Another shiny-eyed dream: "Eating food like soy beans and linseed that naturally contain oestrogen-like compounds helps prevent prostate cancer, a researcher in charge of a new Swedish study on the subject says. "We looked at men who ate a lot of soy beans, beans, linseed and berries, and the men who ate a lot of these things were less at risk of getting prostate cancer," researcher Maria Hedelin at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm told AFP today. Her research team has, over the past two years, questioned 1499 men diagnosed with prostate cancer about their eating habits and other habits then compared their answers to a poll of 1130 healthy Swedish men. Their conclusion, published today in the medical review Cancer Causes and Control, was that men who ate foods high in so-called phytoestrogens, or chemical compounds that act like oestrogen in the body, were 26 per cent less likely to develop prostate cancer. "The theory is that these phytoestrogens can protect against prostate cancer through their hormonal effect, through slowing the male hormones that appear to entail a risk of prostate cancer. They offer a better hormonal balance," Ms Hedelin said."

FOOD CORRECTNESS REBELLION IN BRITAIN

Britain's canteen ladies are on the point of rebellion and they are blaming celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, whose high-profile campaign to provide better school dinners has left them with a lot more work for no more money. Oliver's huge-rating series Jamie's School Dinners provoked a national debate last year with his Feed Me Better campaign. Amid a blaze of publicity, the television chef visited Prime Minister Tony Blair at Downing Street, where he delivered a petition with more than 270,000 signatures calling for more money to be spent on school lunches. Mr Blair announced that his Government would provide an extra pound stg. 280million ($663million) to lift the average expenditure on a school meal from 37pence in some areas to at least 60p across the board.

However, school canteen staff in London, Cheshire and Nottinghamshire say the money has been allocated to ingredients rather than wages, despite the extra hours staff are being required to work to improve the quality of school food. They are threatening mass walkouts if their wages and conditions are not improved. "Have you any idea how long it takes to peel fresh carrots for 700 children?" Transport and General Workers Union representative Cathy Stewart told The Observer newspaper. "Or cook meat pies to feed 300 or bake seven cakes? Our workload has soared. The dinner ladies are under tremendous pressure ... to deliver top-notch nosh but at rock-bottom pay."

Staff at 21 schools in Ms Stewart's Hackney region in east London will vote on whether to take industrial action to press for more pay. Canteen ladies in Newcastle, in the north of England, have already won a multi-million-pound pay claim. Canteen staff in some areas earn as little as pound stg. 9000 a year. "The Government says they are putting more money in but we are not seeing it in facilities or wages," Ms Stewart said. "All we want is fair pay. I would like to say to (Education Secretary) Ruth Kelly, come and spend a full day in a school kitchen in Hackney and see how hard this job really is."

Ms Kelly said more money had been provided to schools specifically for canteens and their staff. "We are investing pound stg. 220million specifically to help schools and local education authorities transform school meals through training and increased hours for cooks, equipment and a minimum spend on ingredients," she said.

Canteen staff are also angry at the public's impression that it needed Oliver to get them to lift their game. Ms Stewart said she and her members had been trying to improve the quality of ingredients long before the TV chef took up the cause. "We do not need Jamie Oliver to teach us how to cook," she said.

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"Natural" medicine could kill you: "A herb commonly used to treat symptoms of menopause should carry labels warning that it may cause liver damage. The Therapeutic Goods Administration says black cohosh may have caused 47 cases of liver damage worldwide, including nine in Australia. Four Australians required hospital treatment after using the herb, with two requiring a liver transplant. The TGA has ordered companies to add a label stating that the herb may harm the liver and should only be used under the supervision of a healthcare professional. Tony Lewis, executive director of the Complementary Healthcare Council of Australia, urged manufacturers to comply."

Penis enlargements a 'waste of time': "Thanks to the incessant spam, it's become the most hyped of all operations but researchers said that most men who have had penis enlargement surgery are not satisfied with the results. "For patients with psychological concern about the size of the penis - particularly if it is normal size - there is little point in offering them surgery because it makes no difference," said Nim Christopher, a urologist at St Peter's Andrology Centre in London. Dr Christopher and his colleagues, who questioned 42 men who had the surgery, found the dissatisfaction rate was very high. Often the men requested another surgical procedure. "The average increase in length is 1.3 cm which isn't very much and the dissatisfaction rate was in excess of 70 per cent," said Christopher. He added that spam e-mails advertising penis enlargement surgery were inaccurate and gave men unrealistic expectations".

