IF KIDS LIKE IT, IT IS BAD FOR THEM

They are some of Australia's most trusted household brands. But as part of a campaign against childhood obesity, the independent consumer watchdog is naming and shaming the food manufacturers who are making children fat. "All natural", "low GI" and "real fruit" are just some of the descriptors used on 10 market-leading snack foods and beverages targeted at children and analysed by Choice. But even a single serve of these products can pack in as many kilojoules as a Big Mac and a middy of beer - without satisfying the tummy rumbles.

Arnott's, Uncle Tobys, Nestle and Ribena are among those named in the report, to be made public today, with two cereal-based products, hailed by the manufacturers for their energy-building qualities, leading the pack in excessive fat and sugar content.

Health-conscious parents are likely to feel dismay when they learn that one of Australia's best-loved brands - Milo, albeit in cereal form - contains almost as much sugar as and even more fat than the much-maligned Kellogg's Coco Pops. And while the childhood lunchbox staple of Arnott's Tiny Teddy biscuits may have been credited with single-handedly resurrecting the local biscuit industry more than a decade ago, a single 27-gram pack with accompanying pink dipping goo takes out top honours for cramming the most kilojoules into the least amount of food. Another lunchbox stalwart which has long been promoted by its manufacturer as a healthy children's drink, Ribena, consists of little more than sugar and water, while its essential ingredient - blackcurrants - makes up just 5 per cent of content.

Choice's spokeswoman, Indira Naidoo, said the association was exposing the market leaders because advertising and labelling led many parents to believe they were buying healthier alternatives to more overtly marketed junk foods. One product singled out by Choice, Go Natural's berry pieces in yoghurt, was even located in the health food section of a big supermarket, despite being laden with trans fatty acids. "Part of these foods' popularity is due to the misleading claims made, leading parents to believe they are not as unhealthy as they really are," she said. "But even a small serve can be as dense in kilojoules as a small meal."

Nestle's director of corporate and external relations, Peter Kelly, said Choice was confusing consumers and making "an unhelpful contribution to the debate over what constitutes a healthy diet". The kilojoules per 100 gram serve criteria used in the analysis meant that a child would have to eat three and a half bowls of Milo cereal to reach the 100-gram serving, he said, while almost seven bars of Uncle Tobys fruit roll-ups - also made by Nestle and singled out by Choice - would have to be consumed to reach the 100-gram target. "As we all know that simply doesn't make sense," Mr Kelly said. "It's a pity Choice has not taken the opportunity to provide consumers with some useful education on what is a very important subject."

But a spokeswoman for Arnott's told the Herald that choc-chip Tiny Teddy biscuits with strawberry dip were already marked for culling. The decision had more to do with low sales than their 80 per cent sugar and fat content, she said.

Source




Speaking two languages may help stave off dementia

A dubious finding. Are speakers of two languages otherwise the same as monolinguals? Unlikely

Speaking two languages delays the onset of dementia by four years, a study found. Researchers in Canada, where the official languages are English and French, examined 132 patients with a diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease. Those who spoke two languages experienced the onset of dementia 4.1 years later than those who didn't, the researchers wrote in a study published in the February issue of the journal Neuropsychologia. The patients spoke a total of 25 different languages, including Polish, Yiddish, German, Romanian and Hungarian.

Previous studies have shown that lifestyle factors such as physical activity, social involvement and education may improve overall brain health. Bilingualism may help the brain build what is called a cognitive reserve, which may provide protection against the onset of dementia, the Canadian researchers said. ``There are no pharmacological interventions that are this dramatic,'' Morris Freedman, director of the Memory Clinic at Baycrest Research Centre for Aging and the Brain in Toronto, said in a statement today.

The difference in dementia onset remained even after the researchers factored in the possible influence of culture, immigration, formal education, employment and gender on the results, the study said. [IQ?] ``The data show a huge protective effect,'' co-investigator Fergus Craik said in the statement.

The finding, while in line with earlier research on lifestyle and dementia onset, is preliminary and needs to be studied further, he said. The researchers are working on a follow-up study to further examine the protective effects of bilingualism on the brain.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************

Trans fats make you infertile?



Popular summary below followed by the journal abstract and comment

Fats hidden in thousands of foods can harm a woman's chance of having a baby, scientists say. A study by scientists from Harvard University's School of Public Health says the fats can increase the risk of fertility problems by 70 per cent or more. And eating as little as one doughnut or a portion of chips a day can have a damaging effect. The scientists behind the study have advised women who want to have a baby to avoid the fats, known as trans fats. They are used in thousands of processed foods, from chocolate to pies, as well as takeaway meals. They have no nutritional value [Really?? A selective definition of nutrition, I fear], but are included simply to extend the shelf life of food.

It is very difficult to know the precise amount of trans fats in any food because it does not have to be put on the label. The fats are found naturally in some red meat and dairy products, but most are produced artificially in a high-temperature process called hydrogenation, which turns oil into solid fat.

Nutritionist Rosemary Stanton said the study was more evidence labelling should be compulsory. "If you compel manufacturers to label products, evidence shows they will want to say their products have 'no trans fats'. And this will stop them using these bad fats," Ms Stanton said. Other studies showed that trans fats were bad for pregnant women because they stopped the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids reaching an unborn child's brain, she said. Women should be wary of processed canola oil used in many Australian foods such as crisps, pastries and crackers, she said.

The US study's lead researcher, Dr Jorge Chavarro, said the findings suggested that women wanting to conceive should watch their trans fat consumption, as well as give up smoking and maintain a healthy weight.

Source

Journal abstract

Dietary fatty acid intakes and the risk of ovulatory infertility

By Chavarro J.E. et al.

BACKGROUND: Pharmacologic activation of the peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor gamma (PPAR-gamma) improves ovulatory function in women with polycystic ovary syndrome, and specific dietary fatty acids can affect PPAR-gamma activity.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of the study was to assess whether the intakes of total fat, cholesterol, and major types of fatty acids affect the risk of ovulatory infertility.

DESIGN: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 18 555 married, premenopausal women without a history of infertility who attempted a pregnancy or became pregnant between 1991 and 1999. Diet was assessed twice during follow-up by using a food-frequency questionnaire.

RESULTS: During follow-up, 438 incidents of ovulatory infertility were reported. In logistic regression analyses, intakes of total fat, cholesterol, and most types of fatty acids were not related to ovulatory infertility. Each 2% increase in the intake of energy from trans unsaturated fats, as opposed to that from carbohydrates, was associated with a 73% greater risk of ovulatory infertility after adjustment for known and suspected risk factors for this condition [relative risk (RR) = 1.73; 95% CI: 1.09, 2.73]. Obtaining 2% of energy intake from trans fats rather than from n-6 polyunsaturated fats was associated with a similar increase in the risk of ovulatory infertility (RR = 1.79; 95% CI: 1.11, 2.89). In addition, obtaining 2% of energy from trans fats rather than from monounsaturated fats was associated with a more than doubled risk of ovulatory infertility (RR = 2.31; 95% CI: 1.09, 4.87).

CONCLUSION: trans Unsaturated fats may increase the risk of ovulatory infertility when consumed instead of carbohydrates or unsaturated fats commonly found in nonhydrogenated vegetable oils.

