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31 January, 2007

INTERESTING AIDS CASE

A scientific theory is to be judged in an Australian court! The judgment is more likely to turn on prestige rather than science, however. Many well-informed people do question whether the HIV virus is the cause of AIDS. There are some murky episodes in the history of research on the question -- with the "discoverer", Gallo, being an undoubted crook driven by a huge ego.

Nonetheless, on the evidence I have seen so far, I am inclined to conclude that HIV does cause AIDS -- chronic skeptic though I am.

All AIDS is not the same however. The defence would do better to concentrate on the case of African AIDS only. They call anything AIDS there.

The Perth skeptics have a critical survey of the main scientific evidence here

Leading scientist Gustav Nossal has stepped into a courtroom showdown, labelling a group of self-styled experts who claim HIV does not exist as "a considerable scientific embarrassment". Sir Gustav, Australian of the Year in 2000 and an immunologist of global stature, will join upto six leading Australian HIV-AIDS scientists in Adelaide this week to give evidence in the appeal of an HIV-positive man convicted of endangering the lives of three women.

Andre Chad Parenzee, 35, was convicted in February last year on three counts of endangering life. South African-born Parenzee - who had unprotected sex with the women but failed to tell them he was HIV-positive - is in custody awaiting sentencing and faces up to 15 years in jail.

Sir Gustav and the eminent scientists will dispute Parenzee's two defence witnesses, Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos and Val Turner, who lead the Perth Group of HIV-AIDS sceptics. During two weeks of evidence at the appeal hearing late last year, the Perth Group witnesses presented scientific research and arguments claiming that HIV does not exist and was not responsible for the global scourge of HIV and AIDS. The defence hopes the hearings will lead to a retrial and acquittal.

HIV-AIDS specialists believe the case has the potential to set a dangerous precedent for public health campaigns and the criminal law. Sir Gustav yesterday called the HIV sceptics "a very considerable embarrassment" to Australian science. "HIV-AIDS is the most serious communicable disease ever - worse than the bubonic plague. It is a pretty serious thing to set yourselves up attacking the science behind it," he said.

South Australian prosecutors will today continue their cross-examination of Ms Papadopulos-Eleopulos, a medical physicist at the Royal Perth Hospital, and Dr Turner, who told the court last year he was an emergency medicine specialist. They believe HIV has never been isolated as an antivirus, since its discovery in the early 1980s, and that it does not cause the AIDS disease and cannot be transferred by sexual contact.

Up to seven prosecution witnesses will begin appearing from Thursday, when Emeritus Professor Peter McDonald of Flinders University will take the stand. He is an expert in infectious diseases. On Friday, the Royal Perth Hospital immunologist Martin French will take the stand. Next Monday, two HIV-AIDS researchers, including world-leading researcher associate professor Elizabeth Dax, will take the stand. Several of Professor Dax's papers have been quoted by the Perth Group and the prosecution has accused them of misrepresenting Professor Dax's findings. Professor John Kaldor of the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology is scheduled to appear next Tuesday, followed on Wednesday by professor David Cooper, director of the National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research at the University of NSW.

Sir Gustav will appear next Wednesday if he chooses, otherwise he will send a written report to the court. From his office at the University of Melbourne yesterday, he rejected the claims made by the Perth Group. "The evidence of AIDS being due to a virus is as strong as any other infectious disease you care to name - from measles to polio," he said. "I was recently chairman in a meeting of the foundation that gave $300 million to finding an AIDS vaccine - I doubt Bill and Melinda Gates would be giving that money if AIDS was not caused by a virus."

Monash University professor Suzanne Crowe, head of the Burnet Institute's HIV Pathogenesis and Clinical Research Program and not a witness in the case, said that unless the prosecution wins the legal showdown, it would set a "dangerous precedent" in the global AIDS fight.

Source



OBESITY WAR PUSHING PEOPLE INTO UNSAFE SURGERY

The number of people having liposuction treatments to remove fat has risen by 90 per cent in a year, prompting a warning from experts that it should not be seen as a solution for obesity. The operation, which involves vacuuming fat from areas such as the thighs and abdomen, was the third most popular cosmetic procedure last year, after breast enlargement and eyelid surgery.

But the surgery is not without risks. Last year Denise Hendry, the wife of the former Scotland football captain Colin Hendry, accepted more than 100,000 pounds in compensation after suffering complications during liposuction in 2002. She was in intensive care for nearly two months after sustaining nine punctures to her bowel and colon during a procedure. At one point her heart stopped for four minutes.

According to figures from the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, at least 4,000 of the 90,000 cosmetic surgery operations carried out last year were liposuction procedures, compared with 2,100 in 2005. Patients included men wanting to remove excess fat from their chests, often referred to as "man breasts". Side-effects can include permanent scarring and loose skin, but Adam Searle, a consultant plastic surgeon and the association's former president, said that the procedure was becoming more refined.

However, it should not be considered as an alternative to losing weight, he said. "There are lots of misconceptions. Every week someone comes into a clinic weighing 25 stone [159kg] and wanting liposuction. This technique is not appropriate for the obese. "It should be reserved for very specific areas of fat in an otherwise fit person. The ideal candidate would be a woman who says, `I go to the gym, I have lost weight but this area on the side of my thigh refuses to go'."

Members of the association carried out 28,921 plastic surgery procedures last year - up about one third on 2005. The association said that the number of other plastic surgery procedures - such as breast and nose surgery - had also risen.

The figures show that anti-ageing procedures were also popular, with facelifts up 44 per cent on 2005, eyelid surgery up 48 per cent, and brow lifts up 50 per cent. The vast majority of procedures - about 92 per cent - were carried out on women, 6,156 of whom had breast surgery. Nose surgery was most common in men, but they also had eyelid surgery, liposuction, altered their ears, and had face and neck lifts.

Louise Braham, the director of the Harley Medical Group, said that demand had increased in the past year. More professionals - including lawyers, teachers, estate agents and accountants - had opted for treatment, she said. She said that "growth hotspots" included the use of botox - the number of procedures had risen 89 per cent in the past six months - breast reductions, which rose 85 per cent in the same time, and nose surgery, which rose 25 per cent.

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

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



30 January, 2007

Child obesity

Is the next generation of Brits facing an epidemic of ill-health?

Panic: The UK House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts has published a new report lambasting the government for failing to tackle child obesity. The report notes that `obesity is a serious health condition', `a causal factor in a number of chronic diseases and conditions', and that `overall, it reduces life expectancy by an average of nine years'. According to the report, `there has been a steady rise in the number of children aged 2 to 10 who are obese - from 9.9 per cent in 1995 to 13.9 per cent in 2004.'

Don't panic: If the committee wishes to attack the government, and demand ever-greater intervention against parents, schools and companies, it had better get its facts straight. Obesity is not a serious health condition. It is a category of body morphology. The definition employed by the committee, the standard one in health circles, is that someone is `obese' if they have a body mass index (BMI) above 30; essentially, if the ratio of their weight to height is above a certain level. Aside from the fact that this ratio can just as easily describe excess muscle as excess fat, being fat does not necessarily imply ill-health. The majority of fat people are pretty healthy. In fact, it is those who, under today's abitrary categories, would be defined as `overweight' or moderately obese (with a BMI between 25 and 32) who seem to have the best life expectancy.

We do not know to what extent, if at all, obesity is a causal factor in chronic disease. We do know that obesity - particularly morbid obesity - is associated with increased risks of heart disease and type-2 diabetes, for example, but causation is a different matter. Given that fat people who are also fit seem to have very similar health profiles to thin but sedentary people, it may well be that lack of exercise not fatty tissue is the most important factor. In any event, untangling all the potential confounding factors makes the simple `obesity=disease/death' equation far too simplistic.

Specifically, the figure given for years of life lost is wrong. It appears to be repeating a statistic from a National Audit Office (NAO) report in 2001. However, what that report actually says is: `On average, each person whose death could be attributed to obesity lost nine years of life.' While this kind of attribution is fraught with problems, it is also very different from the statement in the latest report. The NAO report said six per cent of deaths were due to obesity - suggesting that most obese people die because of some other factor. Therefore, simple maths suggests the average number of years lost due to obesity is substantially lower than the nine years suggested by the new report.

As for child obesity, there is much dispute about what is an appropriate measure - BMI, for example, is even less relevant in children than in adults. But, according to the Health Survey for England in 2002: `About one in 20 boys (5.5 per cent) and about one in 15 girls (7.2 per cent) aged 2 to 15 were obese in 2002, according to the international classification.' While children have got a bit fatter in recent years, average weights for children have changed little.

We are facing an epidemic, it's true: an epidemic of regulation, intervention and fear-mongering. And it will all be based on reports like this one from the Committee of Public Accounts. While the motivations of these politicians may be sincere, their role in the obesity panic is likely only to make us more unhealthily obsessed with food and weight.

Source



A diet of misinformation

John Luik, co-author of Diet Nation, tells Rob Lyons that the obesity panic is being fattened by savvy interest groups and junk science



`More than any other government, the UK government has bought into it. The UK leads the world in bad obesity policy.' I'm sitting in the offices of the Advertising Association discussing the obesity panic with John Luik, co-author of Diet Nation: Exposing the Obesity Crusade. Luik is a genial American policy analyst who's gunning for the `relatively small group of people around the world who have decided, manufactured, this as a problem, and who have sold it to governments.'

`If we had gotten paid by the advertising industry to write this book - which we didn't - people would say, "You guys are on the take". But you can have people on the other side who get hundreds of thousands of pounds from those who have a deliberate interest in making people think they're fat, and no-one thinks that is a question of corruption.'

In Diet Nation, Luik and his co-authors, Patrick Basham and Gio Gori, show that the fear of expanding waistlines is nothing new. But they argue that the modern hysteria about getting fat has little to do with real dangers to our health, or that of our children; rather it has become the obsession of an unholy alliance of sophisticated lobby groups and junk science.

This is perfectly illustrated by a report published by the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts this week, which leaps from making plainly untrue statements about the problem of obesity to berating the government for not doing enough to address it, by clamping down on the food industry, for example, or frightening parents and stigmatising children.

Fretting over our waistlines has a long history. There was already medical discussion about the problem of obesity in the late nineteenth century, but as a `product rather than a cause' of the prejudice against excess weight. Within a few years, this issue started impacting on popular culture. In 1907 a popular American play called Nobody Likes a Fat Man was staged, and in 1913 Edith Wharton described one of her characters fretting about being anything more than `perpendicular'. As the authors of Diet Nation note, in one respect `the century-long European and American preoccupation with thinness and the rejection of fat is very much a social construct in which obesity is increasingly associated with the morally unacceptable' (p33).

The first obesity crusade took off in the Fifties, and was particularly inspired by the work of Louis Dublin, a biologist working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in the US. He was a man on a mission. He wrote hundreds of articles on the subject and produced just the kind of research that is the mainstay of obesity discussions today: he rather dubiously compared the weight of individuals (often self-reported) with mortality many years later. There were many obvious limitations, especially the fact that the subjects were self-selected (insurance buyers were not typical of the population then), and that their weight was not regularly measured over the period of study; in fact, it was often not measured independently at all. And yet, Dublin tried to persuade America using this shaky data that not only was being morbidly obese bad for your health, but even levels of weight 10 per cent above his `ideal' could shorten your life.

While much of the medical profession supported Dublin, others were puzzled to find his results difficult to replicate. Anyway, his worst fears were not realised, as Diet Nation notes: `As the 1960s and 70s came and went, Americans did not lose significant amounts of weight, though they dieted continuously. They enjoyed better health, while the prevalence of most major diseases declined and longevity increased.' (p42)

For Luik et al, while the modern obesity crusade - which began in earnest in the 1990s - still has a moralising tone to it, the message coming from the crusaders emphasises another message just as much: `obesity is no longer a moral failing of bad fat people, but a sickness, acquired in large measure from a "toxic food environment", that requires medical treatment' (p34). It is true that contemporary campaigners against obesity talk about `evil corporations' as much as they do feckless individuals. So, much of the debate increasingly focuses on processed food (like the infamous Turkey Twizzler), fast-food restaurants like McDonald's, agonised debates about labelling, and bans on adverts.

However, it would be wrong to understate the powerful moralistic streak in discussions of obesity and food. In the focus on junk-food restaurants, for example, there is often a barely concealed contempt for the largely working-class people who eat there, who are presumed to be lazy, unthinking and not sufficiently concerned with healthy cooking and physical exercise. They are seen as `junk' people. At a time when it is unfashionable to pass strictly moral judgements on people's lifestyles, the lower orders tend to be maligned through the coded issue of food and health.

The crusaders have maintained a clear and oft-repeated message, according to Luik and his co-authors: `Overweight/obesity equals death; weight loss is possible and necessary; the sources of the problem are to be found in corporate misbehaviour, not individual gluttony or sloth; and personal responsibility is insufficient, as significant governmental action is required.' (p43) While the authors concede that many campaigners may be sincere, `the existence of an obesity epidemic offers enormous commercial, financial and power-maximising opportunities for. the medical profession, academic researchers, the public health community, the government health bureaucracy, the pharmaceutical industry, the fitness industry and the weight-loss industry' (p44).

From this point of view, it's the persistence, brilliance and deviousness of the campaigners, backed by the attitude-distorting presence of very sizeable amounts of money and influence, that have driven the current panic. There is no doubt much truth in this. Often, it is the same relatively small band of experts who conduct research, get paid to be consultants for industry, sit on the boards of specialist journals, and are asked to give evidence to, or advise, governments on public health policy.

The mechanics of how power and influence are grabbed are intriguing, especially when the players involved occasionally make a hash of it. Consider the report of the House of Commons Health Committee published in May 2004, which focused on the effect of obesity on children. The report made a huge splash with the case of a three-year-old girl who had died `from heart failure where obesity was a contributory factor'. The doctor giving evidence on the case described children on her own ward as `choking on their own fat'. However, as spiked revealed at the time, this was not a case of parents negligently feeding a child to death; rather the little girl suffered from a rare genetic disorder (see Choking on the facts, by Brendan O'Neill).

Then there is the case of the US report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2004, which proclaimed that obesity was causing 400,000 deaths a year. This immediately sparked calls for massive government intervention. However, the authors of Diet Nation note how the report was prepared, not by the CDC's top experts on the subject, but by the CDC's director and other researchers attached to her office. After what appears to have been considerable internal criticism of the report, another group of CDC researchers reviewed it, and their review eventually found its way into the public domain under a Freedom of Information request. This second report suggested that a more accurate figure for excess obesity deaths was about 25,000 - 94 per cent lower than the original estimate. Strikingly, the original report was produced under pressure to `get the right result' because a range of groups had an interest in reaching the highest possible figure.

Such methods of securing influence may be increasingly common; yet there is something slightly unsatisfactory in using this as an explanation for the obesity panic. Are governments and the public simply being suckered? Or have there been social and political changes that have left individuals more open to being spooked about their health, and politicians more enthusiastic about interfering in areas of our lives that were previously off-limits? These questions aren't really answered in Diet Nation.

Too often the debate about obesity ends up in a mud-slinging contest over which side is the more corrupted. This provides little illumination into the facts of the matter, and it feeds the cynical outlook that suggests anyone's position can be evaluated by those who have paid to support it. On that basis, Luik and his co-authors could easily be pigeonholed as `free market libertarians' or something similar, as a means of dismissing them. But they clearly have a great deal more to say about obesity than the question of who-paid-who.

The chapter on the science of obesity will surprise many. Luik tells me about a presentation he gave recently at the offices of a major international bank in London. Having discovered that the audience's main concern was with the possibility of dying young from being overweight, he told them: `You'll probably find this astonishing but the people who are most long-lived in these studies are people who I would call "pleasantly plump" or overweight. In fact, even moderately obese live longer those who are the "norm".' The reaction he received shows how deeply imbued the panic has become: `People look at you like you're someone who has two heads.'

Yet Diet Nation claims that in the arbitrary weight categories set by the health authorities and their supporters today, those who are `overweight' - officially `ill', according to today's standards - live longer than those whose weight is apparently `ideal'. This would seem to highlight the ridiculous nature of the Body Mass Index and weight charts that are so popular now. Even those who are morbidly obese are likely to be able to reduce many of the risks associated with their weight by simply taking moderate exercise, even if they fail to lose any weight at all. And the usual pre ion for losing weight - dieting - is, by any sensible medical standards, a failure. Weight loss is very difficult to sustain; around 96 per cent of dieters are at least as heavy as their starting weight five years later.

The myth of dieting is a subject that Luik and his colleagues are keen to return to in another book. Having looked at 28 separate papers on the long-term effects of dieting, Luik tells me that 24 show no benefit to losing weight. Even where a benefit is found, it's small. `Here's an example. One study concluded that if you were successful in losing 50 pounds and keeping it off for the rest of your life, you would have a longevity increase in the order of 11 hours.'

