More from Ted. Following my triumph at posting the Dawkins video link, I’m following up with another. I’m posting this video link because I’ve never seen anyone express such perfect good sense about food. It’s Mark Bittman on what’s wrong with what we eat.
This is something on the blog for those people who come here looking for “5 fruit and veg” posts.
In an Olympic event for the dumbest so-called experts, food experts would probably get a gold.
According to this story, in the Guardian and elsewhere, they can’t tell their stir-fried arses from their lightly fricasseed elbows.
How bad for you is coleslaw?
In the light of a Food Commission report showing that a large pot of KFC coleslaw contains 22.4g of fat – more than its fillet burger (15.6g) or large fries (19.4g) – it is perhaps reasonable to wonder that if a mix of shredded cabbage, carrot and mayonnaise isn’t a healthy option, what on earth is?
…..
A survey of leading nutrition and obesity experts bears this out, with none of the 66 specialists capable of telling from a menu description which item was the least healthy option.
Firstly, what is “healthy” in the context of food. Surely, short of actually putting poison in your mouth, all food is only “healthy” in terms of what it contributes to your overall diet. Cabbage and carrot have obviously got less protein and more vitamins and anti-oxidants than a burger, no matter how much fat they are sitting in. What’s “healthier” – protein or vitamins? You can’t live on either, by itself.
Secondly, why is it assumed that fat is automatically unhealthy? There are several kinds of fat – saturated, unsaturated, monosaturates (or something like that. I’ve forgotten the other kinds but, then, it’s not me who’s supposed to be the nutrition expert, ffs.) Whether any given one is essential or dangerous seems to be a matter of fashion.
The type of fat in the coleslaw isn’t likely to be the same as the types of fat in the burger or on the fries. The body of a person who wasn’t getting enough to eat would probably be well served by any of them. Fat can surely only be considered unhealthy for those of us who are already overweight and got that way by taking in too much fat, over a long time. But the experts are just taking it that any fat is “bad” and, by definition, unhealthy for everyone.
But my main quarrel with this is its bloody stupidity. Let’s temporarily assume for the sake of argument that all fat is by definition bad.
Do I have to take it that 66 “leading nutrition and obesity” experts really don’t know that coleslaw is made with mayonnaise. And don’t know that mayonnaise is made from oil and vinegar and egg yolks. Please note, that’s oil. (Don’t make me post a mayo recipe here.)
A bit more from the Guardian, making me wonder how people can really be this stupid about something so important to survival as food.
Confusion often stems from nutritional truth running contrary to accepted food wisdom. After all, surely vegetarian options are healthier? Not if you choose the Subway Veggie Patty Sub, which has more calories than either the steak and cheese sub, or the turkey, ham, bacon and cheese sub. Salads healthier than burgers? Not if you pick the McDonald’s crispy chicken and bacon salad, which has 15g of fat per portion, almost twice as much fat as a simple hamburger (8g)
I’m a vegetarian but I don’t assume vegetarian food was “healthier” and certainly not in this novel sense of “healthier” as meaning only “having less fat and/or fewer calories.” I have been on the planet long enough to know that food is “vegetarian” in the sense of “not being made from meat.” (Any other use of the word is usually a marketing tool.)
Which is a “healthier” lunch – a pile of candy or a steak? Here’s a clue. The candy is vegetarian.
Which has less fat – a cupful of olive oil or a plate of fried chicken and chips? (That’s french fries to you, Americans.) No matter how much we have been brainwashed into assuming that fried chicken and chips are “bad” for us, because they contain fat, I think you’ll find that olive oil wins this competition.
What about “Salads healthier than burgers? Not if you pick the McDonald’s crispy chicken and bacon salad.” This is confusing the definition of a salad – raw vegetables – with a labelled dish that has the name salad in its title but contains “chicken” and “bacon”, not normally considered raw vegetables the last time I checked.
The Guardian writer’s argument here is in support of the Food Commission’s aim to have nutritional information available for all foods at the point of sale, just as it is on supermarket foods.
This would be a rather more convincing argument if the “nutrition experts” knew enough about food to be aware that mayonnaise is made from oil, hence would recognise that any product swimming in mayo will have a high fat content.