Source

Comment

This is a long way from a double-blind control-group study. It is a cheap and nasty study based on a self-report questionnaire -- with all the limitations that implies. The major deficit would appear to be a failure to allow for social class. Poor people probably both eat more fast food and are more ready to acknowledge it -- thus being rated as big trans-fat consumers. And poor people tend to have more health problems. Surveys such as this do have the potential benefit of making meaningful sampling easier but there is no mention of sampling -- which makes the results of unknowable generalizability





Chinese herbs offer hope to fight disease

The first large-scale screening of herbs commonly used in traditional Chinese medicine reveals they contain thousands of compounds with the potential to fight diseases from cancer to HIV-AIDS and conditions such as erectile dysfunction and high blood pressure. The compounds are promising "candidates" for new drugs, pharmaceutical chemist David Barlow and his colleagues at King's College London claimed.

Dr Barlow's group discovered 8264 chemical compounds in the 240 plants studied. And 62per cent of them contained at least one potential disease-fighting biochemical, with 53 per cent containing two or more. Some, such as maidenhair and skullcap, were packed with five or more active ingredients.

The team will report in an upcoming edition of the American Chemical Society's Journal of Chemical Information and Modelling that it found almost 2600 compounds that could be used to fight a host of ailments. Among them were pain, inflammation, dementia, obesity, Huntington's disease, blood clots, depression, eye disease and arthritis.

Chris Zaslawski, of the College of Traditional Medicine at the University of Technology, Sydney, said the research was an important first step towards novel pharmaceuticals based on natural products. "But that doesn't mean (the compounds) will work in humans," he said.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************

Handbags a health risk?

How ridiculous! Women have been carrying stuff -- including some pretty heavy babies -- for millions of years. Women are not made of candyfloss. Or are they saying that women are too dumb to know when something is too heavy for them? Charming! And what about the common advice that "weight-bearing exercise" is needed to prevent osteoporosis? Damned if you do. Damned if you don't!

WOMEN are risking health problems by carrying fashionably huge handbags. Inspired by style gurus such as Lindsay Lohan, Sienna Miller and Mischa Barton, style-conscious women are toting oversize handbags. The Herald Sun weighed the handbags of Melbourne women and found them lugging almost 5kg apiece.

Australian Physiotherapy Association spokeswoman Cathy Nall said women risked serious neck and back strain with heavy bags. "Five kilos is heavy to be carrying around all day, particularly if it's not being carried properly," Ms Nall said. "The trend to larger handbags for women places the musculoskeletal system at risk, in particular the neck, shoulders and back. "As we know, most women, if they have large handbags, inevitably fill them up. "This results in carrying a heavy weight often for a long period asymmetrically, unless particular care is take to move the bag from side to side or spread the load evenly."

Melbourne handbag designer Catherine Manuell said women carried huge bags because it suited their busy lifestyles. "Our bigger styles are some of our best sellers," Ms Manuell said. "They are popular because we've just got so much to put in there: it's much easier carrying one bag than two or three." Demand for larger tote bags has become so great that Ms Manuell has introduced styles with detachable shoulder straps.

Christine Barro, managing director of Melbourne accessories haven Christine, said women did not factor in health risks when buying a bag. "People are happy using them," Ms Barro said. "It's a bigger and better statement of arm candy." After injuring her shoulder while carrying a hefty handbag, Ms Barro said she now used a tote bag for everyday use. "I wear a bag across my body most of the time," she said. "When I'm chic I wear a beautiful bag."

Source





Addicted to myths about opiates

Almost everything you think you know about heroin addiction is wrong, writes Theodore Dalrymple

It is not only those who take heroin who are blinded by illusions, but almost the entire population, including - or especially - the experts. Every problem in contemporary society calls forth its equal and supposedly opposite bureaucracy. The ostensible purpose of this bureaucracy is to solve that problem.

But the bureaucracy quickly develops a survival instinct and so no more wishes the problem to disappear altogether than the lion wishes to kill all the gazelle in the bush and leave itself with no food for the future.

In short, the bureaucracy of drug addiction needs drug addicts far more than drug addicts need the bureaucracy of drug addiction. Thanks to propaganda assiduously spread for many years by everyone who has concerned himself with the subject, there is now a standard or received view of heroin addiction that is almost universally accepted by the general public, by the addicts and by the bureaucracy. This view serves the interests of the addicts who wish to continue their habit while placing the blame elsewhere, as well as the bureaucracy that wishes to continue in employment, preferably forever and at higher rates of pay.

This standard or received view conceives opiate addiction as an illness and therefore implies that there is a bona fide medical solution to it. When all the proposed "cures" fail to work, as they usually do, and when the extension of quasi-medical services to addicts is accompanied not by a decline in the prevalence of the problem but, on the contrary, by an increase, who can blame addicts if, in continuing their habit, they blame not themselves but the incompetence of those who have set themselves up as their medical saviours and offered them solutions that do not work?

But where bureaucracies are concerned, nothing succeeds like failure. For example, the budget of the US National Institute on Drug Abuse increased by 16.2 per cent between 2001 and 2002, which would be quite a creditable performance if it had been a purely commercial enterprise. In the period, $US126,394,000 was added to its budget, but it would be foolhardy to suggest that a single drug addict stopped, or will stop, taking drugs because of this extra funding.

The standard or orthodox view of heroin addiction is as follows, a view that has a different function in the case of addicts, doctors and the general public. According to this view, a man is somehow or other exposed to heroin, more or less by chance. It has a pleasurable effect on him and he takes some more, and then some more again. Before long, indeed very quickly, he is physiologically addicted, and in order to avoid the terrible suffering caused by withdrawal, he has to take more and more heroin. Unfortunately, in order to pay for this, he often has to resort to crime, unless he belongs to that small elite of addicts who come from the moneyed classes, for his addiction precludes normal paid work but requires a large income. His powers of self-control have by now been completely destroyed or subverted by heroin. Unless he takes a substitute drug, or possibly enters a lengthy and technically rigorous rehabilitation program, he cannot give up. He is hooked for life. He needs help.

There is only a very tiny grain of truth in all this. That physiological addiction exists is undoubted. But in practically all other respects, the standard view is wrong. It is a masterpiece of the old rhetorical tricks of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi. It overlooks the most obvious salient facts.

A man is somehow or other exposed to heroin. But how is a man exposed to heroin? The use of the passive voice is here very instructive. The heroin comes to the man, the man does not go to the heroin. It is as if the heroin had a will of its own, unlike the man. People who are genuinely exposed to strong opiates by chance, in medical circumstances, for example after an operation, very seldom become addicted to them. The vast majority of heroin addicts do not become addicted via the medical route. In fact, I do not recall one among the many hundreds whom I have met. When I ask heroin addicts why they started taking heroin, most of them reply with one of two answers. These are: "I fell in with the wrong crowd" and "heroin's everywhere".

When I reply that it is odd how I meet many people who fell in with the wrong crowd, but I never under any circumstances meet any member of the wrong crowd itself, who must therefore be lurking permanently out of my sight and hearing, the addict who has attributed his addiction to his fortuitous acquaintance with the wrong crowd smiles, or even laughs, knowingly.

