That's men for you - Padraig O'Morain's guide to men's health: On a sun holiday last year, I took one of those tacky boat trips around the bay where you are ripped off at every hand's turn and charged high prices for very little.
That's not what I mainly remember about the boat trip. I do, after all, live in rip-off Ireland so getting ripped off on holiday helped me feel at home.
What I remember is two large gentlemen with very tight haircuts and very big bellies. They stood, drinking cans of lager and chatting amiably, at the front of the deck on which we were all sitting.
This had the disadvantage that instead of being able to see the cliffs without obstruction, we instead observed these tourist attractions through the small amount of space left by these gentlemen's bellies.
Had any of us remonstrated with these chaps about the damage that they might be doing to their health, let alone to our view of the cliffs, by their obesity, they might have pointed out that they did not smoke.
To that extent, they could argue, they were taking care of their health. That is true. But I wonder do they know, and I wonder how many other men know, that being overweight or obese actually increases the risk of suffering from cancer and heart illness?
A recent survey in Britain showed that men there do not know this. I expect that Irish men do not know it either.
Certainly I must admit that I had never made quite such a strong link between obesity and cancer, for instance, as was made when the survey results were published.
Obesity, I was surprised to learn, increases the risk of bowel cancer by 60 per cent. It increases the risk of cancers such as cancers of the oesophagus by 100 per cent. It also increases the risk of heart disease.
As many of us realise by now, it increases the risk of diabetes and is a major factor in forecasts that we are facing an epidemic of diabetes.
Another British survey found that some men have a sort of cultural objection to the notion of losing weight. These men see dieting as something that women do, and they believe gaining weight is simply a thing that happens as you get older.
Very few take the recommended five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. To be honest, I'm not sure whether I do myself. It sounds like an awful lot. Yet a diet rich in fruit and vegetables can help to reduce the risk of prostate cancer.
Not only might our two seafarers with the large girth be ignorant of the health effects of obesity, they might also be surprised to learn that they are overweight in the first place.
That's another thing that came out in that survey which I referred to earlier in this article. It found that 65 per cent of the men surveyed are overweight or obese but only 40 per cent actually think they are overweight.
So it would appear that when it comes to weight we may be taking a more benign view of our situation than is warranted by the facts. Of course, we don't want men, or women for that matter, trying to go around looking like Twiggy - that's assuming that they have been told by their grandparents who Twiggy is.
But it does seem to me that the issue of obesity and the link with cancer and heart attacks is not just something that has been dreamt up by doctors to annoy us but is something to which we need to pay real attention.
One of the researchers described the findings as a wake-up call to men and their partners. Partners?
Clearly, this researcher - a woman, of course - makes the assumption that if men are to lose weight, it is up to their partners to badger them into doing so.
How outrageous! We men would never be so silly as to need women to tell us when to do the things that are good for us.
Would we, lads?
Padraig O'Morain is a journalist and counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.