Experiment:
To live on foods without any packaging
Background:
We are often told that landfill is all our fault for using plastic shopping bags. I did the decent thing and bought a linen shopping bag. But
None of my efforts at recycling are much use. On the sink top, there are a dozen slightly smelly jars and bottles that never made it to the correct recycling container on the right day. My compost heap is just a pile of rat-bait at the edge of the yard, appreciated only by the feral cat that turns up once a week. My pile of old Guardians and free bus-papers doesn’t have a proper collectible green plastic bag to store it in, so it’s just a fire hazard/burglar trap behind the front door.
Basically, inept recycling is changing my home into a transitional garbage dump. Too concerned about landfill to throw anything out. Too lazy to spend an hour a day on sorting, washing and packing trash for recycling.
The alternative plan is to avoid packaging. This won’t work with clothes or new electrical items. (Cutting down on buying them would help. But, I can generally rely on my income to do this for me, all by itself.) But food, surely I can do it with food.
Method:
I decided to try and eat only unpackaged foods that I can just drop into my non-plastic bag and carry home in their natural state. Blimey, there’s not much there. The list seems to come down to two things:
Firstly, you can’t get fruit and vegetables from a supermarket. Even supermarket bananas are wrapped in plastic.
Secondly, it seems you have to concentrate on buying BIG foods. The shopkeeper is getting a bit irked when he has to collect together individual item groups, from a jumble of mushrooms, peppers and tomatoes, for weighing. Yams are ideal. (No, yams are a bad idea – transport miles – carbon footprint… Plus, buying up the staple food crops of the poor countries is not very defensible.) Well, big potatoes, then. Bananas are good – intrinsically well-wrapped and big enough to handle. (No, wait. Transport costs, staple foods in poor countries, etc. Big fruit corporations.)
OK, local potatoes, it is. By an uncanny stroke of luck, I live close to one of the few shops left that actually sells cheap,tasty locally-grown potatoes. But this could become a diet of Potato Famine- like consequences, if I’m to be stuck eating only potatoes. Oh, and onions. Cauliflowers. Broccoli. Apples. Peas. And a few other fruits and vegetables that can get tipped into my bag, however irritating it is for the lad behind the counter to weigh things that aren’t in handy plastic bags. (Berries are out. Grapes may be OK, if I can collect a big bunch all linked together.)
(Should easily achieve the 5-pieces-of-fruit-and-veg a day goal, however spurious its scientific basis. Then again, potatoes don’t count.)
Bread. Bah, there aren’t any local bakeries for miles. Can walk a mile to the supermarket and get a loaf there, though, from the instore “bakery.”
Eggs. There are still a few places that sell loose eggs. Buying eggs in an unpackaged state involves a dedicated egg-shopping trip, so as to avoid making an uncooked omelette in the increasingly filthy canvas advert-bag. Bugger, I have to boil or poach them, not having worked out a way to get oil back in my bare hands.
Butter. Cheese. Milk. No, can’t have them. Argh. How am I supposed to eat the spuds, without butter? Well, OK, then, fair enough. Veganism does always seem so much more definite and determined than my wishy-washy vegetarianism. (They would have to force those soya abomination foods into my cold dead mouth, though.)
Hmm, that’s it then. I won’t last long on this diet, I suspect. I’ll have to broaden it out a bit.
Extend the acceptably-edible categories of packaged food to include things with reusable packaging. Re-usable, not recyclable. (I’ve already said how crap I am at recycling.)
Cheese is back on the menu. w00t! The shop sells an Arabic soft cheese that comes in a drinking glass. (Even saving the packaging that a bought drinking glass would have. And increasing my store of guest cutlery by 100%.)
Nutella – also comes in a drinking glass.
There’s a SUMA peanut butter spread that comes in a huge hard plastic tub with a metal handle that makes a perfectly adequate plant pot (that I could use to grow some small food crop in, like a couple of radishes. If I buy soil and seeds. But they would both be packaged 🙁 )
Result:
Bread with spread. Some fruit. Some vegetables.
(Much more food than millions of people get. Way too limited for my pampered western self.)
The point:
Nothing, really. Just thinking about the absurdity of trying to change the world through our own individual consumption patterns, but, still remembering that we do make choices in the little things.