Another area where the science is pretty much the opposite of what we've been led to believe is the effect of advertising on children - a topical issue in the UK since Ofcom's recent decision to ban the advertising of `unhealthy' foods during children's TV programmes. Luik sums up the evidence pithily: `We're saying that kids that can operate computers from the time they're three, and have immense media literacy, are so unaware of advertising up to the age of 16 that they can be convinced to buy a packet of crisps by seeing an advertisement, or that a cartoon character is going to convince them to buy a breakfast cereal.' All of which explains why I'm meeting Luik at the offices of Advertising Association: he's just given a talk to the association about why they must tackle the dubious claims made about obesity and the draconian measures being proposed to deal with it.

This isn't just a concern for advertisers, though. The lessons of the campaign against tobacco illustrate that a tactical move to attack industry will sooner or later lead to further attacks on our individual freedoms. Having convinced the world that cigarettes were an evil brought down upon us from on high by Big Tobacco, smokers now find themselves banned in public places; some agencies now ban smokers from lighting up in their own homes if they are being visited by health or social workers; and doctors are increasingly feeling free to refuse treatment to those who won't give up. In turn, the obesity panic is already leading to parents being instructed about how they should feed their children, while hospitals are also turning away the obese.

For the moment, Big Food or the advertising industry might be the fall guys; but it's in all of our interests to oppose the stringent measures being implemented on the basis of this junk panic. Diet Nation has its flaws, but it is an important contribution to our understanding, cutting through the flabby debate that has taken place so far.

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

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



29 January, 2007

British "social workers" put fat children on "abused" list

The Unhinged Kingdom devises a new madness

Social workers are placing obese children on the child protection register alongside victims thought to be at risk of sexual or physical abuse. In extreme cases children have been placed in foster care because their parents have contributed to the health problems of their offspring by failing to respond to medical advice. The intervention of social services in what was previously regarded as a private matter is likely to raise concerns about the emergence of the "fat police".

Some doctors even advocate taking legal action against parents for illtreating their children by feeding them so much that they develop health problems. Dr Russell Viner, a consultant paediatrician at Great Ormond Street and University College London hospitals, said: "In my practice, I can think of about 10 or 15 cases in which child protection action has been taken because of obesity. We now constantly get letters from social workers about child protection due to childhood obesity."

Viner points out that children are not placed on the child protection register simply for being obese but only if parents fail to act on advice and take steps to help their children lose weight. "Obesity in itself is not a child protection concern," he said. "When parents fail to act in their child's best interests with regard to their weight - for example, if they are enrolled on a behavioural treatment session and only get to two out of 10 sessions or if they miss medical appointments - then the obesity becomes a child protection concern."

Dr Alyson Hall, consultant child psychiatrist at the Emmanuel Miller Centre for Families and Children in east London, said that in some cases children were put into foster care to ensure their safety. "I have known instances where local authorities have had to consider placement outside the family. It has been voluntary so far, and has not gone to care proceedings, but that could happen," she said. "These are children suffering from sleep apnoea and serious health complications from diabetes. Initially, social workers try to help the parents but, in some cases, the parents are the problem."

Earlier this month two brothers were convicted of causing unnecessary suffering by letting their dog become obese. The labrador, Rusty, was 11 stone, more than double the weight he should have been, and could hardly stand. "We wonder whether the same charge should be applicable to the parents of dangerously obese children," said Dr Tom Solomon, a neurologist at Royal Liverpool University hospital. "I think it should be considered. It depends on the parents' attitude. If the parents say there is nothing they can do because their child only likes to eat chips and biscuits then perhaps it might be worth the state intervening. "The state intervenes with schooling. Parents who do not send their children to school are prosecuted eventually. To be badly educated is not dangerous but we are making our children diabetic, and even killing our children by our feeding habits."

Tam Fry, chairman of the Child Growth Foundation, a charity that fights childhood obesity, agreed. "It should be a punishable offence," he said. "Very obese children are taking up NHS resources that should be used for legitimate purposes. Parents have got to be held accountable for overfeeding their children or letting their children become fat without taking action."

Other health workers, however, argue that parents should not be punished because social circumstances sometimes prevent them from ensuring their children follow a healthy diet. Last week the government's strategy for tackling childhood obesity was criticised as "confused" and "dithering" by the Commons public accounts committee. MPs warned that ministers are set to miss their target to halt the rise in childhood obesity by 2010. The number of children aged under 11 who are obese leapt from 9.9% in 1995 to 13.4% in 2004

Source



The Internet is making kids fat?

The Internet is making kids fat, and it's time the government did something. That was the impression "American Morning" gave its January 25 audience with a report by Dr. Sanjay Gupta that neglected to give parents tips for supervising their children's Internet usage, while lamenting a lack of government regulation. Not only are more American children than ever overweight, "Now there's evidence of hidden messages that could be adding to America's weight problem," anchor Soledad O'Brien teased as she introduced Gupta's story on kid-friendly online games at food and candy Web sites.

CNN's in-house doctor used his "Fit Nation" story to hype a 6-month-old study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. "As we look at the problem of childhood obesity, and as we look at the possible role of food marketing . we need to be sure we're looking at online food marketing to kids," insisted Kaiser's Vicky Rideout, pointing to her group's July 19, 2006, study that suggests candy and cereal Web sites featuring online games aggravate the nation's "obesity epidemic" among children.

Rideout's pre ion for the outbreak of pudgy kids hunched over the keyboard seemed to point to government regulation. "The Internet is potentially way more powerful than television advertising ever dreamed of being, but it's also way more challenging in terms of any kind of oversight," Rideout added.

Of course, computers and cable modems have off buttons and software exists for parents to block unwanted Web sites. And of course most young children rely on their parents for food shopping or allowance money they might use to buy snacks. Yet rather than giving parents practical advice to get their kids more physically active and less reliant on Internet games, Gupta lamented a lack of government regulation of the Internet. "Where television ads are regulated in length, Internet ads for now are only regulated voluntarily," Gupta noted, before tossing in a 6-second sound bite from industry spokesman Daniel Jaffe. "I believe that if you really did look at these sites, you would find quite a number of foods that are healthy," said Jaffe of the Association of National Advertisers.

Back in the New York studio, O'Brien told viewers the government might be riding in to help after all. "The Federal Trade Commission is also studying junk food ads to see how manufacturers are marketing to children," the CNN host told her breakfast-hour audience.

The Business & Media Institute has reported on the media's recurring hype about food advertising to children. For example, ABC's Lisa Stark picked up on the Kaiser study with her July 26, 2006, "World News Tonight" story, and on the December 7, 2005, "Early Show," Dr. Emily Senay compared cartoon characters that hawk cereals and candy to one that was an icon for tobacco. "Parents certainly have a role to play, here, but this is very powerful stuff," CBS's medical correspondent lamented of Internet advertising, "it's not unlike, for example Joe Camel."

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

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



28 January, 2007

"Smart Growth" town-planning now justified on (spurious) health grounds

Our self-appointed "betters" tell us: We will dictate how you live "FOR YOUR OWN GOOD"! As usual, it's about depriving people of choice. The idea that if people want to live in suburbs and drive everywhere, that's their own personal prerogative is totally alien to these neo-Fascists

Lawrence Frank is no couch potato. Taking full advantage of his city's compact design, the Vancouver, British Columbia, resident often bikes to work and walks to stores, restaurants, and museums. That activity helps him stay fit and trim. But Frank hasn't always found his penchant for self-propulsion to be practical. He previously lived in Atlanta, where the city's sprawling layout thwarted his desire to be physically active as he went about his daily business. [How awful for him! But strange that he could find no other way to excercise if he really wanted to!]

"There was not much to walk to," says Frank, a professor of urban planning at the University of British Columbia. For example, he recalls that there was only one decent restaurant within walking distance of his old home. Many restaurants and other businesses in Atlanta cluster in strip malls that stand apart from residential areas. In Vancouver, by contrast, Frank's neighborhood contains dozens of eateries, and he often strolls to and from dinner. "I'm more active here," he says.

The glaring difference between the two cities' landscapes figures in Frank's professional life as well as in his personal one. Frank is part of an emerging area of cross-disciplinary science that's examining the relationship between the shapes of our cities and the shapes of our bodies. He and other researchers have evidence that associates health problems with urban sprawl, a loose term for humanmade landscapes characterized by a low density of buildings, dependence on automobiles, and a separation of residential and commercial areas.

Frank proposes that sprawl discourages physical activity, but some researchers suggest that people who don't care to exercise choose suburban life. Besides working to settle that disagreement, researchers are looking at facets of urban design that may shortchange health. As scientists investigate the relationship between sprawl and obesity, a compact style of city development sometimes called smart growth might become a tool in the fight for the nation's health. However, University of Toronto economist Matthew Turner charges that "a lot of people out there don't like urban sprawl, and those people are trying to hijack the obesity epidemic to further the smart-growth agenda [and] change how cities look."

In September 2003, two major studies linked sprawl and obesity. Since those reports, researchers in fields as disparate as epidemiology and economics have generated a spate of similarly themed studies [They would]. In the first of the 2003 reports, researchers analyzed data from a nationwide survey in which each of some 200,000 people reported his or her residential address, physical activity, body mass, height, and other health variables. Residents of sprawling cities and counties tended to weigh more, walk less, and have higher blood pressure than did people living in compact communities, concluded urban planner Reid Ewing and his colleagues at the University of Maryland at College Park's National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education.

In the second study, health psychologist James Sallis of San Diego State University and his colleagues reported that residents of "high-walkability" neighborhoods, which have closely packed residences and a mix of housing and businesses, tended to walk more and were less likely to be obese than residents of low-walkability neighborhoods. In 2004, Frank and his colleagues produced additional connections among urban form, activity, and obesity. The data on more than 10,500 people in the Atlanta area indicated that the more time a person spends in a car, the more obese he or she tends to be. But the more time people spend walking, the less obese they are.

Frank's team, like the other groups, found that areas with interspersed homes, shops, and offices had fewer obese residents than did homogeneous residential areas whose residents were of a similar age, income, and education. Furthermore, neighborhoods with greater residential density and street plans that facilitate walking from place to place showed below-average rates of obesity. The magnitude of the effect wasn't trivial: A typical white male living in a compact, mixed-use community weighs about 4.5 kilograms (10 pounds) less than a similar man in a diffuse subdivision containing nothing but homes, Frank and his colleagues reported. [That people of middling weight live longer is a bit pesky so we won't mention that!]

Such studies can't prove that living amid sprawl leads to inactivity; it may also be that inactive people choose to inhabit areas where driving is the easiest way to get around. In other words, people with different health habits and different propensities to gain weight may sort themselves into different kinds of neighborhoods. That's what Turner suggests is going on. Turner conducted a study that tracked people over time, as some of them moved from one neighborhood to another. He and his collaborators found no change in weight associated with moving from a sprawling locale to a dense one, or vice versa. "We're the only ones that have tried to distinguish between causation and sorting... and we find that it's sorting," he says. "The available facts do not support the conclusion that sprawling neighborhoods cause weight gain."

Turner's team analyzed data collected over 6 years on more than 5,000 young adults living across the United States. Most of the volunteers moved at least once during the study. The researchers compared individuals' weights before and after they moved between communities with different degrees of sprawl. To measure sprawl, they used satellite images to calculate the average distance between residential buildings. They also determined the average density of nonresidential establishments such as churches and shops in each volunteer's zip code. "We're estimating the effect [of sprawl on weight] to be zero or very close to zero," Turner says. Any weight gain attributable to sprawl, he says, is at most "a couple of ounces."

More here



British Conservatives go nuts too

They have become the "me too" party

Food and drink manufacturers could be given strict quotas for producing fatty and sugary foods and alcohol under plans to tackle obesity and excessive drinking being considered by the Conservative Party. Under the plan drawn up by the Working Group on Responsible Business, set up by David Cameron last July, producers would be allocated production limits allowing them to produce a certain quantity of fatty food or alcoholic drink. Manufacturers wanting to produce more would have to buy credits from companies prepared to produce less. The regime would give a financial incentive for producers to make products containing less fat, sugar, salt and alcohol.

The consultative paper, aimed at making business more responsible, described obesity and excessive drinking as "social pollutants" that might be tackled in the same way that carbon emissions trading schemes reduced environmental damage. The proposal surprised food and drink makers, who said that the idea was not wanted and would not work.

In the foreword to the paper, Mr Cameron said that he wanted the Conservatives to reclaim responsible business from the Left. While paying tribute to the benefits of capitalism, he said: "I've never believed that we can leave everything to market forces. I'm not prepared to turn a blind eye if the system sometimes leaves casualties in its wake."

Emissions trading had been an invaluable tool in addressing environmental pollution, the paper said. "If . . . social and environmental pollution may be seen as in some ways analagous, might not a process of social emissions trading be a way of addressing some aspects of social pollution?" The amount of fat, sugar and salt in processed foods was easily quantifiable, which would make setting quotas straightforward, the report said. Similarly alcoholic consumption across the country was easily quantified, which would simplify setting quotas for companies. "In this case, companies who lowered the alcohol content of their products would have a significant incentive, as well as selling off alcohol quotas they did not need."

Manufacturers questioned whether the system could work in practice. It would have to be applied to imports to work, and could have the opposite of the desired effect by pushing up the prices of targeted products and so widening profit margins.

Graeme Leach, the policy director of the Institute of Directors said: "This sounds pretty radical. For this to get off the ground a lot of detailed work would have to be done and a very large number of problems would have to be overcome. I don't think it's going to happen."

The Food and Drink Federation was surprised, saying that it was already making progress in reducing fat, salt and sugar levels in processed foods. Spokeswoman Christine Welberry said: "No form of quota system would be wanted by the industry." She said that the FDF had asked to see Mr Cameron but had been rebuffed. "So far he's refused to meet us." The group has also proposed that responsible corporate behaviour be rewarded by lighter regulation. Companies could be awarded bronze, silver and gold standards, according to their behaviour.

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

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



27 January, 2007

"Obesity" confusion in Britain

Plans to halt the rise in childhood obesity are confused, poorly co-ordinated and lack clarity and forcefulness, according to an influential Commons committee. In 2004 the Government set a target of 2010 to halt the year-on-year rise in obesity in children under 11, but there are still no ring-fenced funds nor any specific programme to bring this about, the Public Accounts Committee says in a scathing report.

Particular anger is directed at the Department of Health's plans to weigh and measure children in all primary schools but not tell parents the results. This policy provoked one of the briskest exchanges in a public hearing in the Commons as the committee chairman, Edward Leigh, accused three Whitehall permanent secretaries of "talking drivel".

Yesterday Mr Leigh said: "If a primary school finds that a child is overweight then the parents must be informed. To do otherwise would be to keep parents in the dark about health risks to their children. "A campaign aimed at parents, children and teachers is supposed to be launched this year, three years after the target was set. When it appears it must bring home all the risks of being obese and show that obese children can make small changes to their behaviour that help them lose weight."

Responsibility for the childhood obesity strategy is divided between three departments - Health, Education and Skills, and Culture, Media and Sport - and 26 bodies or groups of bodies, the report says. This leads to confusion over roles and responsibilities. Mr Leigh said that it was "tricky territory". That made it all the more urgent that the departments involved should work together to set a clear direction. "It is lamentable that long after the target was set there is still so much dithering and still so little co-ordination," he said.

Departments had been slow to react and efforts to work with the food industry to change the way that unhealthy products were marketed had failed, the committee said. It also called for the appointment of a high-profile figure to champion the battle against obesity. Parents were still not being engaged, and a public information campaign was finally being launched only this year. The report found that "the departments' strategy of working alongside the food industry to influence its approach to the marketing of foods and drinks that are high in fat, salt and sugar has not been successful in changing the way the majority of unhealthy foods are marketed".

Meanwhile, the Department of Health has no idea if the strategy is working because there was a delay of two years in getting data on childhood obesity from the Health Survey for England. The attempt to measure obesity in primary school children ended in failure when fewer than half turned up, although the committee does not report this. The results of the exercise were meaningless because the parents of fatter children opted them out, as they were allowed to do.

Caroline Flint, the Public Health Minister, claimed that a lot had been achieved since the evidence on which the report was based had been gathered. She said: "There are no easy answers or quick-fix solutions. Changing behaviour requires long-term action on a number of fronts and that is what we are putting in place. People's awareness of the importance of healthy eating and exercise had increased significantly, she said, and food labelling had become the norm. Ofcom had made recommendations about food advertising on television; there had been "a transformation in school food" and the target of 80 per cent of children doing at least two hours of school sport a week had been beaten, she said. But Andrew Lansley, the Shadow Health Secretary, said: "Conservatives share the committee's alarm at the dramatic increase in childhood obesity and the apparently uncoordinated way in which the Government is dealing with it."

Source



Doctors hope to switch off brain’s craving for tobacco



Smokers who suffer damage to a particular part of the brain can give up quickly and easily without feeling any urge for a cigarette, according to research that promises new approaches to treating nicotine addiction.

A study of smokers who suffered strokes has shown that part of the brain, the insula, appears to be intimately involved in their addiction, indicating that it could be targeted to help people to give up the habit. Patients who had strokes that damaged the insula, which is thought to be involved in emotions and cravings, lost the urge to smoke immediately, and many have not touched a cigarette since.

