The Glorious Post-Brexit World Of Affordable Food

The European Union is warning us of the tragedy that will ensue as we leave the warm embrace of the federasts. That food will become more affordable upon this sceptered isle.

The UK will be flooded with cheaply produced food should it lower its regulatory standards after Brexit, Brussels has warned,

Well, yes, and this should be a warning for us why?

Given that the shouting about those food standards is to insist that we should be fed by peasants of good stock rather than industrial conglomerates who do it cheaply, why should we stick with the condemning people to the idiocies of rural life? Better, by far, to let the corporations take the strain, no?

Do note the important thing here. The relaxing of the standards doesn’t prevent anyone who wants to continue to purchase from rosy cheeked yokels. The imposition of the standards does stop the poor gaining a cheap chicken dinner. So, concerned with liberty as we are, even with the feeding habits of the poor, we should be against the regulations in the first place, right?

All of which is most fun and yet still not quite grasping the actual point here. The European Union exists – we can tell this from where it spends its budget – in order to benefit the owners of the countryside, the landlords. Brexit gives us the opportunity to give said landlords the right good walloping  they should be getting. No longer will their rent be subsidised from the wallet of every other taxpayer. No more will their production be subsidised by restrictive practices imposed upon every producer.

Basically, we’ve the opportunity to do over the squirearchy just as we did in 1846. Not an opportunity we should allow to go to waste.

<a href="https://www.continentaltelegraph.com/2020/09/the-glorious-post-brexit-world-of-affordable-food/">SOURCE</a>  

The Problem With Whining About Processed Food

By

 Tim Worstall

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It is the latest assault on all this capitalist modernity, that processed food is bad for you. Instead we should all be eating stuff that has never seen the inside of a factory. Because, you know, Rousseau and eating the acorns that falleth upon the bonce.

One entrant into the tidal wave of whines:

Processed food ages your body and increases risk of a host of diseases
The University of Navarra in Spain studied 900 men and women, examined their diets and the sections of DNA which are a marker of age

This is to miss the point entirely. Not eating processed food may keep those telomeres nice and long but it will also make them nicely cool and immobile – food for the worms even.

Processed food ages the body as well as increasing the risk of a host of diseases, Spanish research suggests.
The study of 900 men and women, with an average age of 68, examined their diets, and the sections of DNA which are a marker of biological age.
Short telomeres indicate biological changes at a cellular level, and are associated with ageing.
Those who ate more convenience foods, and less fresh fare, were twice as likely to have short telomeres, the study found.
The research by the University of Navarra, presented at the International Conference on Obesity (ECOICO 2020) online, found that as consumption of “ultra processed” foods increased, the likelihood of having shortened telomeres rose dramatically.
Such foods include ready meals, processed meats and other convenience snacks and meals.

This is to miss the point entirely. Processing food is, largely enough, to preserve it. Bacon is a manner of having pork three weeks after one did away with the pig. Ketchup means tomatoes 6 months after the crop. A world without processed food is one in which eating comes in fits and starts – the gaps between often imposing crash diets unto the point of becoming worm food.

As has been pointed out before:

Telomeres aren’t important in their length in societies where 30 is a grand old age.

Oh, and to add to the capitalist free marketry wonders. It is, today as it was not before, possible for us to all eat fresh, not processed, food. Because we now have a vast global logistics chain which delivers fresh food to us all. When we each raise and kill our own pig we cannot live upon fresh pork. It’s only when we raise millions, then eat each some small fraction a day, that we can do without bacon and ham and preserved lard and salamai and smoked sausage and canned Spam and…..

It’s that very industrialised agriculture that allows us, if we should so wish, to stop using he preservation and processing methods of the old days. What cannot happen is local food, peasant supply systems, and fresh food all the time – why do you think our peasant forbears processed their food in the first place?

 

https://www.continentaltelegraph.com/2020/09/the-problem-with-whining-about-processed-food/

 

How dairy and fat could save your life

A new study confirms decades of research that saturated fats are good for your heart. So why do guidelines still push a non-fat diet?

You probably didn’t see that, a couple of weeks ago, a respected US scientific publication — the Journal Of the American College of Cardiology, no less — came out with a review of the literature saying there was no evidence that cutting saturated fats from your diet would help you live longer. And that eating more of the much-libelled lipids — found most abundantly in red meat and dairy — might help you avoid stroke.

That you didn’t read about it is no surprise. It is one in a long list of trials, studies, reviews and meta-analyses that have found similar results and gone the same way — sunk without trace, ignored by the people who create our dietary guidelines.

This issue was brought into focus last month when eye surgeon Dr James Muecke, 2020’s Australian of the Year, wrote in the Canberra Times: “A flawed dietary guideline, which we have obediently and blindly followed for 40 years, is literally killing us. We’ve been encouraged to eat less fat and consume more carbs and yet we’ve never been fatter, our teeth never more rotten, and type 2 diabetes and its complications never more prevalent.”

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt responded with $2.5 million to review the guidelines which were last updated in 2013.

So what is Muecke talking about? Surely fat is bad, and saturated fat is worse.