Sorry. Move to another post if you expect this to be about absurdities that the US military feeds its troops.
The BBC reports that that “High GI foods are associated with liver disease”
Boston-based researchers, writing in the journal Obesity, found mice fed starchy foods developed the disease
With an appropriately slim – nay starved – knowledge of food science, I assume that “starchy” means that carbohydrate-based foods are responsible. But a table on the BBC page shows this list of BAD “starchy” and GOOD, presumably “non-starchy” foods:
High GI foods:
Mashed potato
White bread
Chips
Some breakfast cereals (eg Cornflakes, Rice Krispies, Coco Pops)
Steamed white rice
Moderate GI foods:
Muesli (non-toasted)
Boiled potatoes
Pitta bread
Basmati rice
Honey
Wholemeal bread
Low GI foods:
Roasted salted peanuts
Rye and granary bread
Whole and skimmed milk
Spaghetti
Boiled carrots
Baked beans
These foods are nearly all carbs, apart from milk, peanuts and (possibly) beans. So what distinguishes the groupings and how could you tell where other carbs would fit into the groups? After all, if this is all true, and you want to avoid liver disease, especially for your kids, (it posits fatty liver disease as a serious future danger for today’s kids) you need to know the difference.
But “mashed” and “boiled” potatoes are in separate groups? Has the BBC never cooked food? It has enough food programmes and celeb chefs on its staff. Well let me explain.
Mashed potatoes are boiled potatoes. Mashed up. A bit like the effect of chewing up boiled potatoes. I think you could reasonably assume that a chewed portion of mashed potatoes and a chewed portion of boiled potatoes hit your stomach in the exact same condition. Chips (“French fries” to non-Brits) are slightly different, given the addition of fat, but the carb part of a chip is still pretty much what you’d get if you boiled a potato.
Steamed white rice is different from Basmati white rice? Why? Because it’s less tasty? Because it’s cheaper? Does the steaming make a difference?
Wheat breads and spaghetti are made from the same natural product. Unsurprisingly, that’s wheat. Which is mainly starch, whether or not you take the bran out. It’s certainly just the same starch if you shape it into a standard loaf or pitta shape. It even remains wheat if you throw in a few bits of grit from other grains (granary) or add a bit of semolina (spaghetti).
I can accept that the body may respond to wholemeal flour differently than to refined flour. Wholemal flour has more nutrients and roughage. However, it’s not a completely different substance. It may indeed be the case that semolina and bran and wheatgerm or chunks of other grains change the way that the body absorbs starch, possibly by slowing the rate of absorption. Or maybe by making you eat fewer carbs because you feel full with less carbs in your stomach.
So far, this would suggest that avoiding liver disease means eating fewer carbs and/or eating carb foods closer to their natural condition. These suggestions may or may not be true, but they are at least reasonable and don’t depend on a spurious carb classification.
The GI index is an odd way to categorise foods, which seems to be gaining ever more authority. I looked at these groups and could think of several alternative ways to categorise them. E.g.
Social/cultural: Group one is the carbohydrate food of the urban western poor. Group two contains the diet fillers more likely to be eaten by the better-off. (Just ignore the boiled potatoes nonsense.) Hmm, let me think. Does social class have anything to do with health?
Colour: Group one is mainly white or false-coloured (coco pops). Group 2 is generally a bit darker. Group 3 has some brightly coloured foods, if you ignore milk.
Number of vowels in their names: Gave up there, sorry. I was too idle to count them all. Feel free to take up the slack.
In any case, there’s another question hanging around. Group 2 contains muesli (non-toasted) Would toasting muesli push it up or down the food group chain?
I love the irony. A BBC report of research in the Journal of Obesity suggest that children are more likely to overeat if they are fed low-calorie diet foods.
Yes, OK, it’s pop science and it’s based on rats rather than actual children. Still..
Research from the Food Standards Agency was reported as showing that the poor do not have worse diets than the rest of the population. I am all for truths that fly in the face of “common sense” but I am finding this quite hard to swallow.
As soon as you look at the specifics, this whole argument starts to fall apart for me.
The Food Standards Agency found that contrary to popular belief, nutrition, access to food and cooking skills are not much different in poorer families.
