Reports telling us what's wrong with our lives are all well and good. But who is going to do anything to improve the situation?

Take the report this week which revealed that a quarter of Britain's workers go without any lunch break at all, while only one in every 50 has a full hour. The reason for this is pressure of work - real or perceived - and the outcome is lots of stress-related illness.

So what's to be done about it? The obvious answer is that companies should acknowledge that their staff need a decent midday break, and shouldn't overload them so much that they can't take one.

Easy enough to say. But it's hard to expect executives and managers to carry out such a policy when they are the ones least likely to take a lunch break and are probably themselves suffering from high levels of stress.

The problem lies with the workplace culture which has taken hold in Britain over the last decade and a half. The rush to boost productivity and profits has led to most firms getting the maximum amount of work from the fewest possible employees.

Stress at all levels of an organisation - as well as missed lunch breaks - has been the inevitable result.

Meanwhile, and ironically, although people are being forced to take time off work with stress-related illnesses, they aren't taking off enough time for other illnesses - the ones caused by bugs. Instead, they go to their doctor and get some antibiotics, which they pump down themselves as they work on.

Now doctors have been told not to prescribe antibiotics except in cases of dire emergency. Illnesses are to be left to time and Nature instead.

But there's another factor besides those two. Rest. If your body is to conquer bacteria and viruses through its own devices, you need to take things easy. If you don't, it will take you a lot longer to recover and you might actually make yourself worse.

There are times when you need to do what your body and all the medical books tell you to do but real life in the 1990s won't let you do - get yourself to bed and switch off for a few days like they did in the Olden Days.

When their employees, denied antibiotics, start keeling over at their work stations in significant numbers as they try to soldier on, companies just might get the message that the high-pressure culture is no longer the way forward and start to look for alternatives.

Who knows, lunch breaks might even find their way back on to the menu.

I wouldn't put too much money on it, though. The "new ways" have too tight a grip on our national life. Shaking them off will be on a par with defeating one of the new generation of Super Bugs that over-use of antibiotics has helped to create!

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.