From Reuters...
Multinational food, drink and alcohol companies are using strategies similar to those employed by the tobacco industry to undermine public health policies, health experts said on Tuesday.
In an international analysis of involvement by so-called "unhealthy commodity" companies in health policy-making, researchers from Australia, Britain, Brazil and elsewhere said self-regulation was failing and it was time the industry was regulated more stringently from outside.
Food isn't an "unhealthy commodity" and if you think any of these industries are "self-regulating" you haven't kept up with legislation in the last hundred years.
The researchers said that through the aggressive marketing of ultra-processed food and drink, multinational companies were now major drivers of the world's growing epidemic of chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes.
Funny how marketing is always "aggressive" when it's for things the bullies don't like. I suspect that their problem is with the existence of "multinational companies" more than anything else.
Writing in The Lancet medical journal...
Let me stop you there. At one time The Lancet may have been worth reading, but I advise you to follow its editor—the mind-blowingly self-important, overgrown, pseudo-intellectual teenager Richard Horton—on Twitter before you take anything it publishes seriously. It is now a glorified student rag."Welcome to a permanent attack on the present" indeed. Words fail me.
Next.
This is from New Zealand...
Public health specialists say alcohol industry has no place in making policy and should stop.
Yeah, I'd prefer it if people who disagreed with me were silenced too, but down here in the land we laughingly call 'liberal democracy' that ain't how it works.
The liquor industry must be shut out of alcohol policy-making and implementation, to prevent manufacturers from undermining efforts to reduce the harms of alcohol, says an international grouping of public health specialists.
Do you? Is that what you think? Well I think they should have a say, what with it being their business and all. So why does your view trump mine?
One of the 16 authors of the statement, Professor Sally Casswell of Massey University at Auckland, said the thrust was that the global industry commitments were "all whitewash".
And who the hell might Sally Casswell be?
Sally Casswell is a social scientist...
I had a feeling she might be. I must be psychic. Go away Sally, and mind your own business.
Suggestions include reducing the alcohol content of products, refraining from lobbying against effective public health measures and giving up political activities designed to reduce or eliminate evidence-based alcohol-control policies.
Splendid. Everything in the state, nothing outside the state and nothing against the state, as Mussolini would say. But has it occurred to you that we can only decide what are "effective public health measures" by debating the issues from all sides? And has it occurred to you—I doubt it has—that even if something is an "effective public health measure", the demos might still reject it because normal people think in terms of trade-offs and are not that interested in "alcohol-control"? Next.
From The Conversation—always a trusty font of health fascism...
Most health problems in Australia are now attributable to a poor diet, insufficient physical activity, tobacco or alcohol.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
This means we have to move on processed and fast foods in the same way that we have on tobacco.
You will move onto them because you're an Australian public health statist ratbag. I won't be moving anywhere because I'm not an authoritarian busybody, what people eat is up to them, and people are living longer than at any time in human history so your whole thesis is bunk.
Foods high in salt, fat, sugar and calories are unfortunately a great way for the industry to make profit...
I guarantee that the profit margin is higher on the type of "sustainable", "locally sourced", "organic" sucker-bait that you eat, sunshine. The reason the food industry sells the enormous range of foods it does is because people like different things. Never before have people had such choice in what they eat, nor have they had more money with which to choose, and no matter how much you rant about industry, your little crusade—like every puritanical crusade—is a snooty, regressive war on people.
Clearly, we need to find a way to put health ahead of profit. The UK Food Standards Agency, which was launched in the aftermath of the mad cow or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) outbreak in the United Kingdom, is one example of a good solution.
Ha ha! I'll pass on your regards to the Food Standards Agency as soon as they've worked out how half the meat supply came to be made up of bits of French horses and Romanian donkeys. And rates of obesity are higher in the UK than they are in Australia, but never mind...
Muppets.
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