Men and women with a lower level of educational achievement tended to have a ‘less healthy’ diet than men and women with more education. Men and women with less education ate fewer vegetables and more chips, fried and roast potatoes. Less educated women also consumed less fruit and fruit juice.
If educational level has any correlation with income (as we are told by other parts of government), doesn’t this suggest that the poor do have a worse diet? So it might be poverty rather than lack of education that leads to the duff feeding?
About 80% of this group did their main shopping at a large supermarket. About 50% had access to a private car for shopping
Hmm – car? Not markedly poor then, you would think.
But then:
Mean weekly spending on food and drink (including eating out, but excluding alcoholic drinks) was just under £30 for one-adult households, just over £50 for households containing two or more adults, £55–£65 for households with one adult and one or more children, and £80–£90 for households with two or more adults and one or more children.
(You have feel particularly sorry for the adults in a 2 or more adult household, scraping by on £25 or less per person.) Continue reading
From BBC Breakfast Time to the BBC website, child obesity is yet again a BBC theme of the day. The topic is whether child obesity is a form of neglect.
Related articles are one about Kacey’s weight went off the scale and Infants being treated for obesity.
Rather disappointingly, from a freak show point of view, four-year-old Kacey didn’t break the 20 stone barrier, or whatever the top mark on a set of bathroom scales is. She was only “off the scale” in terms of the percentile charts used to measure infants. (Just in case there aren’t enough normality hoops for parents and children to jump through, when they get to school….)
It turns out that the supposedly monstrously obese two-year-old Kacey is no longer obese but is in fact just tall now.
As a result of becoming obese when she was still a baby, Kacey has had a premature growth spurt and is now the height of an average 10-year-old and still weighs five stone (31.7kg).
So, was this even “obesity”? Don’t children put on weight before they grow tall. And if they are going to be very tall, they need something to grow new body from.
This got me wondering, is tallness a potential problem? Are people to have their children taken off them by social services for growing too tall at the wrong age?
Because that seems to be one implication of this compulsory normality madnes sthat is getting beamed at children and parents.
Her mum hopes that will continue and by the time Kacey is reaching her teenage years her height and weight will be much closer to the average child. By taking control of Kacey’s food her parents have transformed their daughter’s future.
Sentence One: WHY? Thor forbid that anyone should be on the outside edges of the human bell-shaped curve any more. Average is GOOD. Standard is GOOD. Diversity is BAD.
Sentence Two: Well, no, actually, it seems to me they have more likely set up a future teenage battle-ground that will end up with her becoming anorexic, bulimic or a compulsive eater. Food & control all tangled together, with subliminal Stepford-Wines style messages about how important it is to be like everybody else. Important enough to embarrass the future fiurteen-year-old Kacey (is that even a name or a set of initials?) with the existence of discussion and pictures of her as fat two year-old “problem child” in the national press. I can’t predict a good outcome.
I don’t blame this family for apparently turning a child’s weight into the centre of their lives. What else can they do? Thye have to show a willingness to change it. The other articles discuss the BBC’s apparently successful drive (no surprise there, resources flow to those who take the fashionable line) to find paediatricians who will agree that families with overfed children should be scrutinised by social services.
Now Social Services departments are well known for always improving the lives of kids who fall under their tender attentions …….
And there blatantly aren’t any enough children who are beaten or homeless or abused who could really do with some of this attention……
Doctors say they are now seeing children as young as six months old in their obesity clinics.
Come on. How on earth can a child under 6 months become “obese”? Small babies can’t even eat food. Even bottlefed babies are hard pushed to take in more than they can handle. Babies just stop feeding when they are full. And as soon as they start moving round, even chubby babies tend to burn up their stored energy.
Parents are allegedly to blame for feeding McDonald’s diets to their babies. Nonsense again, if we are talking about the poor* – because there is always an unspoken assumption in this that the poor are too stupid to feed their kids nutritious food – they can hardly afford to give babies a diet of BigMacs and Super-thick milkshakes, no matter how stupid they may be.
* At the children’s centre in the deprived Meadows area of Nottingham parents are offered support to improve their children’s diet.