Of course, it is perfectly possible, likely even, that people live in social micro-climates, in some of which heroin addiction is much more common than in others. But there is no micro-climate, other than the self-constituted one in which addicts live, in which heroin addiction is universal, literally inescapable, as it would have to be for its ubiquity to count as the explanation of any individual addict's addiction.

Distress from opiate withdrawal is overwhelmingly a social or psychological condition: it is not caused by observable physiological changes. This has extremely important implications for practice. It means that anyone who suggests withdrawal is a serious condition, worthy of and necessitating medical attention and treatment, other than treatment of the most trivial kind, is, wittingly or not, increasing the distress that withdrawal causes.

In other words, the whole apparatus of care, doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, counsellors, serves not to alleviate suffering but to create and exacerbate it. (I cannot resist quoting a law first enunciated by Colin Brewer about modern society: "Suffering increases to meet the means available for its alleviation.")

The idea of the most common method of "treatment" is substitution of heroin with a drug called methadone. This substance, which is most often taken in syrup form, but is also available as an injection and as pills, is a synthetic opiate first developed in Germany just before World War II. What we end up with (at best) is a methadone addict as well as a heroin addict, whereas we had only a heroin addict before. Neither the quadrupling of methadone prescriptions in Britain between 1982 and 1992, nor the doubling of them in the US between 1999 and 2001, had any effect on the scale of the problem. Substantial numbers of people are killed by methadone. Heroin was involved in 58 per cent of the 3961 fatal poisonings from opiates between 1993 and 1998 in England and Wales, while methadone was involved in 49 per cent.

The resort to intoxicants is a permanent and ineradicable temptation that arises from human nature. Not everyone gives in to it, however, or is equally susceptible, by virtue of their situation in life. The majority of people sometimes resort to intoxicants (or, like me with alcohol, resort to them every day), without letting them interfere with their ability to function in the world. Indeed, taken in moderation, they probably increase their ability to do so.

But there are some people for whom the desire for the consolation of illusion, and the illusion of consolation, is constant. In most Western societies, there is now a class in which tedium vitae is very common, almost normal. This is the class from which the vast majority of heroin addicts now comes. The young of this class are disaffected, and have good reason to be so. They are for the most part poor, though not of course in the absolute sense. They have no interests, intellectual or cultural. The consolations of religion are closed to them. As for their family life, loosely so-called, it is usually of an utterly chaotic nature, a quicksand of step-parents, step and half-siblings, and quite without an orderly succession of generations. Their sexual relationships are a kaleidoscope of ephemeral couplings, often with abandoned offspring as a result, motivated by an immediate need for sexual release and often complicated by primitive egotistical possessiveness leading to violence and conflict.

Their economic prospects are poor. They are unskilled in countries in which the demand for unskilled labour is limited. Any work that they do will be repetitive and dull; and while a man might once have derived satisfaction from performing a menial task well, from leading a life of modest usefulness to others, this is not an age in which such humility is very common.

In large part, this is because people live to a quite unprecedented degree in the virtual world of so-called popular culture. From the very earliest age, their lives are saturated with images of celebrities, whose attainments are often modest but who have been whisked by good fortune into a world of immense and glamorous luxury.

Crime ceases to be crime, but is rather restitution or justified revenge. The result is that, while profoundly dissatisfied with their present lot, they do not have ambitions towards which they might work in a constructive fashion, but daydreams in which everything is solved at once in a magical way, daydreams from which the emergence into reality is always painful. Any aid to the perpetuation of the state of daydreaming is therefore greatly appreciated.

The temptation to take opiates, and to continue to take them, arises from two main sources: first, man's eternal existential anxieties, to which there is no wholly satisfactory solution, at least for those who are not unself-consciously religious; and second, the particular predicament in which people find themselves.

The addict has a problem, but it is not a medical one: he does not know how to live. And on this subject the doctor has nothing, qua doctor, to offer. What he ought not do, however, is to mislead the addict, or allow the addict to mislead him, into thinking that the problem is medical and requires, or is susceptible to, a medical solution.

Source

****************

Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************

Chlorinated water a cancer risk?

We're all gonna DIE!

Odd that drinking water has been chlorinated for about a century while lifespans have soared, though

We can add swimming pools to the ever-growing list of things we like that are bad for us, with a new study showing chlorinated water may increase the risk of bladder cancer. Staff at the Municipal Institute of Medical Research in Barcelona have found chemicals, most commonly chlorine, used to disinfect water can produce by-products that have been tied to increased cancer risk. Dr Cristina Villanueva today said the findings were the first to suggest the chemicals could be harmful when they were inhaled or absorbed through the skin, as well as when they were ingested.

The most prevalent chlorination by-products, chemicals called trihalomethanes (THM), could be absorbed into the body through the skin or by inhalation, the researchers said. To investigate lifetime THM exposure and bladder cancer risk, they matched 1219 men and women with bladder cancer to 1271 control individuals who did not have the disease, questioning them about their exposure to chlorinated water via drinking water, swimming pools, showering and bathing. The researchers also analysed the average water THM levels in the 123 municipalities included in the study.

People living in households with an average household water THM level of more than 49 micrograms a litre had double the bladder cancer risk of those living in households where water THM concentration was below 8 micrograms a litre, the researchers found. THM levels of about 50 micrograms a litre were common in industrialised societies, they said. Study participants who drank chlorinated water were at 35 per cent greater risk of bladder cancer than those who did not, while use of swimming pools boosted bladder cancer risk by 57 per cent. And those who took longer showers or baths and lived in municipalities with higher THM levels were also at increased cancer risk.

When THM was absorbed through the skin or lungs, it may have a more powerful carcinogenic effect because it did not undergo detoxification via the liver. "If confirmed elsewhere, this observation has significant public health implications in relation to preventing exposure to these water contaminants," the researchers concluded.

Source




The anti-MMR gravy train derailed

Revealed: How more than £15million of legal aid funding was spent by lawyers trying and failing to prove that the MMR vaccination causes autism.

Five years ago, supporters of Dr Andrew Wakefield’s claim of a link between the MMR vaccine and autism used to argue that ‘the evidence was stacking up’ in support of this theory. In fact, the only evidence that was stacking up was evidence against the link: more recently a series of robust epidemiological studies showing no reason to suspect that MMR caused autism has been supplemented by rigorous virological investigations failing to demonstrate any link (1, 2). Meanwhile, another stack of evidence has emerged, revealing how legal aid funding bankrolled the campaign against MMR.

Two significant developments occurred over the Christmas period in the long-running MMR saga – both related to the activities of the investigative journalist Brian Deer. It was Deer who, in The Sunday Times in February 2004, first exposed Dr Wakefield’s failure to disclose the conflict of interest arising from legal aid funding for the study published in the Lancet in February 1998 that launched the MMR-autism scare. In a subsequent ‘Dispatches’ documentary broadcast by Channel 4 in November 2004, Deer raised further questions about Dr Wakefield’s funding and about the ethical conduct of his research (as well as revealing his association with quacks and charlatans in the USA).

