TODAY'S health warning concerns cookery. It is bad for you. Quite possibly fatal.

Any food which is fried or baked may cause cancer, British experts say in findings which have apparently "sent shockwaves around the world".

But before you rush to cut fried and baked food out of your diet, the alert is believed to apply to roasting, grilling and barbecuing.

And that's all food. Including the humble potato. Even vegetarians, who escaped the ravages of BSE, are not safe. A single slice of over-done nut loaf could carry you off.

So let's abandon the cooker and rush to a raw diet. But what about all the pesticides that apparently contaminate everything? What about the dangers of the gum on those sticky labels that they slap all over our fruit?

No - don't wash them with tapwater, you don't know how many bodies that has passed through before it reaches to you. And no, don't use the garden water butt - haven't you heard of acid rain?

Okay, so skip breakfast and give work a call to say we'll be in a bit late.

But not on the mobile phone - don't you know that those things scramble your brains worse than an egg with salmonella?

And please, don't go near a computer. Didn't you see yesterday's health warning? A computer keyboard has more germs on it than a public toilet seat. At least 400 of the blighters. Every one of them a known killer.

Right. Let's relax pottering about in the garden.

Hey! No! Did you not know that gardening is one of the most dangerous activities known to man. About 45 people are killed gardening every year. Half-a-million people are injured. Stepladders are commonly murderous, but in 2000, two people even managed to injure themselves in accidents involving oven gloves in their gardens. It really is a jungle out there.

So we'll just sit here and soak up a few calming rays.

But the sun'll frazzle you to within an inch of your life. And deckchairs - the Lord alone knows how fraught with peril they are!

Perhaps inside is safer. A little TV, perhaps.

Hell, no. Didn't you hear about that chap who jumped up while watching a goal last weekend and snapped his leg clean in half. The World Cup'll be on soon - it's bound to carry off half the planet with extra time heart attacks. And that Stephen Byers is bound to be on the news any moment - he'll make your temperature rise and your blood boil...

In reality, the only things that need a health warning on them are health warnings themselves.