FOOD CORRECTNESS DICTATORS HAVE THEIR LEGS KICKED OUT FROM UNDER THEM AGAIN

But they will continue to act as if nothing has happened

Article by Jeff Jacoby

I don't usually follow nutrition stories, but it was hard to miss last week's shocker about low-fat diets. Like many papers, The Boston Globe put it on Page 1, high above the fold: "Study finds no major benefits of low-fat diet." The study, a project of the National Institutes of Health, had taken eight years, cost $415 million, and involved nearly 49,000 older women, 40 percent of whom were assigned to a diet that kept their intake of calories from fat significantly below that of the other 60 percent. Researchers had expected to confirm what earlier studies and conventional medical wisdom had long suggested -- that consuming less fat is good for your health.

What they learned instead was that the women who dutifully cut back on fried foods, ice cream, and pizza ended up no better off than the women who ate whatever they wanted. The two groups developed breast cancer, colon cancer, heart attacks, and strokes at the same rates. Millions of Americans have been trying for years to reduce the fat in their diet -- eating bread without butter, salads without dressing, chicken without skin -- and now the largest study of the subject ever conducted says it has all been for naught. You could have had those fries after all.

And so once again we are reminded, as The New York Times sighed in an editorial on Thursday, that "the more we learn about nutrition, the less we seem to know." Does oat bran reduce cholesterol? Can dietary fiber prevent colon cancer? Are high doses of Vitamin E good for your heart? Once, the experts said yes. Then the experts said no. It sometimes seems that for every study that makes a nutritional claim, another study inevitably makes an equal and opposite claim.

Researchers can't even agree on whether eating less fat is the way to lose weight. Some insist that obesity is caused by ingesting too much fat, making a low-fat diet the key to shedding pounds. Others claim that reducing fat leads to overconsumption of carbohydrates -- and that it's carbs, not fat, that make people gain weight. Which theory did the massive new study confirm? Neither. Apparently there is still no clear-cut answer -- not even for $415 million.

But clear-cut answers are just what so many Americans want, and what so many of them think science ought to be able to provide. There is a seemingly inexhaustible willingness to believe that the voice of science is the voice of truth -- impartial, incorruptible, and unambiguous. It isn't, of course. Scientists are no less vulnerable to error or bias or ego than the rest of the human race. Scientists too can blunder or act from ulterior motives or convince themselves of things that aren't so. And yet on the whole they enjoy a level of deference and public trust that people in most other fields can only envy.

Which is probably not a good thing. Scientific pronouncements should be subjected to the same level of healthy skepticism as the promises of politicians or the claims of advertisers -- or the views of newspaper columnists. With the best of intentions (and otherwise), scientists sometimes peddle claptrap. Just because a statement begins with "A new study shows . . ." or "Researchers have found . . ." doesn't mean that what follows is true. "We in the scientific community often give strong advice based on flimsy evidence," Berkeley statistician David Freedman said last week in a comment on the low-fat diet study. "That's why we have to do experiments." And why the rest of us have to remember that contradiction, confusion, and changing opinions have always been a part of the scientific process.

One day after last week's low-fat story, the New England Journal of Medicine was out with a study concluding that saw palmetto extract, an herbal product, has no effect on the symptoms caused by an enlarged prostate. Earlier studies had found just the opposite, and more than 2 million American men take saw palmetto for their prostate condition. So does it work or doesn't it? Whichever answer you choose, there's a study to back it up.

In Newsweek last month, Dr. Harvey Simon of the Harvard Medical School recanted a view he had preached for years: that the only way to benefit from exercise was through intense aerobic activity, complete with pounding heart and rivers of sweat. Now, citing the latest research, he says he was dead wrong, and that gentle, no-sweat exercise -- even walking or gardening -- is also highly effective.

From cardiac health to climate change, it's worth keeping in mind that what the experts say today they may not be saying tomorrow. As that noted scientist Emily Litella used to put it in the old "Saturday Night Live" skits: Never mind.

Good one! Millions of kids being fed drugs that cause heart attacks: "In a surprise move, an advisory panel urged the FDA to place strong warnings on all stimulant drugs used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) because of a potential risk of heart attacks, strokes, and sudden death. The experts voted unanimously, with one abstention, to recommend that FDA include "medication guides" with all stimulant ADHD drugs -- Adderall, Concerta, and Ritalin -- warning patients about the potential heart risks. The panel also voted 8 to 7, with one abstention, to urge the FDA to place strong "black box" warnings on all of the drugs' labels and advertisements. The warning should alert doctors and patients the drugs increase heart rate and blood pressure, and that researchers are unsure about the real-world consequences of those changes, some panelists said".

A second childhood is healthy! "Researchers at the Santa Claus Sports Institute in Lapland have found groups of elderly Finns significantly improved their health and wellbeing by simply playing on swings, bouncing on seesaws and leaping around climbing frames. A team at Rovaniemi Polytechnic studied a group of 40 people, aged between 65 and 81, and found significant improvements in their balance, speed and co-ordination after three months of larking about on the climbing frames and play equipment".