On 22 December 2006, in response to a request initiated by Deer under the Freedom of Information Act, the Legal Services Commission revealed for the first time details of how more than £15million of legal aid funding was spent by lawyers attempting to make a case that MMR had caused autism in more than 1,000 children (3). This case collapsed in September 2003 when the LSC finally realised that there was no possibility of the case succeeding on the basis of the research commissioned by the lawyers and refused further funding. On 2 January this year, Dr Wakefield announced his withdrawal from the libel action he had launched against Deer and Channel 4 over the ‘Dispatches’ programme, agreeing to pay costs of £500,000 (borne by Dr Wakefield’s medical insurance firm) (4). Let’s look first at the libel debacle.

Dr Wakefield’s abandonment of his claim that Deer’s documentary had misrepresented him follows earlier setbacks in the progress of his libel action (5). In November 2005, Justice Eady refused an attempt by Dr Wakefield’s team to postpone the hearing of his libel claim until after his appearance before the General Medical Council, on associated disciplinary charges (for my view on Dr Wakefield’s appearance at the GMC see Stop witch-hunting Wakefield). The judge was highly critical of what he described as Dr Wakefield’s wish ‘to use the existence of libel proceedings for public relations purposes, and to deter other critics’ while trying to delay the case, thus denying Deer the opportunity to defend himself. Dr Wakefield had tried to take advantage of his ongoing libel claim to deter critical commentary on the case in the press, on the radio, even on the Department of Health’s website.

In November and December 2006, Justice Eady made further rulings allowing Deer’s application to see copies of key documents – including clinical records of children involved in the Lancet study and other documents that Dr Wakefield had been required to make available to the GMC investigation. The fact that Dr Wakefield’s withdrawal from the libel action followed so closely on Deer’s team gaining access to these documents suggests that they were supportive of Deer’s case.

One unfortunate aspect of the collapse of the libel action is that this information will remain secret – at least until Dr Wakefield’s appearance before the GMC (now scheduled for July). Nevertheless, Dr Wakefield’s libel volte face is a dramatic vindication of Deer and his carefully documented exposure of the anti-MMR campaign.

The LSC’s disclosures confirm that the major beneficiaries of the anti-MMR litigation (payments were made from 1992 up to 2004) were the lawyers. They received some two thirds of the £15million total (£8million to solicitors, £1.7million to barristers). The bulk of the revenues accruing to solicitors went to the Manchester-based firm Alexander Harris, where one partner, Richard Barr, played the leading role in coordinating the anti-MMR campaign from the outset. Barr also pursued the claims of alleged victims of the use of organophosphates in farming and of former soldiers with Gulf War syndrome (with equal lack of success). He has subsequently left Alexander Harris and has apparently abandoned the anti-MMR cause.

The LSC provides a detailed account of how a further £4.2million was claimed in ‘fees and expenses’ by more than 60 experts retained by the lawyers in the quest to justify their claim for damages against the vaccine manufacturers by proving a link between MMR and autism. The key payments – amounting to a total of nearly £1.7million - went to around a dozen prominent campaign supporters (6). In principle, expert witnesses are supposed to provide objective evidence to the courts. In practice, it is clear that, in the case of the anti-MMR litigation, legal aid funding went largely to those supportive of the anti-MMR campaign.

The notion that serious science could result from research sponsored by legal aid funding and administered by lawyers is nonsense. The team of experts assembled by Barr did not include a single recognised autism specialist, paediatrician, vaccine specialist, virologist or paediatric gastroenterologist who has a current public appointment or is currently in practice. (Indeed, many of the experts have long retired, though several have embarked on new careers as professional expert witnesses.) When the LSC finally called a halt to the litigation in September 2003, it belatedly acknowledged that ‘in retrospect, it was not effective or appropriate for the LSC to fund research’, conceding that ‘the courts are not the place to prove new medical truths’ (7).

To any observer not familiar with the world of law, what is striking is the sheer scale of the payments received by the witnesses in this case, which contrasts sharply with standard incomes in the medical and scientific world. To enable a rough comparison, in the UK in the 1990s, the basic income of a mid-career researcher at a university or medical school would have been around £50,000 to £60,000 a year; a clinical psychologist would earn perhaps £30,000 to £40,000. What emerges is a cultural gulf between the largely public sector worlds of medicine and science, on the one hand – with low incomes, austere working conditions, meetings in shabby hospital or university seminar rooms, with institutional tea and sandwiches – and, on the other hand, the glitzy world of the law, in which highly paid professionals meet in luxury hotels with lavish hospitality and everybody claims handsome expenses (and after some quibbling, the LSC pays up).

Dr Wakefield received a total of more than £400,000 for his contribution to the case (equivalent to several times his annual income in the 1990s). He claims that he charged at the rates recommended by the British Medical Association for such work (between £47 and £100 per hour) (8). If he worked full time at this rate, his receipts would cover between two and four years exclusively devoted to the case. (Indeed, he indicates that his final award from the LSC was £100,000 less than he claimed.) Yet he was employed by the Royal Free up to December 2001, when he was reported to have taken up a post at Dr Jeff Bradstreet’s treatment centre in Florida (he has since moved on to another private clinic in Texas). According to Dr Wakefield, he donated the income he received from the litigation to support the foundation of a research unit dedicated to bowel problems in autistic children, first (unsuccessfully) at the Royal Free and later in the USA. According to Deer, the accounts of these organisations reveal that he was a recipient of funds from them rather than a donor.

The biggest single earner from the litigation was Professor John O’Leary who set up the firm Unigenetics to process requests from parents to test bowel and other specimens for traces of measles virus that Dr Wakefield believed would confirm his MMR-autism hypothesis. Indeed, the publication in 2002 of two papers by O’Leary’s team purporting to demonstrate measles fragments in autistic children appeared to many parents – though not to sceptical experts – to provide powerful evidence for the Wakefield theory. Two recent papers have conclusively refuted O’Leary’s findings (1,2). The recognition by the LSC that it could not rely on the results from O’Leary’s laboratory was one of the key factors in its decision to abandon the litigation. These tests ultimately failed to confirm a link between MMR and autism in a single child and left more than a thousand families with dashed hopes. Professor O’Leary and his colleagues received more than £700,000. No further publications in this field have emerged from his department.

Though the detailed figures have not previously been available, it has long been known that Dr Wakefield and Professor O’Leary had derived a substantial income from the litigation. Perhaps the most valuable revelation in the LSC’s recent document concerns payments to a number of individuals who have provided Dr Wakefield with vital public backing at key moments in the unfolding controversies surrounding MMR over the past decade. Many of these Wakefield supporters had not declared that they were beneficiaries of the litigation, though this might be considered a significant factor.

Dr Kenneth Aitken (£230,000) was formerly a clinical psychologist at Edinburgh children’s hospital but now works in private practice. He is closely associated with the burgeoning world of autism quackery in Scotland (9). He supported the Wakefield position at one of the Medical Research Council investigations and at the Scottish Executive inquiry in 2001. Dr Carol Stott (£100,000) was engaged on postgraduate research in autism in Cambridge before her suspension for sending abusive emails to Brian Deer. She has collaborated with Dr Wakefield on a number of articles published in anti-vaccine journals and runs a pro-Wakefield website. She has recently been appointed ‘associate professor’ at Dr Wakefield’s new clinic in Texas.