Here is the one mysterious fact about the epidemic of obesity (and, yes, I do know that you can’t talk about an epidemic of something that isn’t a transferable disease, I was being ironic, ok?) As you can read in an old post here Everything about diets seems to be bull people actually eat LESS now than they did 15 years ago, according to the UK Office of National Statistics. I can’t repeat this too often. Even the BBC did in their quiz. It undercuts almost all of the food nonsense we get stuffed down our craws:
Men eat 6% fewer and women 3% fewer calories and both men and women eat less fat than they did in 1986.
Hmm, calories and fat. Aren’t we getting constantly told that it’s calories and fat that make us fat? This is obviously not completely untrue – there must be a relationship between how much we consume and how much bodyfat we store – but it can’t be wholly true either.
I can come up with a million crackpot theories involving additives and people not walking anywhere and residual estrogens in the water and so on. These remain personal opinion based on minimal or no evidence, so I’ll spare you them. Until we actually understand any of this, it is stretching credulity to assume that every chubby child is getting stuffed with KFCs and crisps and Big Macs and is doomed to a lifetime of Jerry-Springer-style immobility.
The one crackpot theory that I won’t spare you is the idea that the social meanings that we attach to food are demented.
We are so alienated from what we eat that we barely know it comes from farms (a/c to a spurious report on the BBC yesterday). We are obsessed with the weight of celebrities. Half the population is in a constant state of self-loathing beacuse they cant lose weight, but still despises other people for their fatness. And just in case adolescents aren’t disturbed enough about their bodyweight, we are now stretching the boundaries of concern down to babies.
The BBC website “science” pages have text on obesity and a quiz about it. I am always interested in trying to find any real science basis behind our current obsession with obesity and diet. I still remain to be convinced by more than a scraping of it. (See old post about child obesity/anorexia scares. )
While I was scoring poorly on the quiz- I failed the first question on how many years of life obesity can cost – I saw this,:
Obesity can shorten your life by 9 years. 18 million days of work are lost through sickness due to obesity, and it costs the NHS £500 million a year.
I always have a problem with health rants that discuss how much problem x or y costs the Health Service. We get used to seeing things that put arbitrary cost figures on health. Unfortunately, no source is quoted, so it’s hard to argue with the data. But, an absence of facts never stops me making an argument.
Is every illness suffered by an obese person to be blamed on their weight? Don’t they get the same range of health problems as everybody else? So, any extra cost calculation would surely have to deduct a baseline standard level of health costs.
This is not normally a topic I would stray into, but as Heather is hors de combat for a while, I thought I would give it a shot. It certainly strikes me as “bad science” but I may be wrong…
Given the way the UK has got on board this “healthy eating” campaign, it is not surprising that the supermarkets have pulled out all the plugs to use this woo to sell more products. On a fairly regular basis there are adverts on TV how this product or that product is “one of your five a day” with minimal reason behind the claims. It seems Sainsbury’s (supermarket chain) has joined in and in their infinite wisdom have decided that telling their customers how many grams of fat, carbohydrates/sugar, protein etc., are in their food is not effective. As part of the great dumbing down of the UK they now use a “traffic light” system. It is pretty embarrassing.
What intrigues me the most, is the apparently arbitrary nature of what gets a “green” compared to what gets an “amber” or “red” (I am assuming Green = Good and Red = Bad by the way, can food be “Bad?”). As a recent example, I bought a Sainsbury’s Cheese Ploughmans ready made sandwich which comes on malted bread with “seeds.” The packaging calls it “reduced fat, a healthier option.” In the picture, you can see what the traffic light system looks like, but please note, the fat and salt are supposed to be “amber” rather than red. Continue reading
Diets don’t work, according to a research report in American Psychologist, (Mann et al) discussed on physorg.com. Not only had most people who lost weight through dieting regained their weight in a couple of years, Mann concluded that
most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all. Their weight would be pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back
Well blow me down with a feather, etc. Who would have thought it? Well me, for a start. Given the obsession with dieting, if diets worked, people wouldn’t be (supposedly) getting fatter and fatter all the time.
Now I have a bit of a moral quandry here. Normally I would be loathe to pass comment on research findings without having read the research in full but for some reason (well, I can think of lots) I have been unable to read the full JAMA article. Obviously I am not going to let this stop me though…
In the 10 Mar 07 edition of NewScientist the news section reports on a study into diets which is titled (in the magazine) The Atkins diet works – a bit. The news item begins:
Compared head-to-head against three other diet plans, the Atkins diet has come out on top. In one of the largest studies to date, overweight women lost most weight on the popular low-carbohydrate diet.