The findings suggest the possibility of helping smokers to give up by manipulating the insula to kill their addiction, without causing the extensive brain damage of a stroke.

Drugs could be developed to alter its activity, or it could be disrupted using magnetic fields. Another technique called deep brain stimulation, in which electrodes are implanted in the brain to switch off particular areas, has already been used successfully to treat Parkin-son’s disease and depression.

Such treatments, however, will require much more research into exactly how the insula affects smoking and other addictions before patient trials could begin; it will be important not to disrupt other activities in which the region plays a critical role.

The insula lies in the centre of the brain and is thought to translate information from other parts of the body into feelings such as hunger, pain or cravings for a drug.

“The insula also carries out lots of normal everyday functions, so we would want to make sure we only interfere with functions that disrupt bad habits like smoking but not something vital like eating,” said Antoine Bechara, of the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of Iowa, who led the research.

Nevertheless, the work is exciting because damage to the insula appears to break many smokers’ habits instantly; their brains seem to forget that they are supposed to crave cigarettes.

“There is a lot of potential for pharmacological developments,” Dr Bechara said. “One of the most difficult problems in any form of addiction is the difficulty in stopping the urge to smoke, to take a drug, or to eat for that matter. Now we have identified a brain target for further research into dealing with that urge.”

Antonio Damasio, Professor of Neuroscience at USC, who first suggested the insula’s role in feelings, said: “It’s really intriguing to think that disrupting this region breaks the pleasure feelings associated with smoking. It is immediate. It’s not that they smoke less. They don’t smoke, period.”

The study, pubished today in the journal Science, was inspired by a patient who smoked 40 cigarettes a day before having a stroke that damaged his insula. He quit immediately, telling doctors that he “forgot the urge to smoke”.

The scientists then turned to a database of stroke patients held by the University of Iowa and identified 69 who had smoked at least five cigarettes a day for at least two years before they suffered brain damage. They found that 19 of these patients had damage to the insula and 13 of them had given up smoking, 12 of them quickly and easily. The other six continued to smoke — possibly reflecting damage to different parts of the insula.

Of the 50 patients who had strokes that did not disrupt the insula, 19 also gave up smoking, but only four did so instantly and without any cravings.

The difference in the two groups’ experience of quitting suggests that the general stroke patients gave up in standard fashion because of the health risks. The insula-damaged patients, however, gave up because it no longer occurred to them to smoke.

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

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



26 January, 2007

Experts divided over obesity issue

Australians aren't getting fatter at all, according to a group of academics who claim the obesity epidemic is a money-wasting illusion. National and international researchers will convene in NSW on Thursday to argue that statistics supporting obesity and its health consequences are much more uncertain than people realise.

However, the concept has been met with intense criticism from a leading diabetes expert who says it "comes from another planet". The conference organiser, Jan Wright, says the commonly reported belief that Australians are generally fat, and growing all the time, is a "beat-up" with its own agenda. "There's no epidemic," says Professor Wright, associate dean of education at the University of Wollongong, which will host the event. "There's not these radical increases in terms of overweight and obesity like everybody thinks, so the entire argument is wrong from the start."

Prof Wright says there is no longitudinal figures to support expanding waistlines and most calculations rely on the Body Mass Index (BMI), not an accurate marker of obesity. "Using that scale, the entire All Black team would register as obese, so that can't be right."

She said many industries - especially fitness, food and pharmaceuticals - have a vested interest in perpetuating the obesity "myth" because they can make money out of the solutions. Many scientists also support the concept because, says Prof Wright, there is a huge amount of funding thrown at the area by governments. "Money is a huge motivator for people to support the position that there is an obesity epidemic," she said, "but millions of dollars are being wasted".

During the three-day conference, called Bio-pedagogies, academics, including people from the UK, Canada and New Zealand, will develop a plan to stay the momentum of the obesity argument, she said. But Paul Zimmet, director of the International Diabetes Institute, immediately discounted the "myth" concept as "from another planet". "We conduct the national Australian diabetes and obesity study and there's no question from the data that obesity is on the increase," Professor Zimmet said. "There's no illusion here, no scare-mongering - this is really wrong."

Source



Alzheimer's cure patchy

A new skin patch showing promise as an Alzheimer's vaccine has been greeted with caution by Australia's peak advocacy group for the disease. US researchers have developed a needle-free vaccination method found to be safe and effective in clearing brain-damaging "plaques" in mice with the neurological disorder. The scientists from the University of South Florida said their technique blocked the development of brain inflammation, a serious side-effect that caused patient deaths in an earlier study.

Alzheimer's Australia national executive director Glenn Rees said the research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was promising but must be approached with care. "It's in a very early stage," Mr Rees said. "This research is one of many exciting possibilities . . . but it remains exactly that, a possibility."

The organisation's research development manager, Susanna Park, said the failure of the earlier study had made those in the field very cautious. "Obviously, because of the problems with the trials last time nobody wants to get too excited," Ms Park said. She said the new approach had been successful in mice but there was no proof it would work in humans, and the time needed to develop it from a basic, one-study mouse model was considerable.

The vaccine works by triggering the immune system to recognise beta amyloid -- a protein that abnormally builds up in the brain of an Alzheimer's patient -- as a foreign invader, and attack it. Previous research on an injectable Alzheimer's vaccine proven safe and effective in an animal model was suspended indefinitely when the initial clinical trial caused brain inflammation and death in some patients. Those serious side-effects were triggered by an auto-immune reaction that occurred when immune cells aggressively attacked the body's proteins produced by the vaccine. But the researchers say their skin patch avoids that response.

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

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



25 January, 2007

HAVING WORMS IS GOOD FOR YOU

But only if you have MS. Popular summary below followed by journal abstract:

Parasite infection could benefit patients suffering from multiple sclerosis (MS), according to a study in the current issue of Annals of Neurology. The study involved 24 patients with MS, half of whom had a current parasitic worm infection. Over an average follow-up period of 4.6 years, patients were checked every three months for any worsening of their symptoms. Those infected with parasites had fewer relapses than those who were parasite-free. There were only three relapses in the infected group compared to 56 relapses among the uninfected patients. When they invade the human body, parasites are able to dampen down the immune response to prolong their own survival. As MS is the result of an overactive immune system, the authors suggest that mimicking a parasite infection could be an effective treatment.

Source

Association between parasite infection and immune responses in multiple sclerosis

By: Jorge Correale & Mauricio Farez

ive
To assess whether parasite infection is correlated with a reduced number of exacerbations and altered immune reactivity in multiple sclerosis (MS).

Methods
A prospective, double-cohort study was performed to assess the clinical course and radiological findings in 12 MS patients presenting associated eosinophilia. All patients presented parasitic infections with positive stool specimens. In all parasite-infected MS patients, the eosinophilia was not present during the 2 previous years. Eosinophil counts were monitored at 3- to 6-month intervals. When counts became elevated, patients were enrolled in the study. Interleukin (IL)-4, IL-10, IL-12, transforming growth factor (TGF)- , and interferon- production by myelin basic protein-specific peripheral blood mononuclear cells were studied using enzyme-linked immunospot (ELISPOT). FoxP3 and Smad7 expression were studied by reverse-tran ase polymerase chain reaction.

Results
During a 4.6-year follow-up period, parasite-infected MS patients showed a significantly lower number of exacerbations, minimal variation in disability scores, as well as fewer magnetic resonance imaging changes when compared with uninfected MS patients. Furthermore, myelin basic protein-specific responses in peripheral blood showed a significant increase in IL-10 and TGF- and a decrease in IL-12 and interferon- -secreting cells in infected MS patients compared with noninfected patients. Myelin basic protein-specific T cells cloned from infected subjects were characterized by the absence of IL-2 and IL-4 production, but high IL-10 and/or TGF- secretion, showing a cytokine profile similar to the T-cell subsets Tr1 and Th3. Moreover, cloning frequency of CD4+CD25+ FoxP3+ T cells was substantially increased in infected patients compared with uninfected MS subjects. Finally, Smad7 messenger RNA was not detected in T cells from infected MS patients secreting TGF- .

Interpretation
Increased production of IL-10 and TGF- , together with induction of CD25+CD4+ FoxP3+ T cells, suggests that regulatory T cells induced during parasite infections can alter the course of MS.

Source



FATTIES DO BEST IN NORTHERN EUROPE

Virtually no pay discrimination there

Fatter people pay the price of being overweight by earning less, a Europe-wide study has found. For every 10 per cent increase in body mass index (BMI), a man loses 3.27 per cent in earnings, and a woman 1.86 per cent.

The effect is much stronger in the countries of Southern Europe - the Olive Belt - than it is in the "beer belt" of Northern Europe, say the authors, Giorgio Brunello, of the University of Padua, and Batrice D'Hombres, of the European Commission's research centre in Ispra, Italy.

One explanation is that fatter people are so common in the beer belt that they are less likely to be discriminated against than are those living in the svelte world of the "olive belt". But the issue is fraught with difficulties. The most obvious is distinguishing cause from effect: does being overweight reduce earnings, or do lower earnings cause people to be overweight? Poorer people may have an unhealthier diet, or do less exercise, for example.

Writing in Economics and Human Biology, the authors gathered data from the European Statistical Office on more than 40,000 people from nine countries: Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland and Ireland.

The raw statistics suggest quite a strong link between being overweight and reduced earnings, a 10 per cent increase in BMI being linked to a 3.49 per cent reduction in earnings in women and a 5.29 per cent reduction in men. But when occupations that require physical strength are taken out of the equation the association weakens and the reductions in earnings are roughly halved.

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

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



24 January, 2007

HEALTHY PRISONS

Because of total calorie restriction plus fewer illegal drugs, presumably. Rare evidence that calorie restriction prolongs life in humans as well as in white rats

State prison inmates, particularly blacks, are living longer on average than people on the outside, the government said Sunday. Inmates in state prisons are dying at an average yearly rate of 250 per 100,000, according to the latest figures reported to the Justice Department by state prison officials. By comparison, the overall population of people between age 15 and 64 is dying at a rate of 308 a year. For black inmates, the rate was 57 percent lower than among the overall black population 206 versus 484. But white and Hispanic prisoners both had death rates slightly above their counterparts in the overall population.

The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics said 12,129 state prisoners died between 2001 through 2004. Eight percent were murdered or killed themselves, 2 percent died of alcohol, drugs or accidental injuries, and 1 percent of the deaths could not be explained, the report said. The rest of the deaths 89 percent were due to medical reasons. Of those, two-thirds of inmates had the medical problem they died of before they were admitted to prison.

Medical problems that were most common among both men and women in state prisons were heart disease, lung and liver cancer, liver diseases and AIDS-related causes. But the death rate among men was 72 percent higher than among women. Nearly one-quarter of the women who died had breast, ovarian, cervical or uterine cancer. Four percent of the men who died had prostate or testicular cancer. More than half the inmates 65 or older who died in state prisons were at least 55 when they were admitted to prison.

State prison officials reported that 94 percent of their inmates who died from an illness had been evaluated by a medical professional for that illness, and 93 percent got medication for it. Eighty-nine percent of these inmates had gotten X-rays, MRI exams, blood tests and other diagnostic work, state prison officials told the bureau.

Source



Food industry choking on red tape

Rules and regulations are strangling innovation and are overdue for a purge

The Australian food industry at first glance appears to be thriving. The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics recently highlighted that its value-added contribution to the economy had increased by more than $3 billion between 1995-96 and 2004-05 to be worth around $20 billion in that year. However, when you take a closer look at this key sector, there are some major concerns.

Firstly, the sector's R&D spending has declined relative to other manufacturing sectors in the past few years. Its growth rate is lower than other major manufacturing sectors such as machinery and equipment and publishing. Furthermore, the share it contributes to GDP has been shrinking over the past 25 years. Clearly, all is not well within the food industry.

It is not difficult to identify one of the causes of this malaise. Food businesses must hurdle a multitude of rules and regulations just to remain in business, let alone to introduce a new product or process. This is not to say that unsafe practices or processes should be allowed but simply that regulation tends to breed regulation, and we are now at the tipping point for the food industry.

More and more, consumers are demanding benefits from the foods they purchase beyond that of simple nutrition. Health conscious consumers want to take control of their health and they expect to take on some "do it yourself doctoring" for diet-related chronic disease. This new trend was recognised by the Australian Government when it announced its Better Health Initiative at COAG in February last year. The initiative emphasises prevention and early intervention rather than treatment.

The health benefits of foods are a key driver for industry innovation and have been a centrepiece of two government initiatives under the $137 million National Food Industry Strategy (2002-07), the food innovation grants scheme and the National Centre for Excellence in Functional Foods. But the benefits don't just accrue to consumers and industry from this form of innovation. Governments also reap rewards as the striving for "better for you" foods has an indirect, positive impact on government health funding by improving the health of the nation and contributing to reduced healthcare costs.

It is lamentable that the food regulatory system works against effective innovation in responding to this initiative. Take the example of an application to allow fruit and vegetable juices and drinks, soups and savoury biscuits to be fortified with calcium. Lack of calcium in the diet contributes to osteoporosis in old age. The application showed that increasing calcium intake through these foods had the potential for reducing osteoporosis in the elderly, a disease with a cost burden, according to Access Economics, of $9 billion annually.

The initial proposal was accepted by the regulatory agency, Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) in December 2001. The proposal took almost two years to pass each stage of assessment and public consultation before it was submitted to the Australia New Zealand Food Regulation Ministerial Council in September 2003. The Ministerial Council returned the proposal to FSANZ for reassessment, citing numerous areas for review, many of which had already been covered and reviewed thoroughly in the first stages of assessment.

FSANZ reviewed and returned the recommendation to the Ministerial Council in March 2005 and it was again returned (by a majority) to FSANZ in May that year. FSANZ once again reviewed and returned its recommendation for approval to Ministerial Council and the application was finally gazetted in November 2005. It took four years for this simple request to become part of the food standards code: an unacceptable delay that cost the industry market access.

Another example, fortified beverages, resulted in a lost opportunity of $350million for Australian manufacturing. Australian consumers have shown that they appreciate the opportunity to purchase water and juices with vitamins added to complement their lifestyle. This growing market has been available to New Zealand manufacturers for import into Australia for many years but until recently it was not open to Australian manufacturers. Changing the rules had the potential of increasing Australian jobs, providing niche products for the smaller independent beverage bottlers to explore, and expanding what is now only a small market in Australian non-alcoholic beverage exports. It took four years from 2002 to late 2006 for the Australian Beverages Council to steer an application through the regulatory morass to level the playing field with New Zealand.

Unlike most Ministerial Councils that set policy and permit their agencies to set the rules that allow the policy to be expressed, the Food Regulation Ministerial Council has power of veto over the regulations proposed by the agency. In this case, the council has not one but two opportunities to veto decisions of the agency, first by a single vote and second by a majority vote.

The current system must be fixed. The duplication of review responsibilities given to both FSANZ and the Ministerial Council creates inefficiencies and an additional cost burden. The veto powers of each member of the Ministerial Council, without regard to the constituents that that minister represents, allows Australia's smallest state to stand in the way of a proposal supported by its largest state.

The food regulatory framework was last reviewed in 1998 (Blair review). Its purpose was to simplify food regulation in Australia and New Zealand. However, the sad fact is that the operation of the new system has accumulated even more excessive red tape and poorer delivery in commercial time frames. It has disadvantaged industry without generating the benefits consumers and government deserved from the reforms. Given the difficulties that are needlessly added to the process of bringing new products to market, manufacturing overseas is beginning to look like a preferred option.

The Australian Government recognised this problem 15 months ago and offered a short-term and a longer-term fix. Recognising that some of the delays in the system were the product of the act under which FSANZ operates, the Government undertook extensive stakeholder consultations to streamline the operations of the agency. These were agreed in early 2006 but the bill to amend the act still hasn't been introduced to Parliament 12 months later.

The Prime Minister commissioned the Productivity Commission to report on reducing the regulatory burden on business (Red Tape Review) as a longer-term solution. The Red Tape Review highlighted issues for attention, calling for a reconsideration of the Australian Government's role in the food regulatory system, including aspects of enforcement, which are currently a states and territories responsibility. The Government's response was to endorse the recommendations and initiate a review to report.

The Government announced this week the appointment of the independent chairman of this review, Mark Bethwaite. The review is to be completed by April 2007. The outcome of this review and the implementation of changes by all governments will determine whether the excellent science and knowledge in Australia can be turned into commercial opportunities for the food and agriculture industries.

It is not just commonwealth regulations that stifle industry. The states and territories have the responsibility for enforcement of food regulations and this can lead to a lack of uniformity in response due to resource constraints, which itself creates uncertainty for industry. For example, is it better to set up in NSW, which has a single agency for food matters, or in Victoria or Queensland, where responsibilities are spread across a number of agencies? With 80 per cent of food manufacturing concentrated along the eastern coast of Australia, the Victorian Government has taken leadership in the national reform agenda to build on its competition reforms by reducing the regulatory burden in its food regulatory system. Victoria commissioned an inquiry into food regulation in September 2006 through the Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission. This is a welcome opportunity and may lead to the establishment of a one-stop shop for food regulation in Victoria, similar to the establishment in NSW some years ago of the NSW Food Authority.