Dr Peter Fletcher (£40,000) was head of the committee on safety of medicines in the 1970s and emerged from retirement to endorse Dr Wakefield’s critique of MMR safety in 2001. He is regularly quoted by anti-MMR journalists, but refuses to speak to anybody critical of the Wakefield campaign. Dr Peter Harvey (£10,000) was an adult neurologist at the Royal Free who examined the children in Dr Wakefield’s Lancet study. He subsequently took early retirement and now has a practice in Harley Street providing expert testimony in relation to litigation claims. He has provided occasional endorsement for Dr Wakefield’s claims in the press and on television.

Mr Paul Shattock (£8,000) is the parent of an autistic son and a retired lecturer in pharmacy who provides urine tests of no known scientific value purporting to provide a guide to dietary treatments for autism from his HQ in the University of Sunderland. He is a long-standing public promoter of the Wakefield campaign. Dr Richard Halvorsen is a private GP in central London who runs a business selling measles, mumps and rubella as separate vaccines to parents rendered fearful of the triple jab by the anti-MMR campaign (of which he is a vocal supporter). He received only £6,000 from the litigation. However, a clinic just north of London providing a similar service was at one time reported to have a turnover of £17,500 a week (though it is now defunct since its proprietor, Dr David Pugh, was imprisoned for fraud in 2005 and struck off the medical register last year).

What emerges from these documents is that there does not appear to be a single professional supporter of the Wakefield campaign who was not also a beneficiary of the anti-MMR litigation. If Dr Wakefield’s British supporters appear a rather undistinguished bunch, they are paragons of professional virtue and integrity by comparison with Dr Wakefield’s US backers, such as Drs Bradstreet (£22,000), Krigsman (£17,000) and Geier (£7,000) (10).

It is not surprising that Brian Deer has attracted hostility from Dr Wakefield and his supporters. It is sad that he has also been denounced by a few parent campaigners who continue to regard Dr Wakefield as a hero. In truth Deer has emerged as a forceful champion of families affected by autism by exposing the truth about a campaign that has caused enormous distress to parents of children with autism as well as provoking unwarranted anxieties about MMR. While leading autism specialists and organisations have been largely ineffectual and much of the media (from Private Eye to the Daily Mail, from the Telegraph to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme) has been duped by Wakefield at one time or another, Deer has provided an invaluable service by revealing how much cash and cynicism has surrounded the campaign against MMR.

Much relevant documentation can be found on Brian Deer’s website and further background on the anti-MMR litigation and the personalities involved is provided in my book, MMR and Autism: What Parents Need To Know, published by Routledge, 2004.

Source

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Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************

NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS LIVE LONGER

Not sure of the logic below. Have they REALLY ruled out the possibility that people who are brighter also tend to be healthier? Evidence that they are goes back to the 1920s -- with the studies by Terman & Oden. And there has been plenty of recent evidence to that effect as well. See for instance findings by Martin, Fitzmaurice, Kindlon & Buka in "The Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health" of 2004, vol. 58, pp. 674-679. The full report is here (PDF) and a summary is here. The reason for such findings would be obvious if it were not for politics: High IQ signifies good brain function but the brain is part of the body so good brain function tends to go with good body functioning generally. Note that I say TENDS. There are exceptions to every rule.

British researchers have found that winning a Nobel Prize can add nearly two years to your life because the award boosts social status. Scientists at Warwick University in central Britain studied the lifespans of 524 chemists and physicists who either won a Nobel Prize or had been nominated for the honour between 1901 and 1950. While nominees were found to live to an average age of 75.8 years, the 135 scientists who actually won a Nobel Prize survived for another 1.4 years on top of that.

The researchers found that the prize money won by Nobel laureates had no effect on how long they lived, suggesting that the extra years were solely due to boosted social status.

The research was part of an investigation into the way social position affects well being and lifespan. Economist Professor Andrew Oswald, who led the team, said: "Status seems to work a kind of health-giving magic. Once we do the statistical corrections, walking across that platform in Stockholm apparently adds about two years to a scientist's lifespan. How status does this, we just don't know."

Source





The truth about organic food



It’s not healthier or Greener, and it's incapable of feeding the world. So why is it back in fashion?

It’s not like David Miliband to say something sensible. New Labour’s greener-than-thou environment secretary and warm favourite to be next leader-but-one is usually in the front rank of eco-worriers when discussing climate change or recycling, recently suggesting that people are right to fear global warming and that he was afraid, too. So imagine the annoyance of organic food supporters this week at Miliband’s comments about whether organic food is healthier: ‘It’s a lifestyle choice that people can make. There isn’t any conclusive evidence either way. It’s only four per cent of total farm produce, not 40 per cent and I don’t want to say that 96 per cent of our farm produce is inferior because it’s not organic.’ (1)

Cue outrage. ‘It is not just a lifestyle choice,’ insisted Soil Association spokesman Robin Maynard, ‘In terms of the environment, organic is better. Mr Miliband’s own government has recognised in the past that organic food can be better for that. In fact, organic farmers get an extra payment due to this. (2)’

Miliband’s remarks were surprising because the superiority of organic food has been taken for granted in recent years. It is assumed that organic food is more ‘natural’ and therefore by definition healthier and better for the environment – an assumption backed up by government subsidies for inefficient organic farmers. But is it true?

A new book just published in the US, The Truth About Organic Foods provides a thorough examination of the evidence. The author, Alex Avery, shares Miliband’s conclusion that organic food is no healthier than ‘conventional’ food produced by industrial methods – and also argues that the claim of organic food to be better for the environment is suspect. As Avery, a trained plant physiologist and biologist now working for the Hudson Institute told me, nobody has been putting the other side of the story on organic: ‘The “organic utopian” myth has become a serious roadblock to agricultural progress and I knew that some of the organic food industry’s main claims were simply smoke and mirrors and religious dogma.’

Healthy scepticism

Champions of organic food claim that pesticides and other chemicals used in conventional farming have the potential to cause ill-health, either through immediately poisoning us or through causing cancer in the long term. Take this statement from the Soil Association:

‘Chemicals designed to kill: Along with chemical weapons, chemicals used in farming are the only substances that are deliberately released into the environment designed to kill living things. They pose unique hazards to human health and the environment.’

Elsewhere on the Soil Association’s website we read:

‘Around 31,000 tonnes of chemicals are used in farming in the UK each year to kill weeds, insects and other pests that attack crops. There is surprisingly little control over how these chemicals are used in the non-organic sector and in what quantities or combinations. What we do know is that 150 of the available 350 pesticides commonly used have been identified as potentially [my emphasis] causing cancer and many of us would have been exposed to these pesticides before we were born. (4)’

However, most of our food does not contain residues of these chemicals. Of the minority of food products that still contain traces of pesticide, Avery provides some perspective: ‘[T]he pesticide residue data are a testament to our technical prowess in detecting incredibly tiny traces of specific chemicals in foods. Note that the synthetic pesticide residues… are consumed in microgram quantities, or one-millionth of a gram.’ Given that we tend to buy fruit and veg by the kilo, he notes: ‘Remember, this is equivalent to one penny in $10 million, or one inch in 16,000 miles!’