The JACC paper listed some of the recent papers to contradict these dietary certainties. There was the PURE (Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiological) study of 135,000 people from 18 countries on five continents. It found that increased consumption of all types of fat (saturated, mono-unsaturated and polyunsaturated) was associated with lower risk of death and had a neutral association with CVD. By contrast, a diet high in carbohydrate was associated with higher risk of death. And those who ate the most saturated fat had lower risk of stroke, “consistent with the results from meta-analyses of previous cohort studies”. A newly-published study of 195,658 Brits over 10.6 years found “no evidence that saturated fat intake was associated with cardiovascular disease. In contrast, the substitution of polyunsaturated for saturated fat was associated with higher CVD risk.”

These are examples of epidemiology which can only prove associations, not causation. For that you need randomised trials, which are expensive and difficult. There have only ever been eight of them into the question of whether saturated fat will cause heart disease. The authors of the JACC paper looked at the six most recent systematic reviews and meta-analyses of those randomised trials. They wrote that the “results showed that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat has no significant effect on coronary outcomes or on total mortality.”

You might have also missed a fascinating story about the deaths of 63 middle-aged Sydney men in the early 1970s. It took place in the depths of a heart attack epidemic. Middle-aged men were dropping like flies, seemingly in their prime. It had peaked in 1968 when 55 per cent of all deaths in Australia were from heart disease (compared to around 27 per cent today).

The theory which had captured the debate was that saturated fats were clogging up their arteries like lard down a drainpipe. It had never been proven, but everyone thought it was probably true in the same way that most people still think it is.

Researchers at Sydney’s Prince Henry Hospital wanted to prove that by giving polyunsaturated fats instead of animal fats to a group of men who had just survived heart attacks they would lower their cholesterol and prolong their lives.

They gathered almost 500 heart attack survivors from across Sydney and gave half of them safflower oil and Miracle margarine — made from safflower oil — and advised them to cut down on animal fats. They gave the other half nothing. Just as expected, the men given the oil, margarine and advice lowered the cholesterol in their blood significantly more than the blokes still eating whatever men were eating in mid-70s Australia.

Unexpectedly, however, from the beginning, and over the five years of the study, the researchers saw that the margarine group were 50 per cent more likely to die than the butter, meat-and-three-veg group. The researchers looked for confounders like smoking, weight, age and exercise but found nothing that could make sense of these numbers. “At that time the clinical and biochemical knowledge did not allow us to interpret our results,” recalls Dr Boonseng Leelarthaepin, who was the PhD student who did all the work on the study.

Funding that had backed the study — from the Life Insurance Medical Research Fund of Australia and NZ — had dried up and they were under pressure to just finish it up, says Leelarthaepin. He denies recent suggestions the Marrickville Margarine company had put the financial squeeze on them owing to the way the results were heading.

“They were not a significant sponsor,” he said. When the study was published in 1978, it only including total mortality figures and not specific heart attack numbers. They figured that total mortality was a more important number than heart attack deaths, but not including heart attack numbers made it easier to ignore.

While they had proved that margarine and vegetable oils lowered cholesterol, the Sydney Diet Heart Study, like the concurrent London heart study, was seen as a failure because it had not proved the “lipid hypothesis” — that lowering cholesterol in a person’s bloodstream by lowering their saturated fat intake would prevent heart disease. But it didn’t matter because, even then, saturated fat had already been convicted in the court of scientific and popular opinion. The Sydney study became a mere confounding footnote in the literature.

Fast forward 30 years. Dr Chris Ramsden, a scientist with the US National Institutes of Health, was onto a theory that the reason why some studies have shown a benefit from cutting out animal fats for polyunsaturates —while others hadn’t — was because some polyunsaturated fats have Omega 3 in them. Of the eight randomised controlled studies that were done, five of them used oils that contained both omega 3s and omega 6s and they tended to show a small benefit to the study group — especially the ones where large amounts of omega 3 fish oils were used. So Ramsden needed to know what happened in the others. There was one small trial of 54 people using corn oil. Five of the corn oil group died compared to only one person in the group that got no dietary advice. While these numbers were stark, they were also very small. That’s where the Sydney study became crucial. There were no omega 3 oils in safflower oil or Miracle Margarine.

The published version of the study, however, was missing a lot of data, and had no information on heart disease deaths, only all-cause mortality. Ramsden needed more. He tried contacting the head researchers but they were all dead and their hospital was now a waterfront housing development. He found some helpful relatives who went rummaging through dusty boxes for him, but came up empty-handed. Then a year or so later, he found Dr Leelarthaepin on the internet. Leelarthaepin told Ramsden that the reason they hadn’t published the heart disease statistics was that the money had dried up and he needed to get it done.

 Statistics were difficult in those computer dark ages. Leelarthaepin went rummaging through his garage in the southern Sydney suburb of Matraville, through the detritus that accumulates over 30 years at the one house. And there it was, a 9-track tape from an IBM 360 computer which contained all the punch-card data.

Ramsden sent it off to California to be converted to modern computer language still not knowing what he might find, but when it came back it exceeded his expectations. He saw a well-organised study with cholesterol measured throughout, along with dietary surveys completed every four to six months so he knew what all the men were eating, and details of the 63 who died.