The clock is ticking for food manufacturing in Australia. Delays in reform will increase the potential for more R&D to leave Australian shores. It is imperative that the food regulatory system returns without delay to the fundamentals of protecting public health and safety while removing unnecessary impediments to innovation and competitiveness.

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

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



23 January, 2007

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 de ors 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

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



22 January, 2007

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.

IVE: The ive 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

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



21 January, 2007

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 pre ions 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

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



20 January, 2007

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 ive 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

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

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

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



19 January, 2007

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

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

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

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



18 January, 2007

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" ions. 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

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

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

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



17 January, 2006

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

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

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

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



16 January, 2007

DRUG-COMPANY HATRED AT WORK? Or a medical profession that does not like to admit that it has been wrong?

There is some very confused thinking in the article reproduced below. If you read the report carefully, all that the latest research shows is that "bad" cholesterol may not be so bad after all. People deficient in it seem to be at more risk of Parkinsons. So maybe we NEED that "bad" cholesterol. Pesky!!

The mention of "dangerous" drugs called statins is a red herring -- presumably motivated by hatred of drug companies -- and the idea that they are a risk is actually CONTRADICTED by the research findings!

Research suggesting a possible link between the statin heart drugs being taken by millions of people and Parkinson's disease has prompted scientists to launch an investigation involving tens of thousands of patients. Researchers in the United States have been sufficiently alarmed by the preliminary findings of a small study of 124 patients to plan a full trial with 16,000 participants to examine whether the world's best-selling drugs can heighten the risk of developing the condition.

While previous work has suggested that taking statins, which lower levels of LDL or "bad" cholesterol, might be a risk factor for Parkinson's, there has never been firm evidence of a link, and previous efforts to test it have failed to find one. A study at the University of North Carolina, however, has shown that patients with low levels of LDL cholesterol are more than three and a half times as likely to develop the disease as those with higher LDL levels. Xuemei Huang, who led the research, said that she was very concerned by the finding. Another large-scale trial investigating a cholesterol link with Parkinson's risk is under way at Harvard University.

Millions of people around the world are taking statins. They have relatively few serious side effects, and there is evidence that they reduce deaths from heart disease. They are considered to be so safe that one, simvastatin, is available without pre ion in Britain.

David Dexter, senior lecturer in neuropharmacology at Imperial College, London, said: "With the evidence we have at the moment, I would say there is not much cause for concern that statin use may cause Parkinson's disease. Previous studies have demonstrated that statins can increase brain dopamine concentration, the chemical transmitter deficient in Parkinson's. "Also one of the secondary symptoms some patients with Parkinson's experience is dementia, similar to Alzheimer's disease, which may result from vascular changes in the brain. Statins would be expected to protect the brain against such vascular changes."

The apparent link found between lower LDL levels and Parkinson's was worrying, he acknowledged, but the study had been carried out on a small number of subjects and needed confirming. "Lower LDL cholesterol levels may also be a consequence of Parkinson's and not a cause," he said.

Patricia Limousin, consultant neurologist at the Institute of Neurology in London, said: "There is absolutely no evidence that statin drugs cause Parkinson's disease. In fact these drugs were related to a lower occurrence of Parkinson's disease in Huang's study, raising the possibility of a protective effect that warrants further investigations."

Peter Weissberg, medical director of the British Heart Foundation, said: "We are concerned that any suggestion of a link between statins and Parkinson's disease would unnecessarily scare the millions of people benefiting from statins in the UK. There is overwhelming evidence that statins save lives by preventing heart attacks and strokes. "Nobody should stop taking statins on the basis of this report. If they do, they will be putting themselves at increased risk of heart attack or stroke."

Kieran Breen, director of research and development for the Parkinson's Disease Society, said: "We should wary of drawing any firm conclusions from this research."

Source



The other drug war

A comment from Australia



The scourge of drugs in our schools is one of the big fears facing all parents as their children grow up. But increasingly concern is turning to the cocktail of mind-altering substances being fed to youngsters before they leave home in the mornings. Tens of thousands of children are being prescribed drugs for a series of mood and behaviour disorders ranging from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) to depression. "There is a medical civil war going on and the victims caught in the crossfire are the kids who have no say in it," says Dr George Halasz, a Melbourne-based psychiatrist.

Lined up on one side are the GPs, child psychiatrists and other specialists who believe medication is a safe, simple and effective way of relieving the suffering of children and adolescents, and controlling symptoms that cause them to struggle at school and socially.

On the other side are colleagues who criticise what they see as massive over-diagnosis and unnecessary use of potentially dangerous drugs that have a largely unknown long-term effect on developing brains. No anti-depressant has been approved in Australia for the treatment of depression in anyone aged under 19, but they are still prescribed.

Federal figures for 2003 show 250,000 pre ions for Prozac and similar drugs - selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) - were issued to children and adolescents. That was 30,000 more than the previous year. Three-quarters of them went to people aged 15 to 18, with about 15,000 going to children under 10. The figures do not indicate how young the children on anti-depressants are, but a 2004 study that tracked more than 5000 mothers and their children found that "it is common for children as young as five to be perceived to manifest a variety of symptoms of depression and/or anxiety".

Black Dog Institute chief Professor Gordon Parker has prescribed Prozac to an eight-year-old boy, reluctantly and only after consulting with two other child psychiatrists. "His mother, who also had a very bad depression, had several children and they were all happy except this one boy who would come home from school and say, 'I want to be dead.' " After about three weeks on Prozac, the boy was "wonderful". Several attempts were made to take him off the medication but within three or four weeks his condition deteriorated each time. The use of anti-depressant drugs for children under 12 "should be done rarely and by specialists and with great care", cautions Prof Parker.

A study by Professor Jon Jureidini of the Adelaide Women's and Children's Hospital concluded children and adolescents should not be placed on anti-depressants. "The drugs do not work and there is a possibility they may be dangerous for a small group," he says.

In 2004, the UK banned the use of all SSRI anti-depressants except Prozac for young people and the US Federal Drugs Agency asked manufacturers to include warning labels after experts found a link between anti-depressants and increased risk of suicide in children and teenagers. The danger was said to be greatest at the start of treatment, when there was a change in dosage or if it was suddenly withdrawn. Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration gave a similar warning and reiterated that the drug companies advise against the use of the medications to treat people under 18 for depression.

The Australian Adverse Drug Reactions Advisory Committee recommended that where anti-depressants were prescribed for children and adolescents it should be carefully monitored and done only as a part of "comprehensive" patient management, preferably with cognitive behaviour therapy. ADRAC documents show that since close monitoring of pre ions to children began in 2005, more than 1600 adverse reactions had been notified. Of these, 827 related to children aged under 10 and the drugs had been linked to two suicides and a death from heart failure. Another 833 adverse reactions were logged for youths aged 10 to 19, including links to three deaths.

Dr Brett McDermott, director of the Mater Child and Youth Mental Health Service in Brisbane and spokesman for the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, says: "I think Australia has got it right. There are very safe anti-depressants and we are not prescribing them lightly. "Depression is a severe condition and I don't think you can withhold treatment because a small amount have side effects." Dr McDermott said GPs were competent to prescribe to adolescents but the younger the child, the more important it was they saw a child psychiatrist. "I would be very reluctant to prescribe anti-depressants to kids in primary school," he said.

Dr Halasz and others fear the use of drugs to treat depression could follow the explosion in ADHD medication. "The US, Canada and Australia are the world gold, silver and bronze medal-holders in terms of prescribing drugs to children," he said. Pre ions in Australia for the most common medication - dex-amphetamines- rose from 96,000 a year to 232,000 between 1994 and 2004. In August 2005, the other popular ADHD drug Ritalin was added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, reducing the cost from $49 to as little as $4.70 for concession card-holders. Over the next six months, the number of Ritalin s issued soared from 523 a month to more than 5800, with no apparent decrease in other medications. Queensland pre ion numbers have grown at a rate second only to that in Western Australia.

A world authority on ADHD, Professor David Hay from Curtin University in Perth, says one possible reason for the high number of cases is that GPs are allowed to diagnose ADHD in those two states. Elsewhere, it can be done only by child psychologists or psychiatrists. ADHD is "extraordinarily complex", with a high risk of mis-diagnosis, says Prof Hay. "We have to make sure we are measuring a problem in the child and not the parent's perceptions. I don't think it's done well enough."

A Federal Government study found 11 per cent of parents reported their children had symptoms consistent with ADHD. Dr Halasz says the true figure is more like 1 per cent and that many are being wrongly diagnosed. "Parents are between a rock and a hard place. They always want to do the best for their children," he said.

In the US, it is not uncommon for schools to insist parents medicate their children to modify their behaviour as a condition of remaining at the school. Youth Affairs Network of Queensland director Siyavash Doostkhah says it also happens regularly here - even though it is illegal. Denise, a Brisbane northside mother, says that happened to her son John who was branded a "bad" child all through pre-school. "This came to a head when he had only been in Grade 1 for approximately four months when the principal came to me and told me I either put my son on medication or he would be expelled."

Queensland University of Technology education PhD student Linda Graham recently completed a study of school responses and concluded that children who do not fit the "norm" are made scapegoats. "Parents of children who can be described as 'hyperactive' or 'distractable' are under pressure to medicate their children so they can fit into an overwrought, under-funded public education system," she said. "The load is lessened when difficult kids are diagnosed with something that qualifies for support funding or when parents oblige the school by shifting the problem to their local pediatrician."

She backed claims by child psychiatrists to The Sunday Mail of parents being pressured by schools to get diagnoses of conditions such as Autism Spectrum Disorder. Students with ASD qualify for teacher-aide support funding while those with ADHD do not. Proponents of ADHD medication point to the fact that it has helped thousands of children to control their impulsive or hyperactive behaviour, to focus and concentrate better, to improve their school performance and to increase their social skills.

Dr Halasz agrees it would be unethical to withhold the drugs from the very small group of children who really require them but argues that just because a child functions better after taking them is not proof that the child was ever "ill". And he warns there have not yet been any long-term follow-up studies of the effects. "There could be a sleeper effect. In 20 years we could have a whole generation acting differently."

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

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



15 January, 2007

US woman dies of water intoxication

Ban water!

A 28-year-old woman has died of water intoxication after taking part in a Californian radio station's water drinking contest. She was in the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" competition trying to win a Nintendo Wii video game system. Assistant Sacramento County Coroner Ed Smith said a preliminary investigation found evidence "consistent with a water intoxication death".

Jennifer Strange's mother found her daughter's body at her home on Friday in the Sacramento suburb of Rancho Cordova, California, after Strange called her supervisor at her job to say she was heading home in terrible pain. "She said to one of our supervisors that she was on her way home and her head was hurting her real bad," said Laura Rios, one of Strange's co-workers at Radiological Associates of Sacramento. "She was crying and that was the last that anyone had heard from her."

Earlier Friday, Strange took part in a contest at radio station KDND 107.9 in which participants competed to see how much water they could drink without going to the toilet. Initially, contestants were handed 220mL bottles of water to drink every 15 minutes. "They were small little half-pint bottles, so we thought it was going to be easy," said fellow contestant James Ybarra of Woodland, California. "They told us if you don't feel like you can do this, don't put your health at risk."

Ybarra said he quit after drinking five bottles. "My bladder couldn't handle it anymore," he added. After he quit, he said, the remaining contestants, including Strange, were given even bigger bottles to drink. "I was talking to her and she was a nice lady," Ybarra said. "She was telling me about her family and her three kids and how she was doing it for kids."

John Geary, vice president and marketing manager for Entercom Sacramento, the station's owner, said station personnel were stunned when they heard of Strange's death. "We are awaiting information that will help explain how this tragic event occurred," he said.

Source



Flesh-destroying ulcer infection reaches NSW

The first case of a flesh-eating ulcer infection in New South Wales has been reported, prompting warnings for doctors to watch out for the disease. The Bairnsdale ulcer, which kills human skin cells, fat and blood vessels, was first diagnosed in Australia in 1948, on the Victorian coast. Infection rates in the state have more than doubled in the past three years, with 61 people diagnosed in 2006, and cases have also been declared in Queensland and the Northern Territory. Now NSW has recorded its first case - a 42-year-old man who developed the condition after sea-kayaking near the town of Eden in the state's far south.

The ulcer is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium ulcerans, which is found naturally in the environment. It is not known how humans become infected with the disease, which is common in Africa, but it is believed to be transmitted by mosquitoes. A scab on the kayaker's ankle developed into a gaping wound which grew over five months before he was admitted to a Melbourne hospital last January to have the lesion excised.

Officially declaring the case in the latest Medical Journal of Australia, infectious diseases experts said it was the "first strong evidence" the disease had spread into NSW. "Australian primary care clinicians need to be aware that the ulcer may occur in NSW to ensure early diagnosis and treatment," wrote Paul Johnson from Austin Health in Melbourne.

The finding came as Australian plastic surgeons, GPs, physicians and public health experts set down new guidelines recommending people use insect repellent and wear protective clothing while in disease hotspots. Professor Johnson and his team also advised colleagues confronted with large ulcers to use both antibiotics and surgery. Other new research published in the journal suggests that in a quarter of cases the disease will still spread after surgery if antibiotics aren't used.

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



14 January, 2007

NOW EVEN PEOPLE OF NORMAL WEIGHT CAN BE OBESE!

They'll get us all eventually. First they came for the obese ....

The journal abstract below reports an Italian study based on just 20 women. No double blind controls or any of that nonsense, of course:

Normal-weight obese syndrome: early inflammation?

Antonino De Lorenzo et al.

Background: In obese subjects, the adipose mass represents an important source of proinflammatory cytokines. We have identified a new syndrome-the normal-weight obese (NWO) syndrome-in women with normal weight and body mass index but whose fat mass is >30% of their total body weight and whose risk of developing obesity-related diseases is likely increased.

ive: The aim of the present study was to verify the hypothesis that NWO women are characterized by early inflammation, related to body fat mass, and that their plasma proinflammatory cytokine concentrations are greater than those of nonobese women.

Design: Twenty NWO, 20 preobese-obese, and 20 healthy (nonobese), age-matched white Italian women were studied. Anthropometric variables and plasma concentrations of proinflammatory cytokines and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors were measured and compared between groups.

Results: Plasma values and body-composition measures were significantly different between the preobese-obese and nonobese women. No significant differences in body weight, laboratory values, or CVD risk factors were found between the NWO and nonobese groups. Compared with concentrations in the NWO women, plasma concentrations of interleukin (IL)-1alpha were significantly lower in the nonobese group and were significantly greater in the preobese-obese group. IL-6 and alpha concentrations were related to fat mass distribution in the NWO women.

Conclusions: The proinflammatory cytokines could be regarded as significant prognostic indicators of the risk of obesity, CVD, and the metabolic syndrome in NWO women.



A VITAMIN TO STOP YOU GOING DEAF?

Journal abstract below:

Effects of Folic Acid Supplementation on Hearing in Older Adults

Background: Age-related hearing loss is a common chronic condition of elderly persons. Low folate status has been associated with poor hearing.

ive: To determine whether folic acid supplementation slows age-related hearing loss.

Design: Double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial conducted from September 2000 to December 2004.

Setting: The Netherlands.

Participants: 728 older men and women recruited from municipal and blood bank registries with plasma total homocysteine concentrations 13 mol/L or greater serum and vitamin B12 concentrations 200 pmol/L or greater at screening, and no middle ear dysfunction, unilateral hearing loss, or pathologic ear conditions unrelated to aging.

Intervention: Daily oral folic acid (800 g) or placebo supplementation for 3 years.

Measurements: 3-year change in hearing thresholds, assessed as the average of the pure-tone air conduction thresholds of both ears of the low (0.5-kHz, 1-kHz, and 2-kHz) and high (4-kHz, 6-kHz, and 8-kHz) frequencies.

Results: Initial median hearing thresholds were 11.7 dB (interquartile range, 7.5 to 17.5 dB) for low frequencies and 34.2 dB (interquartile range, 22.5 to 50.0 dB) for high frequencies. Sixteen participants (2%) were lost to follow-up. After 3 years, thresholds of the low frequencies increased by 1.0 dB (95% CI, 0.6 to 1.4 dB) in the folic acid group and by 1.7 dB (CI, 1.3 to 2.1 dB) in the placebo group (difference, -0.7 dB [CI, -1.2 to -0.1 dB]; P = 0.020). Folic acid supplementation did not affect the decline in hearing high frequencies.

Limitations: The strict criterion for participation on the basis of serum homocysteine concentrations limits extrapolation to the general population. Folic acid fortification of food was prohibited in the Netherlands during the study, so baseline folate levels in participants were about half of those found in the U.S. population.

Conclusions: Folic acid supplementation slowed the decline in hearing of the speech frequencies associated with aging in a population from a country without folic acid fortification of food. The effect requires confirmation, especially in populations from countries with folic acid fortification programs.

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

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



13 January, 2007

FATTIES SURVIVE HEART ATTACKS BETTER

It's a well-known paradox that had little evidence to support it, until now. Doctors from UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine have, for the first time, successfully demonstrated that obese patients actually fare better and have better chances of survival when hospitalised for acute heart failure than their leaner counterparts.