A host of different chemicals can cause cancer in rodents when researchers feed them to the animals in very large quantities. But the minute quantities involved in pesticide residues mean the same chemicals are harmless in food. There is no evidence of anybody ever dying or falling seriously ill from eating food carrying traces of man-made pesticides.

The over-reaction to the dangers from manmade pesticides is in sharp contrast to the complete ignorance shown towards naturally-occurring poisons. Everyday foods are full of natural pesticides. That’s hardly a surprise, since we tend to choose as crops things that seem resistant to pests and disease. The world-famous biochemist Bruce Ames makes the point clear elsewhere on spiked: ‘The natural chemicals that are known rodent carcinogens in a single cup of coffee are about equal in weight to a year’s worth of ingested synthetic pesticide residues that are rodent carcinogens.’ (5) He is not arguing that coffee is dangerous – far from it. Rather, he’s pointing out that the tiny risk from manmade chemicals is actually smaller than other small risks we accept as a normal part of life.

As it happens, as Avery points out, organic produce is not entirely free from chemicals – it is simply that a much narrower range of such chemicals is allowed for food to qualify as ‘organic’, and they tend to be used less frequently. Given that some of the things that pesticides are designed to eliminate – like poisonous fungal growths – are pretty dangerous, that is not necessarily beneficial in any event.

Another assertion often made about organic food is that it is more nutritious. It is not clear, in principle, why this might be. However, some studies suggest it might be the case. Avery looks at these studies in detail and finds many of them deeply flawed. The best review of the evidence, a paper by Woese et al in 1997, concludes that it is very difficult to conclude anything at all. ‘Conventional’ foods contain more pesticide residues and more nitrates – hardly surprising given their greater use in conventional agriculture. But overall, the authors note:  ‘With regard to all other desirable nutritional values, it was either the case that no major differences were observed in physico-chemical analyses between the products from different production forms, or contradictory findings did not permit any clear statements. (6)’

In fact, not only do better quality studies in peer-reviewed journals show no consistent difference between the two types of food, Avery notes that even some organic advocates admit it. As William Lockeretz of Tufts University told an organic food conference in 1997: ‘I wish I could tell you that there is a clear, consistent nutritional difference between organic and conventional foods. Even better, I wish I could tell you that the difference is in favour of organic. Unfortunately, though, from my reading of the scientific literature, I do not believe such a claim can be responsibly made. (7)’

Even if there were nutritional differences between organic and conventional food, any benefit one way or the other is likely to be much smaller than variation based on the variety of a crop used, other growing conditions, freshness, cooking method - even which foods are consumed together.

Environmental concerns

The environmental case for organic mainly rests upon the pollution caused by producing agricultural chemicals and cleaning up after them. It is certainly true that producing fertilisers in particular uses energy and this inevitably means fossil fuels. But the production of chemicals is only one part of the energy used in putting food on our plates. As a recent article in the Economist notes, many of the assumptions made about what is the most ‘green’ way to supply food are simply wrong. It suggests that big supermarkets, with highly efficient logistics, are arguably ‘greener’ than trying to feed the nation through local farmers’ markets.

Citing research from the UK Department of Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the article says:  ‘[A] shift towards a local food system, and away from a supermarket-based food system with its central distribution depots, lean supply chains and big, full trucks, might actually increase the number of food-vehicle miles being travelled locally, because things would move around in a larger number of smaller, less efficiently packed vehicles. (8)’

To maintain the same overall level of food production using organic methods today would require far more land to be used for farming. In developed countries such as the UK, where the efficiency of industrial farming methods has left many small farms redundant, there might be space to indulge a small land-hungry organic sector. But if we truly pursued the idea of an organic-only economy, the effect on land usage would be dramatic. At a time when environmentalists complain about how wildernesses are being cleared to produce food, the need to clear more land is organic farming’s dirty little secret.

The other alternative is to grow less food. There is no way, using organic methods, that the world’s current population could be sustained on the 37 per cent of land currently used in agriculture. The solution for some, it would appear, is not more food but fewer people. In the words of one organic farmer quoted by Avery, ‘I want to argue that production is not the problem. The problem is the imbalance of humans relative to the millions of other species with whom we co-evolved. (9)’

Don’t mess with nature

The precise arguments of the Soil Association and other organic food groups are actually neither here nor there because no-one is really holding them to account - hence the shocked reaction to Miliband’s statement. The underlying temper of our times is that anything processed or industrialised can be seen as adulterated and harmful, while anything that appears to be natural or close to nature can be regarded as pure and uncorrupted. The precise facts about residues, nutrition or environmental impact are rarely discussed.

The ‘don’t mess with nature’ approach is illustrated by the organic movement’s attitude to genetic modification. Rather than embracing GM as opening up the possibility of greater control over the properties of plants, it is rejected as dangerous interference in nature with all sorts of unknown potential problems. GM crops have the potential to allow greater productivity, reduced use of pesticides and increased nutrition. The organic movement prefers to smear GM crops as the work of malevolent agribusiness trying to create monopolies.

Even if it is found that a particular GM crop did not live up to expectations or caused unexpected problems, that would not be a cause to dismiss the whole technology out of hand. Any process involving experimentation and new techniques will have problems along the way. The most logical approach would be to learn from our mistakes in order to continue improvements. If the entire world was well-fed and food was as cheap as it could be, the discussion might be academic. But when a large proportion of the world’s population is still undernourished, society must constantly explore ways to grow more, better, food.

The roots of organic

The rise of organic food has little to do with a cold assessment of its merits. As Avery notes, the scientific arguments in favour of organic are feeble. Instead, the organic movement began largely as a rejection of industrial society and materialism - one that continues today. As an editorial in the Independent noted, criticising Miliband, ‘The organic movement is flourishing because it is in tune with the zeitgeist, which favours the small and the local and hankers for alternatives to industrial-scale farming and what is an over-cosy relationship between big producers and supermarkets.’ (10) It is this suspicion of modern production methods (despite all the benefits they have brought), mixed with overblown health fears and tied closely to environmentalism, that has allowed organic ideas to become popular.

While the organic movement is often thought of as beginning with Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the reaction to an agriculture based on man-made chemicals has existed almost as long as the fertilisers complained of. In his book The Origins of the Organic Movement Philip Conford makes the case for the 1920s, and 1926 in particular, as the moment the organic movement really began. During that year, the Chandos Group of predominantly Anglican thinkers first met in London in the wake of the failed General Strike. Conford argues that this group, who published the New English Weekly, were a driving force in popularising organic ideas, some 20 years before the formation of the Soil Association (11).

A number of other writers emerged in the 1920s promoting broadly similar ideas. Perhaps the most well-known, more for the schools he created than his ideas on agriculture, was Rudolf Steiner. His notion of ‘biodynamic’ farming sounds downright wacky today, and Avery takes great pleasure in quoting Steiner at length:

‘Have you ever thought why cows have horns, or why certain animals have antlers?… The cow has horns in order to send into itself the astral-ethereal formative powers, which, pressing inward, are meant to penetrate right into the digestive organism… Thus in the horn you have something well adapted by its inherent nature to ray back the living and astral properties into the inner life.’

