Tuesday, 13 April 2010
Sunday, 11 April 2010
A brief rant about bottled water
For me, one of the most baffling developments of the past decade has been the rise of bottled water as a lifestyle commodity/fashion statement/comfort blanket. Not only have millions of seemingly sane individuals been persuaded to pay upwards of a pound for something that comes out of the tap for virtually nothing, they appear to believe that without constant access to H20, they might actually die of dehydration.
At what point did it become inconceivable for folk to attend meetings, take a short train journey or just walk down the street without a personal supply of water?
Don't get me wrong here. If you've got a mile to cover on a hot August afternoon, I'll turn a blind eye—even if I'll wonder why you don't grab a Coke for the same price. But, in general, I can't help but see the ubiquitous water bottle as a 21st century substitute for the dummy or, to drag this blog back into familiar territory, the cigarette.
It's particularly strange, is it not, that environmentalists are so quiet about something so unnecessary, so wasteful of plastic and so expensive to transport? Could it be that environmentalists are the very type of people who are in search of the ill-defined, but modish, trinity of health, purity and detoxification which makes them suckers for the bottled water industry?
This is little more than a personal hobby-horse, I grant you, but as this article in The Guardian shows, I am not alone.
As I sat in the cafe later, necking a hard-won jug of free tapwater, I realised how odd our relationship with water has become. Sure we've persuaded restaurants to stop charging us for it but no fewer people seem to be wandering around like overgrown babies, clutching plastic sucky-bottles.
Anyone with the brains to read (outside the ad agencies that come up with this sort of rubbish) must by now be aware that the argument that water 'detoxes' is entirely spurious, that the 'two litres a day' myth is just that and that buying water shipped from places like Fiji - even if it can be 'greened' through some 'offsetting' sophistry - is as immoral as it is absurd. Yet somehow, we've programmed ourselves deeply. Stand, sometime, in the queue at the airport; the last few feet before the metal detector, where the travelling classes are having their bottles torn from their hands by stone-faced airport stormtroopers. Witness the genuine pain on their faces.
It makes me want to throttle them all individually. It's bottled bloody water. You can survive without it until you get on the plane. You saw the security signs, you know that poor sod is only trying to stop someone blowing your holiday to smithereens over Staines, yet you act like you're being brutally deprived of a human right. You tut about waste as it's thrown into the blue bin as if it wasn't your own, vacuous credulity that made you give £1.50 to a multinational for it half an hour ago.
What I particularly like about this article is that—unusually, in an age when people think their opinions should be law—there is no call for higher taxes, or a ban on advertising, or a government-sponsored campaign to denormalise bottled water. Just a plea for sanity; a revolution in the head...
Our weapon should be ridicule. Next time you see someone with a bottle of water, be sure to point and laugh.
That's all that's required or, at least, is acceptable in a liberal democracy. If a campaign of ridicule doesn't work, then too bad for the writer of this fine article and too bad for me. I'm not saying bottled water should be banned. I'm not saying that we should burn effigies of people who drink bottled water (a new and real development for which words fail me, but Dick, Bella and Leggy have much to say).
I'm just saying it's a bit daft. It's only my opinion and you're free to disagree. It's your life. Live it as you wish. I just reserve the right to call you a bit of a twat. That's all.
Thursday, 8 April 2010
Carless in Heathrow
In 1985, a taxi driver—Richard Carless—refused to pick up a passenger from Heathrow airport because the man had just lit a pipe and intended to smoke it. The taxi driver had asthma. The passenger understood this and agreed to wait for the next cab. There is no suggestion that their conversation was anything but amicable. However, a passing traffic warden reported the taxi driver to the police who prosecuted him.
Mr Carless said the man was happy to wait for the next taxi but a passing traffic warden spotted what happened and called the police.
What law this man had broken, I don't know. Is there some law saying that taxi drivers have to pick up everyone who hails them? Is it a condition of having a taxi license? Perhaps so. Whatever the case, it resulted in the taxi driver going to prison.
Richard Carless, 67, was locked up for seven days in July 1986 after turning down the passenger who wanted to light up in his car because he feared it would aggravate his asthma.
He refused to pay the £120 fine on a point of principle and was put behind bars.
The former taxi driver is now taking the case to the Court of Appeal, saying it ruined his life.
Once you get over the amusing idea of a former taxi driver being called Mr Carless, this story raises several issues. The obvious observation is to say how times have changed. Today, of course, the police would have prosecuted the taxi driver if he had allowed the man to get in his cab. He would be looking at a £2,500 fine for 'permitting smoking' in an enclosed place and could face, like Nick Hogan, a 6 month prison sentence. Indeed, only last week, two taxi drivers were prosecuted and fined for smoking in their cabs when nobody else was present.
If we look at the Daily Mail's comments section—not a senate of reason, admittedly—we find contrasting views. From this:
This is ridiculous. You people don't jail criminals yet you jail a man for refusing to carry a smoker. I can't stand smokers and I would have done the same as this man. Mr. Carless was right then and now.