In the first-ever large scale study to assess the relationship between Body Mass Index and survival in patients hospitalised with acute heart failure, doctors have found the obesity paradox - BMI being inversely associated with long-term mortality in chronic heart failure - to be real. The study has found that by weight category, in-hospital mortality rate was 6.3% for underweight, 4.6% for healthy weight, 3.4% for overweight and 2.4% for obese patients. Researchers also found that for every five-unit increase in body mass, the odds of risk-adjusted mortality fell 10%, irrespective of the patients age, sex, blood urea nitrogen, blood pressure and additional prognostic factors.

Speaking to TOI, Gregg Fonarow, the school's director and lead author of this study, said, "The study suggests overweight, obese patients may have a greater metabolic reserve to call upon during an acute heart failure, which may lessen in-hospital mortality risk. Prior studies in outpatients with chronic heart failure had shown overweight patients had better chances of survival compared to patients who were normal weight, the so called obesity paradox."

Fonarow said the study was initiated in October 2001 and involved 263 hospitals in the US. Researchers utilised data of over 100,000 patients with acute heart failure patients from the Acute Decompensated Heart Failure National Registry from October 2001 through December 2004. "Further study is required but the finding suggests that nutritional/metabolic support may have therapeutic benefit in specific patients hospitalised with heart failure. Obesity is a known risk factor for developing heart disease and heart failure and every effort should be made to avoid it, but once heart failure has manifested, this paradox seems to occur," Fonarow added.

According to cardiologist Dr K K Agarwal of Moolchand Hospital, obesity paradox is also called reverse epidemiology. "Such a paradox has been found in obese patients undergoing dialysis or suffering from advanced cancer and renal failure. Elderly patients who have better BMI have better chance of pulling through such severe health complications."

Source



BOTTLED WATER?

Panic: `Health warning over safety of bottled water', says the UK Independent, among others, following a report by the food and farming campaign Sustain. The report argues that consumers often buy bottled water because they believe it is healthier than tap water. However, the bottled variety can contain sodium, contaminants (like the benzene found in Perrier in 1989), and the heavy metal antimony. The report notes that the French Senate has recommended switching brands regularly to reduce the risk of harmful effects.

Don't panic: The real aim of the report seems to be to emphasise that bottled water is less environmentally efficient than tap water - so why create a health panic about the bottled stuff?

The authors make a perfectly reasonable defence of tap water. They rightly point out that there are no particular health benefits from bottled water, and nor do we need to drink `eight glasses per day' as is routinely cited. Tap water is now produced to very high standards - 99.96 per cent of UK mains supply now meets national standards. Tap water is generally purer and fresher than the bottled variety, and also much cheaper.

However, some of the other claims in the report are dubious. The risks of sodium in the diet are overhyped anyway, but there is at least 25 times more sodium in a single slice of bread than to be found in a regular 500ml bottle of water. To reach the recommended sodium intake for a day from water would require drinking about 200 such bottles.

As for the claim about antimony, the report cites research from Germany which actually states `all the water tested contained antimony below the guidelines recommended for drinking water'. In other words, as far as anyone can tell, it is safe. While dismissing health fears about tap water, the report prefers to stoke fears about bottled water using innuendo rather than evidence.

Bottled water is convenient and usually preferable to the saccharin-sweet fizzy drinks that are the only alternative when you need to quench your thirst while out and about - even if it is sometimes ridiculously expensive. Claiming that it is potentially bad for your health is cynical, however. If Sustain think the world would be a better place if we only drank tap water, or at least recycled the plastic mineral water bottles, then they should make the case without promoting a different set of anxieties instead.

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



12 January, 2007

STUPID FOOD FASCIST WANTS TO BAN COCA COLA

No doubt he wants to ban coffee too. That's FULL of the evil caffeine and lots of people drink it with that ghastly, fattening MILK and SUGAR!

Governments have been urged to consider banning the sale of caffeinated soft drinks to children following Australian research showing caffeine only increases addictiveness. A Melbourne study, published in the most recent issue of international research journal Appetite found caffeine added to cola-based drinks did not enhance flavour, but did increase their addictiveness, adding to childhood obesity problems. Study co-author, Deakin University's Russell Keast yesterday said his findings were "absolutely conclusive" that people could not detect the caffeine flavour added to cola-based drinks. But he said children might find themselves becoming addicted to the caffeine, without realising it. "It's a problem for children," he said. "We're talking about children, who don't have the cognitive ability to understand why they're getting more irritable, more moody."

Dr Keast said there was a "very strong cause and effect" between soft drink consumption and obesity, with previous research showing a person's chance of obesity rose 60 per cent with each extra can of soft drink they consumed. "Soft drinks have been linked to childhood obesity and caffeine has been linked to increased consumption," he said. "So I think overall that the picture is while caffeine adds no flavour activity to these soft drinks, it is potentially an issue the government perhaps should look at regulating, certainly in schools, to see if maybe caffeinated soft drinks and maybe soft drinks overall shouldn't be marketed to school children."

Dr Keast said banning the drinks' sale to children under the age of 18, in the same way alcohol was banned, could be one approach for governments to explore. "I think if that's a regulatory approach, that sort of thing should maybe be considered. I don't know what the best options are, how you would go about such things." Dr Keast last week emailed his report to federal Health Minister Tony Abbott and Victorian Health Minister Bronwyn Pike.

Mr Abbott last year slammed soft drinks as being "very, very harmful" for children except as an occasional treat, but stopped short of promising tougher laws.

Dr Keast said yesterday that research into the effects of caffeinated soft drinks would continue, with funding being sought to do similar studies in Thailand, where childhood obesity was also a growing problem. The six-month Melbourne study, conducted jointly with Lynnette Riddell, repeatedly tested 30 people aged in their 20s to see if they could detect the caffeine flavour in cola-based drinks.

Source



BAN KIDS!

Adults living with young children eat significantly more fat than grown-ups with no kids at home, a new study shows. Adults with kids consumed nearly 5 more grams of fat and 1.7 more grams of saturated fat every day, the equivalent of an individual pepperoni pizza a week, Dr. Helena Laroche of the University of Iowa in Iowa City and her colleagues found. Adults living with children younger than 17 also ate more salty snacks, cheese, beef, ice cream, cakes and cookies, pizza, and processed meats like bacon.

Busy schedules and time constraints may be forcing parents to choose more high-fat convenience foods, Laroche and her team suggest in their article in the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. Adults with children may also be more likely to keep these foods around the house because they think kids like them. "We need to approach nutrition as good for the whole family," Laroche told Reuters Health. "Everybody should be eating the same nutritious food."

She and her colleagues analyzed data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a nationally representative sample that included 6,660 men and women aged 17 to 65. Households with children younger than 17 didn't consume more calories, but they did eat more fat, Laroche and her colleagues found.

"These findings suggest that food advertising aimed at children may influence not only the child's diet but also indirectly affect parents' diets," they note in their report. The authors suggest switching kids to lower-fat milk after age 2, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Heart Association, as well as limiting snack food, cheese products, and pizza.

Source

Jonah Goldberg comments:

I'm growing increasingly annoyed with the idea that kids like fatty, sweet and all around yummy foods because of some sort of social construction of reality. I remember reading somewhere that Dr. Spock (no, the other one) said dessert shouldn't be withheld as a punishment because it emphasizes the wrong food and makes sweets seem like the most "valuable" meal. For a long time, this made total sense to me because I never had to think about it. Now that I'm a parent, I recognize that it is almost a total crock. Kids like ice cream because it tastes really frick'n good. Telling a kid, "clean up your room or no spinach for you" would be brilliant if it weren't so scandalously stupid (note: if yours is the one kid in a million who likes spinach more than ice cream, congrats. But we ain't building social policy around your example). I keep seeing these segments on TV or reading snippets in the paper about how if you just raise kids to like apples more than cookies, they'll like apples more than cookies. Maybe that's possible, but only if you never let your kids eat really good cookies so they never learn what they're missing.

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

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



11 January, 2007

HEY! WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MEDITERRANEAN DIET?

Or the Japanese diet, for that matter? Countries that seem especially healthy in one way or another often have their characteristic diet promoted as the secret to a long life. On the figures below, I expect the Australian diet will now be similarly promoted -- a diet heavy in big Macs, KFC, chips (French fries), fried food generally, Coca cola and everything that the food faddists deplore. When will the world discover the health-giving wonders of fat-heavy meat pies and Vegemite sandwiches -- to say nothing of Lamingtons and Iced VoVos? Pardon me while I duck out for a nice sausage roll -- encased in flaky pastry that's greasy with fat! You can get them anywhere in Australia



Figures recently released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that Australians are among the longest-living people in the world, with an average lifespan of 78.5 years for males and 83.3 years for females born "Down Under."

But the figures drop by around 17 years for indigenous Australians, whose average life expectancy in 2001 was 59.4 years for males and 64.8 for females. Several factors, including poverty, discrimination, substance abuse [including pervasive alcohol abuse] and poor access to health, are believed to affect the lifespan of these original Australians.

For the rest of the nation, the capital Canberra -- often derided as boring and soulless -- is statistically the best place to sustain a long life. The lakeside city's 325,000 people enjoy the longest average lifespan, with women living to 84 years and most men to 79.9. Built to resolve a bitter 1908 dispute between Sydney and Melbourne over which should be capital, modern Canberra has the wealthiest and best-educated population in Australia. The city's unemployment rate hovers at barely 2.8 percent, while weekly wages are well above the Australian average at A$1,208 (US$941), backed by a booming information technology industry and government salaries.

At the other end of the scale is the sparsely populated outback Northern Territory, cinematic home to "Crocodile Dundee." The territory accounts for only 1 percent of Australia's 20 million population. Men there live to 72.5 years on average, while women live to 78.2. More than a quarter of the population are aboriginal Australians, who often live on remote communities with poor access to jobs, health and education services and have one of the lowest life expectancies.

Australia's nationwide average life expectancy for males is exceeded only by Iceland and Hong Kong while the female life expectancy is exceeded by Japan and Hong Kong.

Source



Natural remedies seen as stab in the dark

Reaching for the aloe vera next time you are sunburnt may be a waste of time, according to the consumer magazine Choice. In its latest issue, the magazine reviewed international medical journal articles on the effectiveness of aloe vera and other natural healing products such as tea-tree oil, St John's Wort, lavender oil and honey. It found that despite generations of folklore promoting their benefits, many natural remedies were yet to be scientifically proven as effective first-aid treatments. "There is such a wide variety of so-called natural remedies out there, we thought it would be timely just to see how the body of scientific evidence was stacking up in or against their favour," said a Choice spokeswoman, Indira Naidoo. "There is a lot of information out there but a lot of it is reaching the conclusion that it is too early to prove [or that] there needs to be more research."

Of the eight natural remedies examined, all have been said to protect the body against infection, while four have been promoted for their ability to heal wounds.

Professor Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist, said that while some natural remedies, such as tea-tree oil, could help clear minor skin infections, it could prompt some to use them on serious infections, with unknown results. "We need to be careful we don't rush in with too much enthusiasm for something that doesn't have enough data to show it works and secondly that it doesn't cause toxicity that we're not aware of." Professor Collignon and Choice called for more research into natural remedies. The president of the National Herbalists Association, John Baxter, said there was plenty of clinical research to prove they worked as a first-aid treatment.

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



10 January, 2007

FAT AS A SOCIAL CLASS MARKER

A line from the comedy troupe the Doug Anthony All Stars has long stayed with me: "People are poor and ugly because they choose to be poor and ugly." Its cruelty got a few laughs but for some reason it struck me as a particularly nasty view of the world. Throw the word "fat" in with poor and ugly, and this mockery of an underclass has launched a legion of reality TV shows. In You Are What You Eat, shame is part of the game. Not only is the particpants' weekly diet of junk spread out on a buffet like a gooey, sick-making reproach but their faeces are examined and ridiculed by a prim and thin host. In Britain these shows are plentiful, cheap to make and have no shortage of "talent".

In Honey I Killed the Kids, parents are put in the metaphorical stocks for feeding their children junk food and are shown a computer simulation of how those children will age if they are kept on a diet of processed food. The parents gasp and reel with horror as their little Augustus Gloops morph into grotesque, mean-looking chavs, old before their time because they are rotting from the inside out from all those additives.

In Too Fat To Walk, the camera angles are reminiscent of a cheap porn film, but instead of stimulating our desire, these shows are designed to provoke our disgust. There are startling and lingering close-ups of cellulite, stomach rolls, chafed inner thighs and, of course, tears. Contestants are not only exhausted from walking up mountains but are filled with self-loathing and disgust. This show is their hairshirt - a humiliation or atonement for lacking self-discipline. As for the viewers, the only reaction can be disgust. These shows make us feel smug and self-congratulatory about our lifestyles. It relieves us, for the briefest time, of the relentless pressure to conform to the unrealistic images that flood us from more aspirational lifestyle shows.

But these shows carry other odious undertones - they encourage us to sneer at poverty. As well as being fat, most of the contestants on these shows are white, poor and working-class. They are torchbearers of an emerging new class system based on nutrition. Before the hysteria over the obesity epidemic there were other indicators that measured class such as accent, education and profession.

Now such elitist snap judgments can be made by observing what goes into your gob or shopping trolley. A survey released in Britain yesterday found the fatter you were, the less you earned, with lower-paid clerical workers nine times more likely to be overweight (75 per cent) than those at upper-management level (8 per cent).

Lack of money can lead to poor diet since the fat underclass work night shift, or double shifts in low-wage jobs, or they don't work at all. They buy frozen or takeaway food, they do not know how to cook and their children are fussy eaters. They line up under the fluorescent lights of McDonald's unable to resist the offer of an upsize. They buy the wrong cuts of meat in the supermarket and they load trolleys with processed food such as chips and frozen pizzas that not only contain an environmentally unsound surplus of packaging, but enough additives to give their children attention deficit disorder.

The middle classes, meanwhile, have developed an almost religious fervour around exercise and nutrition, none of which comes cheap. Look in their shopping trolley: artisan bread ($10) that weighs a tonne, soups in cartons from chilled shelves instead of in tins on shelves, anything labelled "organic" or "free range", freshly squeezed juices and anything marketed as fresh, from pasta to seafood to sauces. It costs a lot to follow this lifestyle.

In a recent article in The Spectator magazine Allister Heath explored the link between fast food and crime and between the haves and have-nots. He observed that a section of society raised on violence and fast food is drifting away from the rest of Britain. Nutrition has become destiny. "Of all the shootings of the past few days, those in the Brixton McDonald's were the most dramatic because they highlighted the divergence between the values and habits of the modern, health-obsessed, metropolitan middle-classes and those of the underclass," he wrote. "The two groups now live in completely different worlds."

But the piece contained a warning for the middle classes, so in the thrall of healthy, organic produce, so willing to squeal with disgust at the fatties on TV. If we say "let them eat cake", we are condemning a generation not only to chronic health problems but also to an inequality which is measured not just by where you live, but also by what you eat.

Source



HEREDITY FACTORS IN BODY WEIGHT REAR THEIR HEADS

Though not admitted as such

Girls as young as nine show an increased risk of heart disease as a result of being overweight. Higher blood pressure and unhealthy changes in cholesterol and triglycerides in the bloodstream suggest that the long-term consequences of puppy fat could be serious. They also show that the years between 9 and 12 are a crucial period for becoming overweight and that once the weight is on it is hard to shift.

Girls who were overweight at the age of 9 were nearly 15 times more likely to be overweight as young adults than those who were of normal weight at 9, a study shows. The authors, from the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, give warning that childhood obesity may have serious short and long-term consequences. "Girls who were overweight were three to ten times more likely to be assessed in the risk range on four out of six health indicators, and had three times greater odds of having elevated levels of LDL cholesterol," the team concludes in The Journal of Pediatrics.

More than 2,300 girls aged 9 or 10 were enrolled in the study and followed for more than ten years. The team measured their height, weight, blood pressure and cholesterol every year until they were 18 and had extra measurements made when they were 21 to 23. The study also compared white girls with those of African-American origin. It found that black girls were 1.5 times more likely to become overweight at any given age than white girls. Being overweight was also about twice as common in black girls between the ages of 9 and 18 (17-24 per cent).

A second study has shown that men who are overweight or obese are significantly more likely to die of prostate cancer. Obesity is known to increase the risks of a range of cancers, including breast [False!] and bowel cancer, but this latest study produced a puzzling result. The risks of dying from prostate cancer may be increased by being obese, but the risks of getting it are actually decreased. [Hooray for fat!]

A team led by Margaret Wright of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, followed 287,760 men aged between 50 and 71 as part of a diet and health study. It reports in Cancer that there is a clear link between weight and death from prostate cancer. Men who were severely obese had a doubled risk. But neither overweight nor obesity increased the risk of getting the disease. The authors explain this by suggesting that overweight and obese men have lower testosterone levels.

