Janet Street-Porter: My advice for this year: take less advice

Advice is the most dangerous drug on offer in modern Britain. It's up to us to take control of our own lives

You can rest assured: this column is an advice-free zone. For the past few days, we have been bombarded with manifestos on all fronts. First, Mr Cameron used the pulp of thousands of trees when he took an advertisement to tell his big ideas for the future of the Tories.

Actually, you could have crossed out the words Conservative Party at the bottom of the ad and substituted "any sane person". It's like telling me that poverty is not a good thing, or that it's not a great idea to pollute rivers - basic common sense.

We seem to be living in a consensus society, with 90 per cent of the population bored with political dogma but happy to sign up to sensible principles for running the country, as long as they can get on with living their own lives with little interference from government or bureaucrats. So Mr Cameron has no choice but to spout platitudes in order to sound appealing.

Elsewhere, January is the month when experts give us their predictions, their mantras for how to live, and their ideas for the coming year. Most of this is nonsense, from such gems as "smile for an hour every day" to "try setting aside an hour a week to talk to your partner".

I spent a riveting hour the other night reading an impressive tome entitled 12 ideas for 2006 produced by Winkcreative, an agency headed by Tyler Brulee, founder of Wallpaper magazine, and once a budding television reporter working for yours truly in the Eighties. Of course, the difference between Tyler and me is that I haven't made millions of pounds, and set up offices in London, Zurich and New York, off the profits of telling governments, corporations and advertisers the blindingly obvious dressed up as golden nuggets of wisdom.

Winkcreative sell their services for thousands to such clients as British Airways, Nokia, American Express and BskyB. A sister company, Winkontent, is behind a new BBC documentary series about shopping entitled Counter Culture.

In the olden days, businesses often consulted astrologers - now they talk to Tyler. His "big" ideas for the coming year include the non-controversial thought that a new way is needed to tackle aid to disaster zones, and the obvious observation that London's street furniture needs re-designing before the Olympics. There's a load of waffle about neighbourhoods being ruined by big business and a concept for a budget airline with the seating based on deckchairs.

Hello? Has no one read the reams of newspaper comment about High Street homogenisation? Has no one at Wink heard about English Heritage's campaign to remove unnecessary signage? After reading a plea for a "pageant" featuring clothing made from damask, hessian and russet at a new festival celebrating St George's Day, I chucked the book on the floor and turned out the light.

It's clear that if you are going to take one of the most promoted bits of advice in the press this week, and re-evaluate your career at the start of the year, then it's perfectly plain which jobs you should think about going for. Major growth industries are clearly futurology (ie Winkworld) or health and beauty journalism.

I received dozens of angry letters when I wrote a column saying that stress, in 90 per cent of the cases, just doesn't exist. Before 1980, no one had stress, they had another illness. Now stress has replaced back pain as the single most-cited cause of sick leave, and not a day passes without another strain being identified and dissected by the army of "experts", most of whom have zero medical qualifications.

Today, I give you another redundant concept - toxins. If I had a pound for each time I've read or heard the word detox used as a way of dealing with everything from excessive Christmas eating and drinking, to problems at work, to fat thighs or depression, I'd be a rich woman, living in one of Wink's new townhouses with a Japanese bathroom and a special cupboard for my bicycle.

Now a group of eminent scientists have agreed with me. Sense about Science is a charity committed to promoting better understanding of modern science, and is publishing a report at the end of this month entitled Making Sense of Chemical Stories.

Alternative health is big business, and no one promotes it more than the army of feature writers who fill up the pages of women's magazines and newspapers, accompanied by page after page of lucrative advertising. You can't escape the stack of supplements about spas, with treatments you have to save up for or fly to the Arizona desert to experience.

Central to all this is the concept that modern day living is somehow polluting our bodies and we are accumulating a ticking timebomb of chemical residues in our system from eating the wrong food, drinking the wrong teas or wearing the wrong clothes. You don't have to be Kate Moss to go through detox, via today's lifestyle journalism it's readily available to all.

One toxicologist quoted by Sense About Science points out that for all the rubbish written about "synthetic" chemicals and how harmful they are, there is an increasing demand for products made with them, from mouthwash, contraceptive pills to iPods, computers and CDs. Who says man-made chemicals are necessarily dangerous?

More importantly, writers who promote the idea of detoxing are simply peddling a basic untruth - you needn't buy a single product and do nothing more than drink tap water and go to bed early in order to feel better after a night of excess. The liver can clear an almost lethal dose of alcohol in 36 hours without the need for one detox teabag, vitamin tablet or herbal patch. But that isn't the sexy rubbish that comforts the needy and encourages manufacturers to exploit their naivety with dozens of completely useless products.

Health and beauty writers constantly promote the idea that chemicals are somehow bad for us, and that if we eat and drink "pure" ingredients we will somehow be healthier and look better. Utter nonsense!

Another misconception - that synthetic chemicals are causing cancers and other diseases. Why should synthetic mean "unpleasant" and "natural" mean good? Of course, I could go on, but you can read the evidence for yourself.

I have absolutely no intention of spring cleaning my colon in 2006, or purchasing a Boots total body cleanse at £14 plus. I've chucked out the nettle tea bags and flushed the aloe vera juice down the toilet

It takes a giant leap of faith to ignore advice - it is the single most dangerous drug on offer in modern Britain.

No one, from Mr Cameron to our Prime Minister, can bear to tell us the truth- which is why they peddle jargon and platitudes. It's up to us to take control of our own lives.