Now this seems reasonable enough. The item continues about how, during a 12 month study the sample on the Atkins diet lost more weight than those on the Zone, LEARN (low fat diet based on US government guidelines) or Ornish (lower fat) diets. 12 months is a long time for a study like this and it looked at 311 women between the ages of 20 and 50. The data should be great.
I have no intention of getting into an argument about which diet is the best, or even if the current western obsession with diet makes any sense at all (simple answer, I dont think it does). The thing which caught my eye was the science involved.
Without having read the study itself, I can only assume this was a properly constructed study to generate an unbiased result as to which diet was the most effective at weight loss. It strikes me, this is what the study found out as well.
You would think they would be happy about it…
Given the fact that the diet industry generates lots of money, even the most crackpot (“eat three ants a day”) diets will pretty much make their inventors rich (especially if a fat celeb signs up to it, gets surgery then claims it was your diet…) and you can see people will defend the cash cow.
The commentary about the study seems to think it has failed (which leads me to suspect they were trying to prove one of the other three diets was the best – I wonder who funded the study..) and Gardner (the author) is quoted in NS as saying:
“Was the slight benefit on Atkins due to the low carbs, or the high protein, or the eight glasses of water a day that may have replaced sweetened beverages? We don’t know.”
Is he saying his experiment construction is flawed? Were there so many uncontrolled variables that he can not explain the results? Was he expecting the LEAN (or Ornish or Zone) diet to come out best? (The Zone diet pretty much came out the worst, which is a blow for people who advocate the “equal proportions” approach.)
I am not convinced this is “bad science” as such. From what I can read, the study looks sound, but I am amazed at the unwillingness to accept the conclusions. Adding to the bad conclusions, if you are still curious, there is an entire website devoted to quotes about this study: “Best Quotes from Atkins, Ornish, Zone, LEARN Diet Study” and in here you can see some amazingly bad conclusions from people doing their utmost to ignore the results of this study and maintain their cash cow…
“This is the message of this article — focus on lifestyle and environmental factors and don’t worry about the macronutrient composition of the diet, particularly if you can achieve the NHLBI guidelines of a 5 to 10 percent weight loss,” says Dr. George Blackburn, chair in nutrition medicine at Harvard Medical School. “I think that was my message for the past 20 years.”
Call me old fashoned but I have no idea where he drew that conclusion from given the available information.
Still, have a look, see what you think and if anyone can get access to the full article I would love to know how it reads. (JAMA, vol 297, p969)
Damp down your instinctive feeling that statistics are really boring for a few moments and bear with me. On the UK Office of National Statistics web pages there is some fascinating evidence that the diet we are constantly told is good for us is probably making us fat. (Fatness being the current manifestation of everything bad that there could possibly be about a human being of course.)
Basically the ONS summary of its data says that British people are getting fatter at a rate of knots. At the same time they are eating less fat and sugar and less calories 🙂 I just have to quote some of it.
“The prevalence of obesity in England has increased markedly among both adults and children since the mid 1990s. In 2002 it was similar for both sexes; the rate for boys and girls was 17 per cent and for adults was 23 per cent. In 1995 the equivalent figures were 10 per cent for boys and 12 per cent for girls, 15 per cent for men and 18 per cent for women.
There is no evidence that the average calorific intake or consumption of foods rich in fat and added sugar has increased in the UK since the mid 1980s. Men aged 19 to 64 in 2000/01 reported a daily energy intake of approximately 2,323 kcal (a reduction of 6 per cent since 1986/87). Women in the same age groups reported 1,642 kcal, a reduction of 3 per cent.
Reductions over the same period were also observed in the contribution of total fat to total energy intake (from 38 to 34 per cent in men and from 39 to 34 per cent in women) and saturated fat (from 15 to 13 per cent in men and from 17 to 13 per cent in women).”
After the “obligatory five pieces of fruit a day injunction – an old moan on this blog – (for which it produces no evidence but shows how many people at different ages eat it) the food page says that people are eating less saturated fat and replacing red meat with chicken.