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



9 January, 2007

Low-carb diets may hit levels of folate

Once again slimming is bad for you

A disturbing drop in the blood folate levels in young American women, which could lead to increased birth defects, may be a result of the growing popularity of low-carb diets. Government health officials said yesterday that, while it was unclear what had caused the slide in the important B vitamin, diet trends could well be a factor.

A Centre for Disease Control and Prevention study released yesterday found an 8 to 16 per cent decline in folate levels in US women of childbearing age, according to large blood-drawing surveys done between 1999 and 2004. It is not clear how the decline has affected newborns, but preliminary data suggest the dramatic declines in neural tube defects seen in the late 1990s may have levelled off by 2004, CDC officials said. "This is a cause of substantial concern," said Nancy Green, medical director for the March of Dimes, which campaigns for birth defects prevention.

It is the first time such a decline has been seen since the start of government health campaigns urging women to make sure they get enough folic acid. Years ago, scientists concluded that folate deficiencies contributed to the occurrence of serious birth defects of the spine and brain, known as neural tube defects. The Government has long urged women to eat cereals and breads fortified with folic acid to prevent birth defects. By the late 1990s, the fortification campaigns were succeeding: folate levels increased, and neural tube defects dropped by as many as 1000 a year.

CDC epidemiologist and lead author of the study Joseph Mulinare said that in 1998, the Food and Drug Administration began requiring that folic acid be added to breads, cereals and other products that use enriched flour. Whole-grain breads did not count because they already contain some folate.

Low-carb diets have increased in popularity since 2000. Women who avoided flour and bread products for their carbohydrates may have also taken in less folic acid, Mulinare said.

Increasing obesity rates among young women could also be a factor. Research has found obese people metabolise folate differently from thinner folk, and some doctors believe heavier women need more folic acid to prevent neural tube defects.

The decline was most pronounced in white women, although black women continue to be the racial group with the least folate in their blood.

Source



Pregnancy test gives doctors more time to detect condition that kills

Protein points to pre-eclampsia risk; Breakthrough could lead to a cure

A simple test for pregnant women could predict a serious complication weeks in advance. A team led by British scientists has developed the test for pre-eclampsia, which causes 22,000 maternal deaths worldwide every year. Until now the first signs of the condition were the symptoms: large increases in blood pressure, headaches, blurred or altered vision, abdominal or shoulder pain, nausea and vomiting, confusion, shortness of breath and excessive swelling of the hands and feet.

The only treatment is careful monitoring, and early induction of birth if the symptoms become dangerous. Doctors balance the interests of the baby — which does better the longer it stays in the womb — with the threat to the mother’s life. As soon as she has given birth, the symptoms subside.

A team led by Thomas Rademacher, of University College London, has found that testing for the presence of a protein called inositol phosphoglycan P-type in the urine gives a reliable indication that the condition is developing.

They compared the levels of the protein in the urine of 27 women who developed pre-eclampsia with 47 who did not. They found that the women who developed pre-eclampsia had levels of the protein several times greater than those who did not. The increases were detectable before symptoms appeared, up to seven weeks earlier in some cases, the team reports in Hypertension.

It is not known whether the protein is responsible for triggering the condition, but this seems possible. If so, the discovery could open the way to developing more effective treatments.

Professor Rademacher said: “Being able to predict the onset of this disease has been the single greatest challenge in obstetric medicine.

“Pre-eclampsia is the most common of the serious complications that can occur during pregnancy and affects millions of women and children. It is a particular problem in the developing world, where treatment is less readily available.

“Our research has identified that the presence of inositol phosphoglycan P-type is a reliable indicator of whether a pregnant woman will develop PE. Now a reliable diagnostic test has been developed, this paves the way for identifying new treatments.”

Pre-eclampsia affects about 5 per cent of pregnancies. It can occur any time during pregnancy, but normally appears in the last three months.

Worldwide, the condition affects more than seven million pregnancies a year and causes 22,000 maternal deaths. More rarely, it can develop into eclampsia, which affects 700,000 pregnancies a year, leading to 43,000 maternal deaths.

“PE is presently only curable by delivery,” Professor Rademacher said. “In many cases clinicians must deliver a baby in order to save its mother’s life, even if this means the baby is born prematurely.”

PE arises when the placenta releases a toxin, causing the mother’s blood pressure to rise sharply. If it develops into eclampsia it can cause seizures and she may lapse into a coma.

Source



BRITISH GOVERNMENT DISSES ORGANIC

Even politicians tell the truth sometimes

The minister in charge of the food industry in Britain has divided the farming community by saying that there is no conclusive evidence that organic food is healthier than food produced conventionally.

David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, told The Sunday Times that eating organic food came down to "a lifestyle choice" and that shoppers should not regard non-organically produced food as second best. "It [organic food] is only 4 per cent of total farm produce, not 40 per cent, and I would not want to say that 96 per cent of our farm produce is inferior because it's not organic."

There has been a reported 30 per cent rise in sales of organic food in the past year, to about 1.6 billion pounds. Organic Farmers & Growers said: "It's not just about health. It's about producing food in a way that is sympathetic to the environment and which enhances the countryside."

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



8 January, 2007

A RECENT SENSIBLE ARTICLE ABOUT DIET

Worrying about your diet is bad for you! Stay happily fat. Ignore media messages about obesity. Those are unusual lessons but they are lessons to be learned from the following findings. Journal abstract follows:

Is Dieting Advice From Magazines Helpful or Harmful? Five-Year Associations With Weight-Control Behaviors and Psychological Outcomes in Adolescents

Patricia van den Berg et al

IVE. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the association between frequent reading of magazine articles about dieting/weight loss and weight-control behaviors and psychological outcomes 5 years later in a sample of adolescents.

PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS. Data are from Project EAT (Eating Among Teens), a 5-year longitudinal study of eating, activity, weight, and related variables in 2516 middle and high school students. In 1999 (time 1), participants completed surveys and had their height and weight measured. In 2004 (time 2), participants were resurveyed.

RESULTS. For female adolescents, the frequency of healthy, unhealthy, and extreme weight-control behaviors increased with increasing magazine reading after adjusting for time 1 weight-control behaviors, weight importance, BMI, and demographic covariates. The odds of engaging in unhealthy weight-control behaviors (such as fasting, skipping meals, and smoking more cigarettes) were twice as high for the most frequent readers compared with those who did not read magazine articles about dieting and weight loss. The odds of using extreme weight-control behaviors (such as vomiting or using laxatives) were 3 times higher in the highest frequency readers compared with those who did not read such magazines. There were no significant associations for either weight-control behaviors or psychological outcomes for male adolescents.

CONCLUSIONS. Frequent reading of magazine articles about dieting/weight loss strongly predicted unhealthy weight-control behaviors in adolescent girls, but not boys, 5 years later. Findings from this study, in conjunction with findings from previous studies, suggest a need for interventions aimed at reducing exposure to, and the importance placed on, media messages regarding dieting and weight loss.

Source



WOW! THIS LOT OF MEDICAL RESEARCHERS HAVE DISCOVERED SOCIAL CLASS

Smarter people tend to eat more "approved" food. But what does it mean? It turns out that it is not a raw IQ effect but is mediated via social class. Brighter people are more educated and more education means more indoctrination into conventional health wisdom. The findings do however extend yet again the evidence about the great raw predictive power of IQ tests in most aspects of life. Journal abstract follows:

Childhood Mental Ability in Relation to Food Intake and Physical Activity in Adulthood: The 1970 British Cohort Study

G. David Batty et al.

IVE. The purpose of this work was to examine the relation of scores on tests of mental ability in childhood with food consumption and physical activity in adulthood.

METHODS. Based on a cohort of >17000 individuals born in Great Britain in 1970, 8282 had complete data for mental ability scores at 10 years of age and reported their food intake and physical activity patterns at 30 years of age.

RESULTS. Children with higher mental ability scores reported significantly more frequent consumption of fruit, vegetables (cooked and raw), wholemeal bread, poultry, fish, and foods fried in vegetable oil in adulthood. They were also more likely to have a lower intake of chips (French fries), nonwholemeal bread, and cakes and biscuits. There was some attenuation in these associations after adjustment for markers of socioeconomic position across the life course, which included educational attainment, with statistical significance lost in some analyses. Higher mental ability was positively associated with exercise habit, in particular, intense activity (defined by being out of breath/sweaty). The associations between mental ability and these behaviors were similar in both men and women, and they were somewhat stronger for verbal than nonverbal ability.

CONCLUSIONS. It is plausible that the skills captured by IQ tests, such as the ability to comprehend and reason, may be important in the successful management of a person's health behaviors.

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



7 January, 2007

TYRANNICAL FOOD REGULATORS BACK DOWN FOR ONCE

By John Stossel

Mary Baker and Ruth Neikirk love to cook. What's more, they love to cook for poor people. They do it frequently, preparing meals at home and bringing them to their church in Virginia. "I love it," Mary says. "I can take a little bit of something, like a soup bone? And I can make a whooole pot of something. Tastes good. With some cornbread you got 'em a meal!"

The people they cook for love it too. But there's a problem. It was "criminal activity." The Fairfax County health department points out that - horrors - Mary and Ruth are actually preparing food and serving it to people! Without a license! That's not safe, said the health department. What if there's food poisoning? Hundreds of pages of regulation say that if you want to serve food to the public, you need a food-manager certificate, a ware-washing machine (with internal baffles), drain-boards, ventilation-hood systems, a sink with at least three compartments, as well as a hand-washing sink, can openers with removable parts, and much more, for page after page.

The county health department wasn't being capricious. It was just enforcing its rules. There had been a complaint. No one had gotten sick, but an "advocate for the homeless" noticed that church kitchens, which appeared sparkling clean to my ABC team, didn't meet "code."

"You've got to be kidding, give us a break," the Rev. Judy Fender told us. "We can fix a nice meal here, but we can't serve it!"

The health department said it was just looking out for the homeless. But did the officials ever think about where street people eat when they don't eat at these churches?

"They've never stopped me from eating out of a dumpster or a trash can," says James, an astute homeless man who understands Henry Hazlitt's "economics in one lesson," namely, look for the secondary results of government policy. The government can close down the church kitchens, but that'll only send the poor to the garbage cans. Is that better? "Some of them take their jobs just a little too seriously," said James. "They got nothing better to do than sit around and write legislation."

James has put his finger on another important point: the perverse incentives facing bureaucrats, who get no credit if they never meddle in our peaceful activities.

An old, near-toothless man agreed with James. "I thought they was crazy. I mean, they're [the church people] helping people, and they're trying to stop it."

Rev. Fender added, "They've set up a situation that you have to have a $40,000 kitchen to feed someone who's going to get their food from questionable sources at best." Rev. Kathleen Chesson said her First Christian Church would not obey the rules. "Our agenda is to feed the hungry. We're going to feed the hungry. That's it."

Before I could confront the county officials about this ridiculous situation, the bad publicity had already prompted a reconsideration. "I got up and saw my morning newspaper and was horrified," said Gerry Connolly, who heads the county government. "I think sometimes the rules overpower common sense."

I asked him, What if the health department had been around when Jesus was feeding the poor? "He might have been, you know, cited," Connolly replied with a laugh. So this story has a happy ending: Connolly exempted churches from the regulations. But let's not celebrate.

"Fairfax is stepping back," James said. "They're saying they're not going to enforce it ... for now. This year. What about next year?"

Again, that's a pretty astute analysis. If you catch the attention of the media, you can bask in your government leader's forgiveness. But what about next year, and what about the rest of us who are still stuck with all the rules?

The rules are well-intended. They're meant to make sure the public is safe. But rule-makers tend to forget that their rules have unintended consequences. And, as James pointed out, eating out of dumpsters is more dangerous than eating at a church without a three-compartment sink.

Source



PORTRAIT OF A POPULAR BRITISH ROADSIDE DINER

A rather "correct" portrait but it shows that food "correctness" has a long way to go in Britain. It seems unlikely that even the most gimlet-eyed food fascist will ever be able to defeat British stodge

Oh, the dilemmas of fine dining. Should it be mushy peas or regular? Let's go for the bright green ones. And perhaps a glass of Chenin Blanc to accompany your lunch, sir? Certainly not; the only proper accompaniment to fish and chips is a large mug of tea and a slice of white bread and butter. Of course, sir; the tea will be o1.59 but the bread comes automatically.

This does not feel like an establishment on the brink of collapse. The restaurant is spotless and bright, the staff attentive without being overbearing. The meal comes within five minutes of ordering. It consists of a Himalaya of chips and a haddock the size of a sturgeon, with half a fresh lemon to squeeze over it, all for 6.99 pounds.

Shame about the industrial batter with which it was enrobed in Young's frozen food factory. Still, top marks for the Heinz ketchup and HP Sauce arriving in proper bottles instead of those infuriating little sachets, which never contain enough for those of us hooked on the many derivatives of spirit vinegar.

Are we really in the Little Chef on the A127 in Essex halfway between the East End and Southend, that road of life for the aspiring Cockney? We are, and it is a surprisingly good advertisement for a supposedly failing chain of roadside caffs, a world away from a greasy spoon. Perhaps the weak link is that, on a Wednesday with many motorists returning from New Year breaks, only a dozen of the 60-odd seats are occupied. Mind you, the rather more upmarket pub and restaurant next door isn't much busier.

When Little Chef proposed to slim down the familiar Fat Charlie logo in 2004, there was such an uproar from loyal customers that Charlie stayed fat. But one feature of that attempted revamp towards a healthier image is that menus now include salads and the sausage meat is free-range.

But ordering salad in a Little Chef is like asking for pork scratchings at the Ritz. What the chain does best, and which has silenced carloads of starving children since 1958, is the all-day breakfast. Top of the range, at 6.99 pounds, is the Olympic, built from bacon, sausage, two eggs, mushrooms, saut, potatoes, tomato, fried bread and beans. This may be suitable for a ravenous giant but it is too thrombotic a threat these days to the sedentary and health-conscious. Yet Little Chef claims to sell 13 million sausages and 12 million rashers of bacon a year. Not all to the same driver, of course. They sold some to John Major; the former prime minister famously once stopped to refuel at a Happy Eater, the former sister chain to Little Chef.

When Sam Alper, a caravan manufacturer, opened his first 11-seater Little Chef in Reading 49 years ago, he was aiming for something a cut above the lorry driver's transport caff, and took as his model the informal roadside diners he had seen in the US. The chain had little serious competition for many years, but latterly its market share is thought to have been nibbled away by Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken. If true, this destroys any argument that the motorist has diverted to a healthy-eating route.

A tired image seems to be Little Chef's problem, and personal experience suggests that not all branches are up to the standard of that on the A127. However, the mountain range of french fries went untouched, although the haddock was deep-mined from within its leaden coating. The waiter was most concerned that the meal had not been up to the usual high standard. "Not at all," this diner insisted. "It's just that I've got to squeeze back behind my steering wheel. But I did eat the peas."

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



6 January, 2007

EDUCATION PREDICTS GOOD HEALTH AND LONG LIFE

Of course it does. The elite are educated more and -- as Charles Murray showed years ago -- are elite because they are brighter -- and high IQ is one aspect of good biological functioning. But you won't see THAT mentioned below. There may nonetheless also be a real effect due to education itself -- but, to understand that, one would as a first step have to look at the content of that education. The education of yesteryear probably did inculcate better life habits. All that modern education inculcates in that department is that you must love blacks and homosexuals and do your best to "save the planet"

James Smith, a health economist at the RAND Corporation, has heard a variety of hypotheses about what it takes to live a long life - money, lack of stress, a loving family, lots of friends. But he has been a skeptic. Yes, he says, it is clear that on average some groups in every society live longer than others. The rich live longer than the poor, whites live longer than blacks in the United States. Longevity, in general, is not evenly distributed in the population. But what, he asks, is cause and what is effect? And how can they be disentangled?

He is venturing, of course, into one of the prevailing mysteries of aging, the persistent differences seen in the life spans of large groups. In every country, there is an average life span for the nation as a whole and there are average life spans for different subsets, based on race, geography, education and even churchgoing. But the questions for researchers like Dr. Smith are why? And what really matters?

The answers, he and others say, have been a surprise. The one social factor that researchers agree is consistently linked to longer lives in every country where it has been studied is education. It is more important than race; it obliterates any effects of income. Year after year, in study after study, says Richard Hodes, director of the National Institute on Aging, education "keeps coming up." And, health economists say, those factors that are popularly believed to be crucial - money and health insurance, for example, pale in comparison.

Dr. Smith explains: "Giving people more Social Security income, or less for that matter, will not really affect people's health. It is a good thing to do for other reasons but not for health." Health insurance, too, he says, "is vastly overrated in the policy debate." Instead, Dr. Smith and others say, what may make the biggest difference is keeping young people in school. A few extra years of school is associated with extra years of life and vastly improved health decades later, in old age.

It is not the only factor, of course. There is smoking, which sharply curtails life span. There is a connection between having a network of friends and family and living a long and healthy life. And there is evidence that people with more powerful jobs and, presumably, with more control over their work lives, are healthier and longer lived.

But there is little dispute about the primacy of education. "If you were to ask me what affects health and longevity," says Michael Grossman, a health economist at the City University of New York, "I would put education at the top of my list."

