The Office of National Statistics has produced figures that show poverty is bad for your health.

No kidding, Sherlock.

Men in the most deprived areas have a life expectancy of 74 – nine years less than chaps from better off areas.

Females in the poverty trap will be 79 when they pop their clogs while the fairer sex of the upper echelons will be 86 when they kick off their Jimmy Choos.

Alison Garnham, chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group, said: “Living in poverty is bad for your health.

“It’s a scandal that whether you’re wealthy or deprived seems to make such a huge difference to good health and life expectancy.”

But surely, it’s no surprise.

There is no way of redressing the balance: poverty and wealth are facts of life.

We may try and make society fairer but the scales will always favour those who can afford good health and whose privileged lifestyle supports it.

You can, of course, take simple precautions to safeguard your health and live longer. I walk every day and keep to a sensible diet and neither of those costs a lot of money. I am also, perhaps, a little fortunate in that genetics have a bearing on lifespans.

I come from a long line of poverty – Irish labourers who fled the famine to become miners in Derbyshire and Yorkshire – which is probably why I am small and designed to go down holes in the ground like a Hobbit.

But many of my ancestors lived to an ancient age despite appalling domestic and work conditions in the 19th and 20th centuries.

My paternal grandfather, a miner all his life, died of neumoconiosis, but only when he was 90.

And recent research from Cambridge University and Harvard Medical School suggests that what your maternal grandmother ate can affect your own lifespan.

My maternal grandmother brought up six children on her own in harsh conditions.

To her, healthy food was anything that was available and affordable. She still lasted until she was 87.

Maybe I should give up brown bread and bran and go back to bread and dripping and chips. It worked for her.

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