So, horns and antlers are like nature’s satellite dish for cosmic forces. These forces are concentrated in the digestive system, according to Steiner, which explains the importance of manure: ‘What is farm-yard-manure?… [I]t has been inside the organism and has thus been permeated with an astral and ethereal content. In the dung, therefore, we have before us something ethereal and astral. For this reason it has a life-giving and also astralising influence upon the soil.’

If you want to improve the fertility of soil, therefore, you just need to get more ‘living forces’ into it by the simple method of filling a horn with manure and burying it in a field: ‘You see, by burying the horn with its filling of manure, we preserve in the horn the forces it was accustomed to exert within the cow itself… all the radiations that tend to etherealize and astralise are poured into the inner hollow of the horn.’

While Steiner was a first class space cadet, Avery notes that he has a surprising number of followers even today in the ‘biodynamic’ movement. After all, his ideas are hardly any more scientifically implausible than those of homeopathy where distilled water, somehow imprinted with the ‘memory’ of some active ingredient long since diluted out of it, can apparently cure all sorts of ailments.

However, while Steiner certainly had followers, his presentation was too esoteric for most. A more influential figure in the long term was Sir Albert Howard. He worked as an agricultural adviser in India in the 1920s but quickly concluded that he could learn more from the Indians than he could teach. He was impressed by the strapping good health of many of the tribes, particularly the Hunza, and concluded their rude fitness must be the product of their food and, by extension, their agriculture.

Central to the ideas that Howard was to promote in later years was the importance of compost. In fact, the Rule of Return – the idea that vital material from the soil must be returned through compost and manure – is a key idea of the organic movement. Howard advised and supervised the introduction of his Indore system of composting in many places both in the UK and America. His comments on the ruining of soil by modern methods could have been made by any modern environmentalist:

‘In allowing science to be used to wring the last ounce from the soil by new varieties of crops, cheaper and more stimulating manures, deeper and more thorough cultivating machines, hens which lay themselves to death, and cows which perish in an ocean of milk, something more than a want of judgment on the part of the organisation is involved. Agricultural research has been misused to make the farmer, not a better producer of food, but a more expert bandit… All goes well as long as the soil can be made to yield a crop. But soil fertility does not last forever; eventually the land is worn out; real farming dies.’

Howard’s predictions must have seemed prescient when American agriculture was doing its best to self-destruct during the years of the Dust Bowl, when a combination of inappropriate farming techniques, drought and depression created the conditions for strong winds to strip vast areas of topsoil. It is also the case that most farmers use manure and compost as means of improving soil quality. But Howard was ultimately wrong. Better understanding of the use of manmade fertilisers, selective breeding, and other techniques have greatly improved crop yields over the last few decades.

What is striking about the early organic pioneers is their rejection of modern society. In a world staggering out of one World War and towards another via economic and social turmoil, there were plenty of people who rejected capitalism. However, most in the organic movement rejected the communist and socialist alternatives, too, and recoiled from the class conflict embodied in the General Strike of 1926.

The social makeup of those prominent in the early organic movement suggests a group of people being squeezed out of modern society: disillusioned colonials from a declining and increasingly discredited empire, aristocrats seeking to preserve rural life as agricultural workers were replaced by machines, and churchmen trying to find a new setting for religious ideas.

Back to the future

So why are organic ideas that were based on disillusionment with modernity back in fashion today? Economically and politically, Western societies have stagnated over the last 30 years or so. The idea that tomorrow will look radically different from – and better than - today seems unrealistic to many. Both the traditional left and right are exhausted, their visions of the future bankrupt. Against this background those who hanker after an imaginary idyllic past, or are fearful of future change, can often exercise disproportionate influence over politics and culture. Alongside the aristocrats like Prince Charles we now have the disillusioned stockbrokers who give up the rat race to sell organic jam, the New Age religionists, and the middle-class hypochondriacs.

Books like Avery’s are important to underline the factual errors of those who campaign for organic food. However, the discussion of food also illustrates a broader need to remind ourselves just how much modern society has achieved in changing the lives of people for the better through the application of science, industry and reason. Perhaps then we will all be better able to see the ideas of the organic movement for the manure that they are.

Source

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Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************

Vote for poverty: buy organic!

I took part in a debate on BBC Radio Shropshire yesterday with Patrick Holden, director of the Soil Association, Britain's main organic food lobbyists and certification body. What was interesting was just how candid he was about what a dramatic change in our lives his organic future would mean. Are organic consumers really aware of what they're signing up to?

He began by asserting that `it's very likely the whole of agriculture will have to switch to organic production methods, certified or otherwise, within the next 10 or 20 years' because of a rapid decline in energy resources. This seemed to be based on the gloomy assessment that we're about to hit, or have passed, the peak of oil production (and ignoring other sources of energy). According to Holden, `by 2025 or 2030, most of us will have to manage on an energy ration that's about 10 per cent of what we use today'.

The problem is that organic production is just much less efficient than `conventional' methods. The result will be a sharp decline in grain production and rising food prices. Holden admitted that `the affordability of food is a big issue. But you should remember that in the 1970s, the typical family spent 30 per cent of its total income on food but today that's down to 9.9 per cent, and of course we spend the balance on DVDs and foreign holidays and travel and all the rest of it.' So, cheap food has only allowed us to go and waste money fecklessly on luxuries instead. He never did answer the question about how the genuinely poor would survive in his rural idyll.

Another consequence is that meat produced using grain as feed would be much more expensive, too. `Chicken and pork would become a luxury again as it was in my boyhood and back in the fifties,' he said. His vision of the future would be to `buy fresh and local food that's had the minimum of transport and preferably from someone I know'. This will indeed be an attractive proposition for the 10million Londoners, and indeed the residents of every other large town in the UK, who may not actually know any farmers.

Next time you're in a supermarket or down at your local farmer's market and you buy organic, just remember that your purchase will be used to promote the idea that we should move away from the cheap food that has allowed us greater freedom in other areas of our lives, to a system where we have to buy whatever gets grown locally. And given that fertilisers, pesticides and grain for animal feed won't be available, that won't amount to a hill of beans.

Source




Cloned Bull

The bum rap on cloned food -- noting another strange contradiction in Leftist ideology: They say human stem cell research is OK but cloned animals are bad

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? People have puzzled over that question for at least 2,000 years. In the eternal cycle of natural reproduction, they saw no answer. But the cycle turns out not to be eternal. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration tentatively approved the use of cloned animals to make food. Natural reproduction is giving way to artificial reproduction. And with the new era comes a new question: Which came first, the steer or the steak?

Case in point: Elvis. He's a 19-month-old Angus calf. You can view him on the Web site of ViaGen, a cloning company. In a recent slide presentation from the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the caption below his photo reads, "Elvis was cloned from a side of Prime Yield Grade 1 beef." No joke: The calf came from the beef. And Elvis is no freak show. He's a business plan. "Some of your animals have more income potential than others," ViaGen reminds farmers. "Our services help you identify, preserve, and reproduce the genetics of those animals." If a steer is already dead, no problem. In fact, the best way to judge its steakworthiness is to cut it open and hang it on a hook. That's what happened to the original incarnation of Elvis. "Biopsy samples should be collected from your animal as soon as possible," ViaGen advises. If you like that side of beef and want another just like it, we can grow it for you. A steer from a steak from a steer. Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has re-entered the building.

