant. Particularly since the latest report always seemed to promote itself as “the largest study ever undertaken". Confused? They certainly were.

But the other problem lies in what we call, in technical terms, “make your bloody mind up.”

Dairy produce taken in excess was once pronounced a shortcut to dodgy cholesterol, so hit the marge and cut the butter. Then, it seems, some marge was itself full of all the wrong kind of fats and butter was rehabilitated.

What is beyond dispute is that we are what we eat, and looking around the average street, or bus stop, or airport departure lounge, there’s little doubt that very many people seem to be eating for three.

Not in dispute either is that obesity can lead to diabetes, which is not a condition you wish on anybody – most particularly school children who combine shovelling in too much of the wrong stuff with no discernible exercise.

Or that the NHS, with its myriad funding problems, is in line for another major crisis down the line because of all this. (No tittering at the back from those who know my kitchen has never had an intimate relationship with anything of a vegetable nature.)