Sex romps can keep you feeling great: "It can help to reduce stress, soothe pain, cure insomnia, lower the risk of a heart attack and, as if that wasn't enough, make your hair shine and your wrinkles vanish. "Forget about jogging round the block or struggling with sit-ups," says the UK National Health Service patients' helpline, NHS Direct. The key for healthy living is, in fact, "a good bout of sexercise". Undertaking "regular romps" will bring a plethora of health rewards, from staying fit and burning calories to combating cancer, says the website. "Orgasms even release painkillers into the bloodstream, helping keep mild illnesses like colds and aches and pains at bay, and produce extra oestrogen and testosterone hormones," the site says. "These hormones will keep your bones and muscles healthy, leaving you feeling fabulous inside and out."

FROZEN FOOD NOW INCORRECT

British food correctness at work

Stormy waters lie ahead for Captain Birds Eye. The fish finger company is being forced to find a new berth.
Unilever, the parent company, is jumping ship, blaming frozen food's bad image for the decision to sell one of its most famous brands. Despite the good captain's "nutrition mission" on television commercials, and a 60 million pound overhall of the range last year, Birds Eye has struggled to reverse growing perceptions of frozen food as unhealthy and outdated. "It's modern and it's healthy," Trevor Gorin, a Unilever spokesman, said, "but it's hard to turn people's ideas around. The popularity of chilled food has been a big problem, too. The decision to sell was not an easy one, but we can't afford to be sentimental."

Birds Eye, founded by the American biologist Clarence Birdseye in 1922, is one of the iconic brands on supermarket shelves, selling more than 515 million fish fingers a year. More than 1.7 million people a day eat the company's peas. Its advertising figurehead, Captain Birds Eye, has become a household name since he appeared in 1967. He was even honoured with an obituary note in The Times during a temporary demise "after long exposure" in 1974. The white-bearded sailor made a comeback in 2002 after an attempt to replace him with a younger, stubble-clad impostor provoked protests from his fans.

Now the captain and the Birds Eye workforce, who include 900 staff at a frozen vegetable site in Lowestoft, Suffolk, and hundreds more at the fish plant in Hull, must wait until the company is sold before their future is decided. Unilever hopes to complete the sale by the end of the year. Birds Eye's Grimsby factory, where fish fingers had been made since their invention in 1955, closed a year ago with the loss of 620 jobs. Heinz and Findus have also put their frozen food divisions up for sale in recent months.

Reacting to yesterday's announcement, a spokesman for the Transport and General Workers' Union said: "Our members face an uncertain and unsettling future. We are very disappointed that Unilever has chosen to sell." Unilever said that it was also selling most of its European frozen food brand, Iglo, which with Birds Eye has an annual turnover of about 1.5 billion pounds. It will retain control of Iglo in Italy, where the market is performing better, as well as the ice-cream brand Walls.

Patrick Cescau, group chief executive, said that the decision to sell "has been a tough call. It has been a successful business for us over many years. However . . . in recent years growth has been harder to come by." Potential buyers for Birds Eye include the private equity group Capvest, which bought part of Findus this month.

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THE INCORRECTNESS OF RED MEAT

Panic: 'Red meat cancer risk clue found,' says BBC News reporting on a new study which suggests a mechanism by which eating beef, pork and other red meat might increase the risk of bowel cancer. A small group of volunteers were fed three different diets: one in high in meat but low in fibre; high meat and high fibre; and no meat. Those in the high meat, low fibre group had significantly greater damage to the DNA in their colon than the other groups. The researchers, from the Dunn Human Nutrition Group and the Open University, suggest that N-nitrosocompounds, substances formed in the gut after consuming red meat, may be responsible.

This study follows a report published in 2005 that suggested that those who ate red meat twice a day were a third more likely to develop bowel cancer than those who ate red meat less than once a week. Cancer of the bowel causes 16,000 deaths in the UK each year.

Don't panic: This new study is only suggestive of a possible cause for why red meat might cause cancer. The link is far from proven, and if there is an increased risk it would appear to be small.

The study obliged volunteers to eat 420g of red meat each day for two weeks. That is an unusually large quantity of meat - roughly equivalent to eating four quarterpounders a day. Moreover, the small number of subjects involved and the short timescale suggest more work is required.

Even if this mechanism suggested was to be confirmed, the risks are still small. The 2005 study found that the annual risk of bowel cancer at the age of 50 for the high meat consumption group was 0.17 per cent, compared to 0.12 per cent for the low meat consumption group. Either way, bowel cancer is not a major threat for most people. While such figures translate into large numbers at a population level, they are fairly meaningless as a guide to individual behaviour.

Other factors are important, particularly age - 80 per cent of bowel cancers occur in people over the age of 60 - and survival rates have improved a lot in the last few years. So, chances are you can carry on scoffing the bacon sandwiches and beefburgers, and still live to a ripe old age.

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