The first rigorous effort to decide whether education really changes people so they live longer began in a most inauspicious way. It was 1999 and a Columbia University graduate student, Adriana Lleras-Muney, was casting about for a topic for her doctoral dissertation in economics. She found an idea in a paper published in 1969. Three economists noted the correlation between education and health and gave some advice: If you want to improve health, you will get more return by investing in education than by investing in medical care.

It had been an inflammatory statement, Dr. Lleras-Muney says. And for good reason. It could only be true if education in and of itself caused good health. But there were at least two other possibilities. Maybe sick children did not go to school, or dropped out early because they were ill. Or maybe education was a proxy for wealth, and it was wealth that led to health. It could be that richer parents who gave their children everything, including better nutrition, better medical care and a better education, had children who, by virtue of being wealthy, lived longer. How, she asked herself, could she sort out causes and effects? It was the chicken-and-egg problem that plagues such research.

The answer came one day when Dr. Lleras-Muney was reading another economics paper. It indicated that about 100 years ago, different states started passing laws forcing children to go to school for longer periods. She knew what to do. "The idea was, when a state changed compulsory schooling from, say, six years to seven years, would the people who were forced to go to school for six years live as long as the people the next year who had to go for seven years," Dr. Lleras-Muney asked. [A non-sequitur: Health throughout the Western world has improved rapidly over the last 100 years or so -- meaning that ANY later year should on average have shown better health than any previous year]

All she would have to do was to go back and find the laws in the different states and then use data from the census to find out how long people lived before and after the law in each state was changed.....

Much more here -- including some conventional but very dubious assertions about influences on health. The article is after all from the paper that publishes "all the news that's fit to slant"



CELEBRITY "SCIENCE"

Madonna, Juliet Stevenson and Lady McCartney have all been singled out for not checking their facts before they speak by a campaign that aims to stamp out bad science.

Sense About Science, a charity that promotes the importance of scientific evidence, warns that celebrities are prone to backing theories and therapies that make no scientific sense and offers them the chance to check their facts first.

It has published a leaflet explaining why some theories promoted by celebrities are wrong and giving a telephone number they can call to be put in contact with experts before getting involved in a campaign.

The leaflet is being sent to luxury hotels, nightclubs and bars, airport lounges and football clubs. In it, the charity points out that Madonna has spoken of the need to develop a means of "neutralising radiation" which is impossible, while Ms Stevenson used the opportunity of her role in a drama about the MMR vaccine to advance the discredited claim that it is not safe.

Lady McCartney and the pressure group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have wrongly claimed that drinking milk is linked to childhood obesity.

David Baddiel, the comedian, Melinda Messenger, the model, and Sharron Davies, the swimmer, were all involved in a campaign by the environmental group WWF about dangerous chemicals in the human body which has been derided by scientists as scaremongering. Toxicologists said that the levels of such chemicals in the body were too insignificant to worry about.

The leaflet also exposes scientific mistakes made by the actors Joanna Lumley and Jenny Seagrove, the lifestyle adviser Carole Caplin and the television presenter Gillian McKeith.

Leading scientists explain why claims are wrong, and encourages celebrities to ring a number to be put in touch with experts who can verify facts.

Tracey Brown, director of Sense About Science, said that nobody expected celebrities to be scientific experts. She said: "We know some people aren't interested in good science or evidence. We are equally sure some will be glad to talk through claims they are asked to front, because they take their impact seriously. But it's not been obvious where to go for that. We are producing this leaflet to show those in the public eye how easy it is now to get help from scientists."

She said that the charity was frequently sent examples of celebrities promoting theories that made no sense. "We have been working out ways for science to be more available," she said. "I think this leaflet is a friendly hand." Some public figures have welcomed the initiative.

Derren Brown, the TV illusionist, said: "We're more than aware that the media prefer a shocking story over delicate fact. In areas like food, environment and medicine, this can have serious results: such as a now dangerously low level of British kids inoculated against MMR following an unfounded media scare.

"Scientists, traditionally a quiet bunch, are now trying to redress the balance and find ways of promoting fact over misinformation."

Simon Singh, the science writer and former presenter of Tomorrow's World who is a trustee of Sense About Science, said: "There are numerous examples of actors or musicians scaremongering over vaccines or pesticides when they have little or no knowledge of the subject.

"Celebrities can have a huge influence on the public, but they need to make sure they are doing more good than harm by checking their facts before making any proclamations."

Professor John Toy, of Cancer Research UK, said: "Celebrities often have a real effect on how members of the public view particular issues, especially health and lifestyle. They have a major responsibility, therefore, to be well-informed before they make statements endorsing particular treatments or products."

Source



Brits still snacking naughtily: "While there has been a large increase in the sale of feelgood foods, such as yoghurts and smoothies, there is no sign of the nation giving up its snack habits, such as crisps, for good. The two fastest-growing products of the year will not please the health police as tastes for individual Goodfella's Solo pizzas and Magners cider topped the chart. The annual top products survey is produced by The Grocer magazine."

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

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



5 January, 2007

Make mine a happy meal, thanks

I pointed out the positive role of McDonalds in hospitals on Dec. 20th., 2006 here so I was pleased to see the realistic Australian article below. Referring to campaigns to get McDonalds out of hospitals, I said: "The fact that for many people the McDonalds is the most comforting and reassuring part of a hospital does not matter, of course. The do-gooders must have a demon to attack"



I CAN'T say I ever pictured myself as a fervent spokesman for McDonald's, but I can say anyone jumping on the bandwagon to save us from Maccas at the Royal Children's Hospital has never had a child who needs treatment there.

There is an old saying that there is good in everything and that one only has to look hard enough to find it. Unfortunately, for us, it is staring us right in the face. My daughter has been an outpatient at the RCH nearly all of her life for a seemingly endless stream of EEGs, ECGs and MRIs. On the morning of our regular visits the conversation usually goes like this:

Can I take dolly to kinder today for show and tell?

Sorry darling, but you have to go to the hospital today.

Oh.

Can I have a Happy Meal?

Of course, darling.

Yay! What a difference the promise of three nuggets, a small chips, a bottle of water and two bobs worth of a toy promoting the latest kids' movie can make. It's the chasm between having a terrified child in the car who is crying that they don't want to go and one who can't wait to get there. To a parent this is absolute priceless gold.

On the occasions I have to work and our daughter requires a protracted procedure, it also provides a place where my wife can sit and have a coffee while our little bloke has a swing on the monkey bars. So he's happy to go, too. Job done all around.

To write off Ronald McDonald House as merely a clever marketing tool does not give any credit to the contribution that has been made, or the hope given to the people who have had to avail themselves of this centre. Our hearts go out to them.

Yes, obesity is a problem. But there are many ways to tackle it. This current posturing only serves to remove a tiny oasis of joy for people who are in a desert of misery. Most of whom are far worse off than our personal situation. So on behalf of those parents that have had, have now, or will have children that need to attend the RCH, we ask the nobly intentioned to turn their focus to issues that do not involve wiping the smiles from the faces of sick kiddies.

Source



All pregnant women should get Down syndrome test?

Sounds reasonable

There's a big change coming for pregnant women: Down syndrome testing no longer hinges on whether they're older or younger than 35. This week, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists begins recommending that every pregnant woman, regardless of age, be offered a choice of tests for this common birth defect. The main reason: Tests far less invasive than the long-used amniocentesis are now widely available, some that can tell in the first trimester the risk of a fetus having Down syndrome or other chromosomal defects. It's a change that promises to decrease unnecessary amnios - giving mothers-to-be peace of mind without the ordeal - while also detecting Down syndrome in moms who otherwise would have gone unchecked. The new guideline is published in the January issue of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

About one in 800 babies has Down syndrome, a condition where having an extra chromosome causes mental retardation, a characteristic broad, flat face and small head and, often, serious heart defects. Age 35 was always a somewhat arbitrary threshhold for urging mothers-to-be to seek testing. Yes, the older women are, the higher their risk of having a baby with Down syndrome. But it's a gradual increase in risk - from one in 1,200 at age 25 to about one in 300 at age 35. Nothing suddenly changes at the 35th birthday. Indeed, because more babies are born to younger women than older ones, women under 35 actually give birth to most of the nation's children with Down syndrome.

"It's clear there's no magic jump at 35," said Dr. James Goldberg of San Francisco Perinatal Associates, a member of the ACOG committee that developed the guideline. "We've done away with age 35 because the screening tests have gotten much better."

It's not just a question of whether to continue the pregnancy. Prenatal diagnosis also is important for those who wouldn't consider abortion, because babies with Down syndrome can need specialized care at delivery that affects hospital selection, he added.

The original age-35 trigger was chosen years ago when doctors had less information about the risk of Down syndrome, and the only choice for prenatal detection was an amnio, using a needle to draw fluid from the amniotic sac, he said. Amnios are highly accurate but were reserved for women at higher risk of an affected pregnancy because they occasionally cause miscarriage. A study this fall put the miscarriage risk at one in 1,600 pregnancies, far lower than previous estimates.

Also today, women have more options. Doctors already frequently offer younger women blood tests that don't definitively diagnose Down syndrome like an amnio or a similar invasive test called chorionic villus sampling - but that can signal who's at higher risk. The newest method, topping ACOG's recommendation for everyone, is a first-trimester screening that combines blood tests with a simple ultrasound exam, called a "nuchal translucency test" to measure the thickness of the back of the fetal neck. Studies from England, where the nuchal translucency combo has been used for about a decade, and the U.S. conclude that screening method is more than 80% accurate, with a very small risk of falsely indicating Down syndrome in a healthy fetus. It is performed between 11 and 13 weeks into pregnancy, and women are usually given numerical odds of carrying an affected fetus. A woman determined to be high risk then still has time for an invasive test to tell for sure.

Women who don't seek prenatal care until the second trimester can still undergo blood tests known as the triple or quadruple screens. The guideline also says women of any age can choose to skip the screening and go straight for invasive testing, an approach that might appeal to those with chromosomal defects in the family. "This new recommendation makes a lot of sense," said Dr. Nancy Green of the March of Dimes. "Maternal age no longer plays such an important role because the screening is better."

Each test comes with pros and cons, and the new guideline advises doctors to check what's available in their communities - nuchal translucency testing isn't easy to get everywhere - and discuss the best options with each patient.

Source



Bioengineered cows 'resist mad cow disease'

The Greenies and their ilk will have a knee-jerk hatred of this

US and Japanese scientists say they have used genetic engineering to produce cattle that resist mad cow disease. They hope the cattle can be the source of herds that can provide dairy products, gelatin and other products free of the brain-destroying disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE. Writing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, the researchers said their cattle were healthy at the age of 20 months, and sperm from the males made normal embryos that were used to impregnate cows, although it is not certain yet that they could breed normally.

The cattle lack the nervous system prions, a type of protein, that cause BSE and other related diseases such as scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, known as CJD, in humans, the researchers said. "(Prion-protein-negative) cattle could be a preferred source of a wide variety of bovine-derived products that have been extensively used in biotechnology, such as milk, gelatin, collagen, serum and plasma," they wrote in their report.

Yoshimi Kuroiwa of Kirin Brewery Co in Tokyo, Japan and colleagues made the cattle, known as knockouts because a specific gene has been "knocked" out of them, using a method they call gene targeting. "By knocking out the prion protein gene and producing healthy calves, our team has successfully demonstrated that normal cellular prion protein is not necessary for the normal development and survival of cattle. The cows are now nearly 2 years old and are completely healthy," said James Robl of Hematech, a South Dakota subsidiary of Kirin. "We anticipate that prion protein-free cows will be useful models to study prion disease processes in both animals and humans," Robl, an expert in cloning technology, said in a statement.

Misfolded prion proteins are blamed for BSE and other, similar brain diseases. It is known that certain genetic variations make animals more susceptible to the diseases.

BSE swept through British herds in the 1980s and people began developing an odd, early-onset form of CJD called variant CJD or vCJD a few years later. CJD normally affects one in a million people globally, usually the elderly, as it has a long incubation period. There is no cure and it is always fatal.

As of November 2006, 200 vCJD patients were reported worldwide, including 164 patients in Britain, 21 in France, 4 in the Republic of Ireland, 3 in the United States, 2 in the Netherlands and 1 each in Canada, Italy, Japan, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and Spain. The disease may have first started to infect cattle when they were fed improperly processed remains of sheep, possibly sheep infected with scrapie. Although people are not known to have ever caught scrapie from eating sheep, BSE can be transmitted to humans. BSE occasionally occurs in cattle outside Britain although it is now rare.

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



4 January, 2007

Food fanatics impossible to satirize

I have had satirical comments about the evils of cheese and butter at the bottomn of each day's postings here for some time now. But reality has caught up with me. Even cheese (and lots of other mainstream stuff) is now under attack in the Unhinged Kingdom. Have they gone too far this time?



New advertising rules that will officially label cheese as "junk food" were condemned yesterday by the dairy industry as unfair, misleading and counter-productive. Under regulations coming into force this month, broadcasters will be banned from advertising cheese during children's television programmes or in shows with a large proportion of child viewers, such as The Simpsons and Hollyoaks. The ban is part of a government drive to crack down on junk food adverts on television, which is designed to reduce the exposure of children to foods high in fat, salt and sugar. It follows evidence that TV commercials have an indirect impact on children's eating behaviour and are contributing to the obesity epidemic.

However, the dairy industry says the rules, which are being introduced by the television regulator Ofcom, are a nonsense. Under the nutrient profiling model used to distinguish junk food from "healthy" food, cheese is officially labelled as more unhealthy than sugary cereals, cheeseburgers, double chocolate chip cake and full fat crisps. The industry points out that if breast milk were covered by the rules, it too would be classed as junk food.

Dan Rogerson, the Liberal Democrat MP for North Cornwall, who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cheese, branded the model as "simplistic and counter-productive". He said: "How preposterous that Ofcom restrictions should be based on a model so flawed as to take cheese off the air, while diet cola, which has no nutritional value whatever, is left firmly on children's menus. It has to be perverse that while milk may be advertised, a wholesome product made from milk - cheese - cannot."

Ofcom published its draft conclusions on junk food adverts in November and is expected to release its final report within weeks. Its initial report went much further than expected. It proposed banning the advertising of all foods classified as high in fat, salt and sugar during programmes made for children under 16, on dedicated children's channels and during programmes with a higher than average proportion of child viewers. However, the ban only covered specific foods, not brands. So while McDonald's cannot advertise burgers during children's programmes, it could promote its restaurants.

The rules also proposed a ban on cartoon characters for adverts aimed at primary school age children shown at any time of the day. The most controversial part of the proposals is the use of the nutrient profiling model drawn up by the Food Standards Agency. The model assesses the fat, sugar and salt content in a 100g or 100ml serving of a food or drink - rather than a typical serving.

The food industry says the use of the FSA model has led to anomalies. Tomato ketchup, for instance, contains a high proportion of sugar and salt and is counted as a high fat, salt and sugar food - even though most people only eat a small amount with a meal. Marmite, which contains 11 per cent salt, is also counted as junk food - even though most people eat only a few grams on bread.

The British Cheese Board says the typical portion size of cheese is 30g to 40g, the size of a small matchbox, not the 100g used in the FSA nutrient profiling model. If a typical portion sized was used in the model, most cheese would be exempt from the ban, it says. Nigel White, a spokesman for the board, said: "Cheese is one of the most nutritionally complete foods and can play an important part of a healthy balanced diet for children of all ages."

Source

Foods caught by the junk food ban:

Marmite, Flora Lite, half-fat cheddar cheese, Dairylea triangles, bran flakes, camembert, sugar-coated puffed wheat, instant hot oat cereal, Jaffa cakes, reduced calorie mayonnaise, multi-grain hoop cereal, half-fat creme fraiche, takeaway chicken nuggets, potato waffles, Greek yoghurt (sheep), ham, sausages, bacon rashers, low-fat spreads, peanuts, cashew nuts, pistachio nuts, peanut butter, raisins, sultanas, currants, low-fat potato crisps, olive oil, butter, pizza, hamburgers, tomato ketchup, chocolate, brown sauce, cola, lemonade



Most lethal killer found



Scientists believe they have captured the most lethal creature on the planet in north Queensland. The tiny but deadly irukandji jellyfish is believed responsible for killing American tourist Robert King off Port Douglas five years ago.

In a piece of detective work worthy of Hercule Poirot, stinger expert Lisa-Ann Gershwin has spent years scouring north Queensland waters for the highly venomous and near-invisible culprit. Her breakthrough came on New Year's Day when the previously unknown, peanut-sized creature, trailing four tentacles, ghosted under her spotlight about 8pm off the jetty at Mission Beach. Comparing stinger cells taken from Mr King at Cairns Hospital in 2002 with the newly-discovered species, researchers found a perfect match.

"This is the killer," Dr Gershwin said. "We knew it existed but we have never before captured one live and healthy. These are a wicked, highly venomous, dangerous animal, that drop for drop are the most lethal on the planet."