“One of the strengths of the Sydney Diet Heart Study is that they used seven-day food records both at baseline and at regular intervals throughout the trial for seven years,” Ramsden told me. “So on the tape that I was able to recover from Boonseng, they had PUFA (polyunsaturated fatty acid) intakes at each timepoint.”

Using modern statistical methods, Ramsden confirmed that polyunsaturated fats did lower cholesterol by an average of 13 per cent, but 17 per cent of those on the diet died, compared to only 11 per cent on butter and lard.

Crucially for Ramsden, when he crunched the heart disease death numbers, they stacked up at the same ratio as the all-cause mortality numbers.

One problem was that some of the subjects in the meat-and-three-vege control group took control of their own health and followed what was becoming standard medical advice — switching to vegetable oils and margarines. Thanks to the regular diet surveys that they filled in, Ramsden was able to determine that by doing so, they actually increased their chances of dying, “leading to an underestimation of the adverse effects of the intervention”.

The results fed into Ramsden’s broader review of the literature where he was able to conclude that cutting out saturated fat “showed no evidence of cardiovascular benefit. These findings could have important implications for worldwide dietary advice to substitute omega 6 linoleic acid, or polyunsaturated fats in general, for saturated fats.”

The US is in the process of updating its dietary guidelines, and judging by a preliminary paper released last week it will not be using the JACC paper. Nor will it use the Sydney Heart study or any of the randomised controlled studies on saturated fat. A spokesperson for Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council said it was too early to say what studies would be considered in the Australian review. “Evidence found to meet the quality standards set by the review will be synthesised and translated into the Australian context and scrutinised through NHMRC’s rigorous guideline development processes. This includes ensuring that the development of any recommendations is based on the body of evidence and not determined by individual studies.”

The NHMRC will call for submissions in coming weeks, the spokesperson said.

For Dr Muecke it’s a straightforward equation. Fifty years of demonising fat has led to excessive consumption of sugar and refined carbohydrates, causing an explosion of type 2 diabetes and blindness. Diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in working age Australians. He has vowed to change the flawed dietary guidelines. “The JACC paper confirms there’s no link between natural dietary saturated fats and cardiovascular disease, which includes foods like full fat dairy, eggs, unprocessed meat and dark chocolate, which is nice. It’s a powerful study and should put the issue to bed forever.”

He points out that diabetes killed more than 5000 Australians during the first three months of COVID-19, during which time the virus killed 102.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/science/full-fat-dairy-red-meat-and-dark-chocolate-are-good-for-you/news-story/4d7418770f1b417d2d485b8aafb0e1ea

Respiratory and atopic conditions in children two to four years after the 2014 Hazelwood coalmine fire

This is a very strange study.  It is about health effects of exposure to smoke pollution from one fire. But they had no baseline for a before and after study.  So they sought to get around that by correlating ESTIMATED monthly exposure to pollution with monthly reports of ill health.

But one would assume that almost all the pollution from the fire would have occurred WITHIN the first month.  How could there be ANY effect up to four years later?  It's a mystery. I have read and re-read the article several times but can make no sense of it

Abstract

Objective: To evaluate associations between exposure during early life to mine fire smoke and parent‐reported indicators of respiratory and atopic illness 2–4 years later.

Design, setting: The Hazelwood coalmine fire exposed a regional Australian community to markedly increased air pollution during February – March 2014. During June 2016 – October 2018 we conducted a prospective cohort study of children from the Latrobe Valley.

Participants: Seventy‐nine children exposed to smoke in utero, 81 exposed during early childhood (0–2 years of age), and 129 children conceived after the fire (ie, unexposed).

Exposure: Individualised mean daily and peak 24‐hour fire‐attributable fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure during the fire period, based on modelled air quality and time‐activity data.

Main outcome measures: Parent‐reported symptoms, medications use, and contacts with medical professionals, collected in monthly online diaries for 29 months, 2–4 years after the fire.

Results: In the in utero exposure analysis (2678 monthly diaries for 160 children exposed in utero or unexposed), each 10 μg/m3 increase in mean daily PM2.5 exposure was associated with increased reports of runny nose/cough (relative risk [RR], 1.09; 95% CI, 1.02–1.17), wheeze (RR, 1.56; 95% CI, 1.18–2.07), seeking health professional advice (RR, 1.17; 95% CI 1.06–1.29), and doctor diagnoses of upper respiratory tract infections, cold or flu (RR, 1.35; 95% CI, 1.14–1.60). Associations with peak 24‐hour PM2.5 exposure were similar. In the early childhood exposure analysis (3290 diaries for 210 children exposed during early childhood, or unexposed), each 100 μg/m3 increase in peak 24‐hour PM2.5 exposure was associated with increased use of asthma inhalers (RR, 1.26; 95% CI, 1.01–1.58).

Conclusions: Exposure to mine fire smoke in utero was associated with increased reports by parents of respiratory infections and wheeze in their children 2–4 years later.

Med J Aust doi: 10.5694/mja2.50719
Published online: 24 August 2020