Now, this stuff bears a good few explanations:
First, it seems a fair guess that many of these people were lying. I think people are more likely to lie about what they eat now than they were fifteen years ago, as we have all got more and more neurotic about our food. So, I wouldn’t becessarily take this at face value.
However, if it’s even partly accurate, the majority (the MAJORITY) of people are clinically obese or overweight*. I don’t know what it’s like where you live but I can’t see that around me.
But, taking the definition of clinically obese as having come to mean a bit plump and above – doesn’t this suggest that eating less fat and eating fewer calories are utterly doomed strategies for staying slim? Eating chicken with the skin and fat trimmed off appears to be more likely to be associated with fatness than eating old-fashioned meat. And so on.
Let me repeat – eating less fat doesn’t seem to make you thin. Now I know fair amount of the blame here goes with the use of hydrogenated fats that are stuffed into all those “healthy low fat” spreads that people still choose over butter, in the belief that they are better for them.
Eating fewer calories doesn’t seem to make you thin.
The website mentions that people eat many more prepared ready-meals and get less exercise. Well, hmm, now that seems more like it.
** Men were more likely than women to be overweight (or obese), 67 per cent compared with 58 per cent. This compares with 58 per cent of men and 49 per cent of women ten years earlier.
Following on from the expose about McKeith and her crackpottery it is interesting that the news of late has been trumpeting the “dangers” of using vitamin and herbal supplements. Remember one of the main claims of the woo-ers supporting McKeith is that modern medicine kills and all these herbal supplements dont.
It seems (JAMA, vol 297, p842) that this is not the case. The report comes to the following conclusions:
Treatment with beta carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E may increase mortality. The potential roles of vitamin C and selenium on mortality need further study.
The study found that people taking beta carotene supplements were at 7% greater risk of death than those who were not taking the supplements, and with Vit E it was 4% greater risk. More worryingly, Vitamin A supplementation appeared to increase the risk of mortality by 16%.
Now, there is a bit of a cautionary comment to go with this – this is a “meta analysis” study not a direct study, so there is the possibility that the people being given the supplements were at a greater risk of dying than the general public anyway, however one of the study group has commented “seventy percent of the participants were healthy.” (New Scientist)
Assuming this study is an accurate reflection, it is a nice slap in the face of those who push this woo in the place of retrovirals, immunisation and other “real” medicine 🙂
Although it only attracted minimal response here (one troll who never came back), the news about Cranky McKeith being told to stop calling herself a Doctor resulted in mountains of posts (281 last time I looked) on Ben Goldacres’ BadScience blog.
Now this is understandable as it was one of Ben’s regular readers who shopped McKeith to the ASA and resulted in bringing her Woo to the news. (Not to mention it is supported by a column in a national newspaper…)
That said, there are some striking similarities between the woo posted by the pro-McKeith (and her ilk) lobby on Badscience, the troll who stopped by here for a few seconds and the rest of the nonsense which pollutes the internet.
Take this, from badscience.net, as an example:
Ben, I think you will turn out to be just as arrogant as all the doctors that go before you. Gillian Mckeith, if nothing else, has encouraged people to realise that nutrition has a direct link to their quality of life and health. I would rather trust in good nutrition to prevent me from getting ill than an ever increasing supply of pharmeceutical drugs that cover up symptoms until they get worse. How many people do die each year from side effects of drug intervention? and what exactly was your Hippocratic oath? With all the incentives doctors get from pharmeceutical companies and the huge power those companies wield one could imagine that it was not really in a doctors best interests for a patient to get better. Humans are not machines, we are self-healing organisms and should be encouraged to remember this. Doctors are trained in body mechanics but not in healing or health and most of them are too arrogant to accept that there are other journeys to health.
I mean, that is good…. I am fairly sure it hits pretty much every logical fallacy I can think of.
The big claim goes along the lines of “if nothing else…” and this is used by apologetics of all flavour – ranging from the religious who say “if nothing else religion has made people happier” (or whatever) to the cranks who think the cruel and inhuman treatment of fat people doled out by McKeith is a GOODTHING™®. While it is (remotely) possible that McKeith has made people aware that nutrition is related to health (and if they needed McKeith to become aware of this, then I suspect letting them die would have been the kinder thing to do), this does not for one second excuse the nonsense, crackpottery and sheer, unadulterated bad science she wrapped her nonsense up in.