The high-profile death of Mr King off Port Douglas in 2002 sent shockwaves through the state's multimillion-dollar tourism industry and led to a taskforce to investigate the little known irukandji. Irukandji syndrome, caused by other species of the tiny jellyfish, is known to cause excruciating back pain, sweating, and nausea, but until the 2002 incident, not death. "We know almost nothing about these animals," Dr Gershwin said. "But now, with this new specimen, we can start to find out more."

Source



Hot water best for jellyfish sting

Hot water is the most effective way to relieve the pain of a jellyfish sting, a study has found. Doctors and medical students at Busselton Hospital in Western Australia purposefully stung themselves with jellyfish to compare four popular treatments - ice, vinegar, aluminium sulfate and hot water. "Hot water was the only successful treatment, relieving 88 per cent of the pain," the team wrote in the latest Medical Journal of Australia. "Other treatments were incomplete and temporary."

They said that sting patients treated with hot water at about 45C got "significant" pain relief in 4-10 minutes, and the heat also appeared to stop inflammation. "There is an urgent need for knowledge of this simple remedy to be spread," said study author, Dr John Taylor. "And there is the potential that it could even be lifesaving when used with more serious jellyfish stings in the north of Australia."

Source

The original journal article is here. The treatment seems to work for a variety of jellyfish species and even other marine toxins

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

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



3 January, 2007

FAT POLITICS

"It began with Ethnic Studies, which, even if you don't approve of them, at least contain some fragments of actual history and sociology. Then our universities opened themselves to Women's Studies, closely followed by Queer Studies, then Disability Studies. If you think that has exhausted the possibilities for giving claims of victimhood their own college departments, professors, and budgets, you have underestimated the ingenuity and ambition of the grievance industry.

Get ready for Fat Studies. Yes: Fat activism, which goes back at least to the 1960s, has at last attained academic standing. The University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee is offering a course titled "The Social Construction of Obesity." There is no such thing as being fat, you see; "fatness" is just a figment. Nor is there any substance to claims by "scientists" that "obesity" is "linked" to diabetes, hypertension, or heart disease. Those are just ploys by the oppressive power structure to perpetuate discrimination against ...

Well, you get the idea. "Fat scholars" (sic-we are quoting here from the New York Times) "hope that one day fat studies will be as ubiquitous on campus as Shakespeare." It is at any rate a relief to know that the Bard-who had his own, mostly fond, opinions of fat people-has not yet been crowded out of the college curriculum by these faddy, bogus new "studies."

More here



US hospitals boost effort to kill resistant bugs

As infections that patients pick up in hospitals grow increasingly resistant to antibiotics, US facilities are turning to more aggressive measures. This includes a "search and destroy" approach borrowed from Europe.

Each year staph infections and other powerful bugs that thrive in hospitals kill 90,000 people and result in $US4.5 billion ($A5.8 billion) in excess costs, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). A study published earlier this month in the American Journal of Medical Quality found hospitals lost $US27,000 ($A35,000) for each patient who gets a preventable infection there. Insurers reimburse many hospital stays by the diagnosis rather than per day, and payment drops off the longer patients stay in the hospital. "A lot of hospital administrators don't realise how expensive these infections are," said Lance Peterson, head of epidemiology at Evanston Northwestern Hospital, located outside Chicago. However, the costs have not escaped the notice of the government and private insurers that collectively fund most of the $US2 trillion ($A2.5 trillion) US health-care tab.

Antibiotic resistant strains, or "super bugs", now account for about two-thirds of infections associated with health care. Vancomycin is most often used to treat the stubborn infections, but some have become resistant to the antibiotic.

Betsy McCaughey, founder of the non-profit Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, said most evidence showed that three steps could dramatically cut infection deaths in hospitals. But she said most US facilities were not implementing these practices - meticulous hand-washing between procedures, cleaning equipment between patient use, and identifying infected people before they enter the hospital. "About 90 per cent of patients treated in a hospital know well ahead of time they will be admitted, and can be tested in a doctor's office a week before," McCaughey said.

The CDC suggests that hospitals screen high-risk patients, such as those with weak immune systems, but does not recommend testing all patients for infection. That leaves hospitals to experiment with myriad approaches, resulting in a lack of consistency, experts said. In fact, big for-profit chains like Tenet Healthcare Corp and Triad Hospitals leave policies on handling infections up to local administrators.

Evanston Northwestern, affiliated with Northwestern University and part of a small local network, is one of a handful of US hospitals to implement "universal surveillance" - testing every patient that walks in the door for an infection. When it gets a positive result, it isolates the patient, gives him or her a powerful antibiotic, and requires all people going into the room to wear gowns and gloves. For every patient with an untreated infection, four or five start carrying it in their nose, Northwestern's Peterson said. The hospital's "search and destroy" approach steals a page from some European countries like the Netherlands, where hospital-acquired infections are rare.

A key component of Evanston's effort is Becton Dickinson & Co's new gene-based test, which gives results in a few hours, compared to a few days with an older product. About 160 of the 5,000 US hospitals use the test, up from 60 a few months ago. But some experts question whether the rapid gene-based test is more cost-effective than the older - and much cheaper - culture-based version that takes a few days to interpret.

Robert Weinstein, a doctor at Chicago's Cook County hospital and the recipient of a CDC grant to study the issue, said the new test needed peer-reviewed data to support widespread use. Tenet spokesman Steven Campanini said the company did not deem the test as essential. Each test costs about $US25 ($A33), and the equipment needed to run it costs about $US30,000 ($A40,000). If hospitals don't want to make that capital investment, there are leasing and other payment options.

McCaughey says the test is definitely preferred for emergency patients who can't be tested ahead of time, but does not make the old test obsolete for other patients. "It is easier to use," she said. "If you don't have a rapid test, you have to isolate the patient until the test comes back."

Meanwhile, public and private insurers are employing both a carrot and a stick to push hospitals to make changes. On a national level, the US government is considering halting payments for avoidable infections to patients on Medicare, the federal health insurance program for about 43 million elderly and disabled. Illinois, Pennsylvania and a handful of other states require reporting infection rates, and about two dozen others are considering a mandate. States fund health care through the Medicaid insurance program for the nation's 53 million needy.

In Illinois, private insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield is giving Evanston Northwestern a bonus payment of about 10 per cent for avoided infections. Many insurers are also "trying to ratchet down the payments" for the preventable infections, Peterson said. In Texas, about two dozen hospitals in the Blue Cross Blue Shield network agreed to use a software tracking system that seeks to identify the infections, made by Cardinal Health. The insurer shares the cost with each hospital, and the hospital must share the results with the insurer, said Rick Haddock, senior director of special programs of Blue Cross of Texas. "We're trying to find a better mousetrap," he said, adding that the effort has saved $US1.6 million ($A2 million) and prevented 326 infections over several years.

Source

Update:

The full name of the Evanston institution is "Evanston Northwestern Healthcare".

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

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



2 January, 2007

PROGRESS IN TREATING DIABETES AND ITS EFFECTS

Notes from a diabetic

The first breakthrough, one I didn't predict, is a drug, called Metanx (pronounced, stupidly enough, "MET-an-ex" when it obviously should be "met-TANKS"). My doctor tells me it's acquiring a reputation for reversing diabetic neuropathy, something I'd thought impossible. Let me assure you it ain't. I have some hope it might even deal with a special kind of neuropathy, retinopathy, which is what you call it when diabetics slowly go blind.

The breakthrough I did predict, I called the "Bassett coil", after the doctor who invented it. I read about it in 1977 in the National Inquirer, believe it or not. Despite the source, the story seemed credible, so when a badly shot-up Win Bear, hero of The Probability Broach, wakes up in Ed Bear's home, being treated by Healer Clarissa MacDougall Olson, he has these "Bassett coils" fastened all over his body....

The idea behind the coils, as I understood it way back then, is that electromagnetic fields can be used to encourage and control calcium ion deposition in the human body. Bassett's invention was seen as a way to help old people with broken bones heal faster-when they weren't healing at all without this treatment. I had a good family friend who had to have her femur surgically removed because it wasn't healing and finally infected, so I understood very well what's at stake. It turned out that the primary use to which this progress was put was in the rapid healing of professional sports injuries-nothing to sneer at, since professional sports ends up financing a lot of medical progress....

The bone stimulator is ultrasonic, rather than electronic, and one thing it accomplishes is to increase circulation drastically, it says here, while stimulating various complex features on the membranes of individual cells. It's a little black plastic disc held in place with a Velcro strap, and there's a lead to a small box about the size of an overly thick PDA. The only sensation I can associate with it is of an increased warmth, although any pain I was feeling is now gone, along with a sense of strain and distention that was bothersome and sort of ominous....

Although it's difficult to imagine anything much spiffier coming to pass than the bone stimulator, the really big news this holiday season-a Christmas present of inestimable proportion, from Canadian science to all sixteen million of us-is that diabetes has been cured. Completely. Irrevocably. In mice.

This has to do with a previously unknown effect that pain neurons have in the Islets of Langerhans. No, these are not Danish coastal features, but the parts of the pancreas that produce insulin, the lack of which constitutes Type I diabetes. It seems these naughty neurons secrete an enzyme, or cause it to be secreted, that shut the islets off. But the neurons can be shut off, themselves, by judicious use of capsaicum, the stuff that makes chilis hot. Some other enzyme is then administered to the pancreas that turns the islets back on, and the diabetic organism-as I said, only mice, so far-are through with Glucophage, glypizide, blood tests, insulin injections, and can eat all the buttery mashed potatos, Mexican food, and chocolate cake they want. Merry Chistmas, mice!

What's more, for reasons that are so far completely unknown, the capsaicum treatment appears to work on Type II diabetes-which in many ways has always seemed like a completely different disease-as well. How soon this will get to people, I can't say. Not soon enough. If I weren't diabetic, I could look forward to living another 30 or 40 years without pain, and in tolerable good health-long enough to die of cancer, anyway. If the government-induced delay extends the process by even a microsecond, then it's time to abolish the FDA once and for all.

Source



British ad ban takes big bite out of Burger King

Burger King, the world's second largest fast-food chain, estimates that the ban on children's advertising could cost it up to 100 million pounds in lost UK sales next year. The prediction came as the company's new management in the UK vowed to fight regulatory interference and a declining fast-food market. Giorgio Minardi, the company's head of north west Europe, in his first UK interview, said: "Advertising is a key part of our drive to get kids and families into our restaurants. It will have a major impact on our top line."

His comments come less than a week after Burger King aired its last advert aimed at children - an advert promoting penguin toys based on the hit animated film Happy Feet.

Mr Minardi, a former senior McDonald's executive, joined its arch rival earlier this year and is leading an almost entirely new team in the UK, vowing to turn around the struggling fast-food chain. "There is life yet in the burger," he said. Like McDonald's, Burger King has suffered from the relentless competition on the high street and the change in consumers' habits. One of his first decisions was to end adverts aimed at children, before regulators enforced any ban, outmanoeuvring many of his competitors.

He and his new head of marketing David Kisilevsky, have also, controversially, heavily promoted its calorific Double Whopper burgers. Mr Kisilevsky said: "People are starting to get a little bit fed up with the nanny state intrusion in our lives. It was important for Burger King to come out in a light-hearted way and say there is nothing wrong to partake in your love of a great burger."

Burger King spends about 10m a year on advertising, with traditionally a third of that geared towards children. Mr Minardi said that once the children's adverts stop airing the turnover will be hit "without doubt by approximately 10 to 15pc."

The company, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, does not split out sales from individual countries but market research firm Euromonitor estimates that Burger King in the UK generated sales of 693m in 2004. Though sales are forecast to have fallen since then, the impact on sales could therefore be 100m in a worst-case scenario. This is a far higher figure than most in the industry are prepared to predict. Ofcom estimates that the lost advertising revenue to broadcasters will be 39m when the ban comes into force next year. However, the regulator never calculated the possible lost revenue to the UK fast-food industry, reckoned to be worth 13bn in annual sales.

Mr Kisilevsky said he was confident the hit could be partly offset: "We are redeploying some of our advertising spend to focus that on to families." Mr Minardi confirmed that the company would continue to sell toys in its restaurants. "There's nothing wrong with our kids meals, and the toys are part of that experience. We're not going to take them out. What we're not going to do is target kids directly." He added that, after years of decline, sales in the UK were now in positive territory thanks to the launch of the Aberdeen Angus beef burger, which has been a hit with its diners

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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

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



1 January, 2007

"DETOX" NONSENSE

It has been a gluttonous few weeks. The parties, the chocolates, the mince pies - all capped with that 6,000-calorie Christmas Day feast. A January detox sounds sensible. A chance to purge those toxins, burn away the flab and give our furred arteries a well earned break.

Millions of us will be making just such a resolve today as we prepare for New Year's Eve and one last night of hedonistic indulgence. If, however, you are thinking of joining that bandwagon then you may be about to suffer in vain. After sponsoring one of the biggest nutritional research programmes of its kind, the BBC is set to debunk the notion of detoxing, together with a list of other food myths.

"The detox diet idea is nonsense," said Nigel Denby, a dietician at Queen Charlotte's hospital in west London, who worked on the BBC's detox experiment. "Our research has confirmed what medics have long suspected: that our bodies are extremely efficient machines for doing all the detoxing needed and they don't need much extra help."

The BBC's six-part series The Truth About Food will set out the results of dozens of scientific experiments commissioned to test popular beliefs about food. Can, for example, foods really make you feel sexy? Some can, it appears - but not the ones you might think. (Forget oysters and chocolate, think garlic instead.)

The new series, supported with a book, is not the only thing that will keep food in the headlines throughout January. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is also to hit the airwaves with advertisements promoting its traffic light labelling system for packaged foods. The voluntary system, which puts a red warning blob on foods that are high in fat, salt or sugar is driving junk food retailers and manufacturers such as Tesco, Kellogg's and Nestl to distraction. They are expected to launch their own television counter-blast.

Neville Rigby, policy director at the International Obesity Task Force, said: "The labelling of food has been confusing consumers for too long. The FSA's new traffic light system is the first attempt to give consumers clear, simple information that they can use to make simple decisions about which foods to buy. It would give consumers an easy way of spotting foods that are high in fat, salt or sugar - and that is why the industry is so set against it. It will be a hard-fought battle."

All this comes as Ofcom, the communications regulator, is preparing to implement its long discussed ban on television advertising for junk food before the 9pm watershed. That could see advertisements for up to 75% of breakfast cereals and other products aimed at children being taken off the air.

Source



PROMISING NEW IVF METHOD

Women who have difficulty conceiving will be able to benefit from a new method of IVF that is cheaper and safer than conventional fertility treatments, doctors say. Clinical trials in Denmark have shown that a pioneering technique known as in-vitro maturation (IVM) has a success rate of 30 per cent, comparable to standard IVF procedures. The patient, however, does not have to take expensive fertility drugs that can carry serious side-effects.

With conventional IVF doctors stimulate the release of mature eggs using hormone drugs and collect them during a woman's monthly cycle before fertilising them in the laboratory with a man's sperm. The IVM method involves taking undeveloped eggs from ovaries and maturing them in the laboratory before fertilisation, while using hardly any drugs or no drugs at all.

More than 400 healthy babies have so far been born to women using the technique, which could reduce the cost of fertility treatment by up to half and give thousands more women the chance to conceive. Professor Svend Lindenberg, a Danish scientist who has helped more than 1,000 women become pregnant using IVM, told a London fertility conference that the process had now achieved "stunning results". "We have demonstrated that it is possible to take an egg and fertilise it without having to use the heavy-duty drug approach," he said. "We are achieving results that are better than nature and as good as high-stimulation IVF, without the risk of potentially life-threatening ovarian hyperstimulation and, of course, saving thousands of pounds per cycle in the cost of drugs."

Professor Lindenberg, who works at the Nordica Fertility Centre in Copenhagen, explained: "We give a very low dose of a stimulating drug for three days early in the cycle and rescue up to ten eggs. For the first 24 hours a tiny amount of stimulating hormone is added to the culture, in fact one hundreth of the dose the woman would receive, and after that the eggs go on to mature in the culture alone."

Under present IVF methods many women have been reluctant to donate their eggs for IVF because the drugs they must take can lead to life-threatening complications and an increased risk of cancer.

The demand for donor eggs is huge - potential recipients outnumber donors by two to one in Britain. In Denmark the move to IVM has been driven by women who are reluctant to take drugs, often because the problem lies with the male partner and not themselves, Professor Lindenberg said.

The technique is not suitable for all women; it works best in those who are under 37 years of age, have regular cycles or polycystic ovary syndrome, where women frequently fail to ovulate naturally. "This is part of a worldwide move against high-dose stimulation IVF," Professor Lindenberg said. There was now no excuse to continue giving women high dosages of stimulation to the detriment of their health and their financial and emotional wellbeing.

IVM has previously been successful in creating animal embryos but the process has only recently been tried on human eggs. It was originally developed by Bob Edwards who, with Patrick Steptoe, were resposible for Louise Brown, the world's first IVF baby. It has been made easier by the development of finer needles to aspirate the eggs from an ovary and new scanning techniques that now show doctors the best follicles to select when seeking eggs to remove.

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? It is just about pure fat. Surely it 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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