The political fight over animal cloning is just beginning. It's a lot like the fight over human cloning, except that the roles are reversed. Right-wing groups and Republican senators fanned fear and ignorance about human cloning; left-wing groups and Democratic senators are fanning fear and ignorance about animal cloning. Moderates on both sides get trampled. So do principles. The same liberals who demand stem-cell research using human embryos and who blasted the FDA for delaying approval of emergency contraception now accuse the FDA of recklessly approving cloned food.

The left-wingers want the FDA, Congress, and President Bush to keep clones off the market. Their case, laid out in a petition to the FDA, is a mess of anecdotes, obsolete data, speculation, and ideology. Like right-wingers in the human cloning debate, they expect the government to honor even their "religious" objections. But their strongest argument is that cloned food is unsafe, since cloning, unlike fertilization, often fails to reprogram genes for normal embryonic development.

It's a sensible worry, but the facts don't bear it out. The FDA's review, based on exhaustive and fully disclosed analysis of scientific journal articles, health records, blood samples, and meat and milk composition, found no "food consumption risks or subtle hazards in healthy clones of cattle, swine, or goats." The agency concluded that "food from the sexually reproduced offspring of clones is as safe as food that we eat every day."

Why don't reprogramming errors taint your food? Because if they're serious, they kill the animal before it's old enough to be milked or eaten, or they cause defects that make the animal flunk federal food safety inspections. They don't carry over to a clone's offspring, since fertilization, like rebooting, cleans up programming errors. And the offspring are where the milk and meat will come from. ViaGen charges $15,000 to clone a steer. You don't butcher a $15,000 clone. You use it for breeding.

Critics say cloning often causes health problems for cloned animals and their surrogate mothers. That's true, but less so in some species, and the rate of complications is falling as the technology improves. Opponents of cloning also suggest we should ban it because it's unethical "to alter the essential nature of animals." Essential nature? We've been breeding animals for 15,000 years. We've been artificially inseminating them for nearly 700 years. Most apples, bananas, grapes, peaches, and potatoes are clones, and a lot of meat sold today was produced through in vitro fertilization, embryo transfer, or embryo splitting.

The silliest rap on cloning is that it offers "no consumer benefits." That's insane. Cloning means total genome control. It bypasses the uncertainties of breeding. It also improves breeding, since five clones of your best bull or cow produce five times as much sperm or eggs. Theoretically, you can target any trait for cloning: more muscle, less fat, more omega-3 acids. You can even help the environment by cloning animals that eat grass instead of grain.

Yes, we're scared of cloned food. But according to the same polls, most of us have heard little about animal biotechnology, don't know biotech food is already in supermarkets, and, against all reason, are more afraid of cloning animals than of genetically engineering them. Don't be cowed. Question your fears. That's the difference between us and the animals.

Source

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Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

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Cancer patients warned off soy-rich foods

This will upset the Tofu brigade

Cancer patients are being warned to avoid foods rich in soy because they can accelerate the growth of tumours. The Cancer Council NSW will issue guidelines today, warning about the dangers of high-soy diets and soy supplements for cancer patients and those people in remission from cancer. At particular risk are people suffering from hormone-dependent cancers, including breast and prostate cancer - the two most common types of cancer in Australia. Cancer survivors are also being urged to avoid high doses of soy, as they may be more vulnerable to a relapse.

Research has found high consumption of soy products can also limit the effectiveness of conventional medicines used to treat the disease. "There is evidence to suggest that women with existing breast cancer or past breast cancer should be cautious in consuming large quantities of soy foods or phyto-oestrogen supplements," a position statement from the Cancer Council says. "Women with current or past breast cancer should be aware of the risks of potential tumour growth when taking soy products. "The Cancer Council does not support the use of health claims on food labels that suggest soy foods or phyto-oestrogens protect against the development of cancer."

Health experts are particularly concerned that breast-cancer sufferers who take soy or phyto-oestrogen supplements could feed the disease and reduce the effectiveness of their treatment. Soy, which is present in soy beans, soy milk, tofu, tempeh and some breads, contains phyto-oestrogens that mimic the actions of hormones in the body. This means it may interfere with cancer drugs such as Tamoxifen, which works by suppressing the female hormone oestrogen.

Men with prostate cancer are also being warned against high soy consumption, as phyto-oestrogens may imitate the male hormone androgen. Although the Cancer Council has warned against soy supplements, it believes an occasional intake of soy food is still safe for cancer patients. Cancer Council nutritionist Kathy Chapman said soy supplements could contain dangerously high doses of phyto-oestrogens. "If you were a woman with breast cancer and thought, 'I'm going to radically change my diet and have very large portions of soy at every meal', it could be a problem," Ms Chapman said. "For someone who has tofu once or twice a week and drinks a bit of soya milk, it's not so much of a problem."

Soy has earned a reputation as a natural "superfood" that cuts the risk of breast or prostate cancer, and is commonly included in women's health supplements. This claim was based on findings that cancer rates were lower in Asia, where soy consumption is high. But soy would lower the risk of contracting cancer "only a little", according to the Cancer Council. "While they may have a protective effect, there is also some evidence that phyto-oestrogens may stimulate the growth of existing hormone-dependent cancers," the council's statement said. The risk of contracting other non-hormone-dependent cancers, including bowel cancer, would be unaffected by soy intake.

The Cancer Council was prompted to investigate the issue after being inundated with questions about the role of soy in cancer patients' diets. "We felt we were getting a lot of calls on our hotline about this topic," Ms Chapman said.

Source




The chewing gum that may aid slimming

An appetite-suppressing injection or even chewing gum could one day be used to tackle Britain's obesity problem. Scientists have been given funding to develop a treatment to help clinically obese patients to "feel full" and to eat less. The injection would contain a naturally occurring hormone that curbs appetite and is often lacking in overweight people. Within a decade the injection could provide the first effective treatment for obesity, which contributes to about 1,300 deaths a week in Britain, the scientists say.

The research, announced today, is among the first projects to benefit from a 91 million pound scheme by the Wellcome Trust to fund new medicines. It promises to be safer and more effective than present treatments, which culminate in drastic "stomach- stapling" operations. The hormone, pancreatic polypeptide (PP), is normally released from the small intestine as food is consumed, signalling to the brain that the body has had enough. In preliminary trials, an intravenous infusion that boosted levels of the hormone led to a big reduction in appetite among healthy volunteers.

Thirty-five healthy volunteers who were given the PP treatment consumed fewer calories, with the effect lasting for about 24 hours. Steve Bloom, who led the research at Imperial College and Hammersmith Hospital, London, said: "Even a 1 per cent reduction in appetite could lead to significant weight loss over a year." Professor Bloom has received a grant of 2.3 million pounds to develop the drug as a longer-lasting weekly injection. Other ways to administer the hormone could include a pump or even chewing gum, he said.

Source

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Just some problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

Trans fats:

For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.

The use of extreme quintiles (fifths) to examine effects is in fact so common as to be almost universal but suggests to the experienced observer that the differences between the mean scores of the experimental and control groups were not statistically significant -- thus making the article concerned little more than an exercise in deception

*********************