Creating weird rituals, falsifing science and tricking the public is not an “acceptable” means to an end.
The “how many people die each year” is fantastic. The appeal to fear there is brilliant because at its core, the sentence carries some truth. People do die of drug side effects. Side effects are called side effects for a reason. No one in their right mind thinks anything which works to treat an illness is 100% safe. The only possible reason McKeith’s recommendations were safe is because they do not do anything. This argument always pops up from the homeopathic woo-ers and it is tired and repetative at best.
This poor poster puts the nail in the coffin with “Doctors are trained in body mechanics but not in healing or health and most of them are too arrogant to accept that there are other journeys to health.” Well done.
Sometimes I despair that we allow people like this to have recourse to the NHS when they get sick and suddenly realise that crystals (or whatever nonsense they are in to) will not mend them.
The old themes keep coming back here. We really need some startling new things to blog about. Still, here goes…..
A 14 or 15 stone 8-year-old seems to sparked a huge moral panic all by himself. The media keep showing this kid and getting really worked up about him. Oh my god! He’s obese! Government ministers have even opined on the question of whether he should be taken into care. (There was a case conference today that decided he coulld stay with his mum, for the time being and if she agrees to cut his weight and so on.)
Now, on the face of it, unless there is a lot more happening in his family, I can’t see that a fat child is really such an urgent cause for intervention. Does anyone have any idea of the kind of suffering that some kids go through, with no assistance from anyone? Has the care system suddenly become a much more favourable option than being overweight?
What is really depressing about this story is that “fat” kids often get bullied. Nothing special in the fat bit, though, kids get bullied for any behaviour or characteristic that the bullies define as an offence. Adults are not supposed to reward bullying, let alone join in and take it to another level.
I doubt if the worst child bully in the world could come up with anything like the public pillorying of the child and his family. If the kid was a criminal, the media wouldn’t be allowed to name him, let alone plaster his picture everywhere and publicly debate his weight and his family circumstances. This kid and his family aren’t harming anyone, except possibly increasing his chance of getting certain diseases. Can anyone seriously believe that an 8-year-old is not going to be damaged by this experience of being in the public eye?
But obviously, it’s more important for us to show our social cohesion by all joining together to condemn him and his mother.
(Scapegoat rituals are so bloody powerful… You would hope that rational people could move beyond them or at least use symbolic scapegoats, as the obviously wiser amd more humane people of the past did.)
His weight is probably bad for his health, but I can’t honestly see what concern that is of mine. I don’t have enough faith in nutrition to believe everything we are told about it anyway. I have my own beliefs about food and health but I would hardly demand that everybody eats what I eat or exercises as I do. I thought that human diversity was a crucial survival strategy for our species.
If it is now OK to attack everyone who doesn’t meet my moral and physical standards, I can see a dozen candidates a month due for public naming and shaming as people who shouldn’t be entrusted with kids. I would be only too happy to voice my opinions on their apperance, their intelligence and their weight. And, of course, my opinion is necessarily always right…..
My point is that I have a mass of personal prejudices, based on highly dubious aesthetic grounds. However, if I don’t like someone’s appearance or expression or voice or way of life, I don’t claim any right to impose my standards on them. This is pure self-interest, lots of people object to me and I wouldn’t like to have them impose their values on me, so it seems only fair.
This argument is increasingly being overlooked, as our society becomes ever more willing to impose health fascist criteria on everybody. We can all join in this game. Whole sections of the media rely for their content on the alleged excessive fatness/thinness of “celebrities” or on peddling weight loss and exercise programmes. The food industry is constantly working out ever more complex ways to adulterate our food on the grounds of making it “healthier.”
Guess what, as a society, the more obsessed we become with our body size, the fatter and fatter we get. That’s working out well then.
A comment on this blog took us to task for joining the anti- “Doctor” McKeith clamour, largely on the grounds that we must be “fat” if we didn’t accept McKeith’s legitimacy. And that, having assumed we were “fat”, the commenter could more or less take the moral high ground.
I always want to say, so, if I don’t break the health rules (whatever they may be at any moment) I’ll live forever then? Great. That’s a weight off my mind