PERISCOPE

VAL SCHAFFNER

I'm starting to feel a bit like the Woody Allen character who wakes up centuries in the future in a time when medical science has discovered that red meat and fudge cake are, after all, good for you.

I've encountered a number of such revelations lately- usually on Tuesdays, Tuesday being the one day I get really upset if The New York Times is sold out. That's when the paper has a science section which I read avidly to find out the latest on black holes and the comet that killed the dinosaurs and topics of that nature.

More remarkable than the exploding stars or the happily conjoined twins in a recent issue, however, was the news that chocolate doesn't, after all, cause pimples.

This was something I myself had suspected back in the years when I was known to my pitiless contemporaries as "Scarface"- a condition they blamed on my fondness for chocolate, in addition to banana splits and milk shakes. Once in a while I would abstain from these for a week or so, but it never made any visible difference, so it hardly seemed worth the effort of will required. If you're going to be damned if you do and damned if you don't, I figured, you may as well do.

I would have felt better about it, however, had there been a Science Times in those days to pronounce authoritatively, as that recent issue did: "Repeated studies have failed to find any link between eating chocolate (or anything else) and teen-age breakouts."

Somewhere else, I think it was CNN On-Line, I read about another study that established the benefits of eating fats. Apparently a diet rich in french fries and whatnot helps prevent strokes, albeit at an increased risk of heart attacks.

Meanwhile, other research has proven that a drink or two a day is a good idea for most of us, as it helps prevent heart attacks, albeit at an increased risk of strokes.

There was even an article a while back that probed well beyond the outer limits of the politically correct to explore the benefits of tobacco, which, it turns out, improves memory and may alleviate the ravages of Alzheimer's disease.

Which reminds me of the news story about the state mental hospital whose directors were seeking a waiver from the ban on smoking in public facilities because when they enforced it all the schizophrenics got worse.

My favorite of these research findings, however, was reported in the very same edition of The Science Times that pronounced chocolate okay.

"Men who have more orgasms," the article led off, "seem to live longer, a statistical study of Welsh villagers in The British Medical Journal has found."

In fact, those Welshmen who said they had sex twice a week turned out to have only half as much risk of dying as those who admitted to only once a month.

Skeptics of these results argue that people who have more sex are able to do so because they're healthier in the first place, and that's why they live longer, but a better way of looking at it, I think, is that they are the ones who have more to live for.

Anyway, the researchers plan further study, apparently to establish whether the effect works outside of Wales. I hope they also, because I'm curious, see whether it has any upper limit, in terms of frequency, beyond which the benefits are reversed, as is held to be the case with alcohol.

It's fashionable in academia to claim that all science is culturally driven, and, if this is so, perhaps these findings - about how various pleasurable activities held sinful in former times and unhealthy in ours are actually salubrious, at least in moderation - may indicate that puritanism is again on the wane, finally.

They provide, anyway, a basis for my two New Year's resolutions, which are to give up giving things up, and to do so in moderation.