- Latima, FL USA, 07/4/2010 13:45
To this:
oh the good old days! a time when we were responsible for our actions and not told how to live our lives by a nanny state
- IAND, LONDON, 7/4/2010 11:20
In the course of 24 years, we have gone from a system that effectively protects people's 'right' to smoke in a cab to one that prosecutes people for smoking in a cab (I can't quite believe that taxi drivers didn't have the right to designate their cabs as non-smoking in 1985, but anyway...)
People like the American above who "can't stand smokers" (not, you will note, smoking, but smokers) are no doubt delighted that the government's guns have turned 180 degrees and are now aimed at smokers. The chap from London clearly thinks that the old ways were the best.
Both of them, I would argue, are wrong. The law in 1985 was an ass. Far from making us "responsible for our actions" it intervened unfairly and unnecessarily in a private negotiation between a taxi driver and a potential customer. The taxi driver's terms were not to the customer's liking—he had just got off a flight and wanted to smoke—and the customer was happy to wait for a driver who would accept his terms. No one was hurt, or even upset, by this negotiation.
Today, that pipe-smoker would still be able to find a taxi driver who would take him where he wanted to go, but the law does not allow it. That's because the law is still an ass. No one would be hurt—the driver might ask him to wind the window down—and everyone involved in the transaction would be happy. As in 1985, the only people who would be unhappy will be distant bureaucrats and, perhaps, the odd interfering traffic warden.
There are no victims or villains in any of these 'crimes'. By prosecuting individuals for victimless crimes, the state itself is the villain. You do not—or rather should not—have a right to demand entry into private property. That, I'm afraid, also applies to bed and breakfasts, since bigots have property rights as well. Richard Carless took a stand against an unjust law and that should be recognised. Nick Hogan also took a stand against an unjust law. From their completely different perspectives, they have both suffered at the hands of the government despite harming no one.
Issues like the story above polarise debate. It's easy for some nonsmokers to rejoice that the state is now going after smokers. Equally, some smokers might be nostalgic for the days when the state, however inadvertently, went after nonsmokers. Upon sober reflection, we might conclude that all our interests would be better served if the state didn't 'go after' any of us.
All the good stuff
I wasn't blogging over Easter, but here's a bit of good reading if you haven't had the pleasure already...
At Spiked, Patrick Basham pulls apart the recent 'junk food is like heroin' garbage:
Proving that junk food is addictive is a crucial final step in the War on Obesity. As long as the debate over obesity is framed in terms of choice, autonomy, and responsibility, the advocates of aggressive and overwhelming state action will face considerable problems getting many of their policy proposals accepted.
Meanwhile, there's no sign of the medical establishment's God complex wearing off in Britain, where those nice people at the British Medical Association want to ban smoking in the home. Leg-Iron is mad as hell and he's not going to take it any more:
We smokers have attempted compromise at every turn. We have not demanded all the pubs back, we have asked for some. We have asked for private smoker's clubs, staffed by smokers, but have been refused. The ban is total. No compromise at all. And we are called 'selfish'.
We are also called many other names, any of which, if applied to one of the government's pet groups, would get the name-caller arrested. We smokers are expected to shut up and get out of the way because we are inferior.
I say 'enough'.
Frank Davis has also had enough:
Push smokers too far, and they'll fight back. Push antismokers too far, and they'll fight back too. In many ways we already have a civil war. We have a civil war that is being conducted by antismokers against smokers. At some point, when smoking was ubiquitous, the antismokers probably got pushed too far. And they set out to fight smoking with everything they had. It's an unrelenting war. It never stops. Antismokers are trying to completely wipe out smokers. And it's only a matter of time before smokers start fighting back, and set out to completely wipe out antismokers, because now they're being driven too far too.
On a very different note, Google have put a very rare anti-tobacco tract from 1854 on-line (for download as PDF). Titled O tempora! O mores! A word to the wise on the use of tobacco and snuff, it gives a good insight into anti-tobacco sentiment in the days before they pretended it was only about health. Full of tall tales and hyperbole, it's an excellent example of anti-tobaccoism from that era:
These practices are of so filthy and disgusting a nature, and attended by so many evils, producing such fearful results to man, not only in a physical but a moral point of view, that it remains one of the most intricate problems how such practices can ever be tolerated amongst thinking people, much less become popular, to an extent so inconceivable as to be justly considered a national evil... [and so on for 100 pages]
It's worth noting that the whole treatise is not just against smoking but against chewing tobacco and snuff. Stopping smoking has never been the only goal; it has always been the aim to eliminate all forms of tobacco. Today's equivalent to snuff is the e-cigarette and today's equivalent to the Victorian anti-tobacco nut is John Banzhaf, who claims to have got e-cigarettes banned in the USA:
The importation of e-cigarettes will be banned indefinitely as the result of a unanimous ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Dick Puddlecote warned e-cigarette users than ASH were not their friends some time ago. In 2010, as in 1854, it is a moral crusade for people like Banzhaf. Puddlecote reminds us, once again, that you can't pick and choose which liberties you defend:
You're either libertarian, or you're not. You can't pick and choose which liberties you wish to keep, and which are OK to be stamped on. Bending an inch to these people just boosts their power and leads, eventually, to something being attacked which you hold dear.
But, in any case—and as the tireless Michael Siegel points out—Banzhaf is lying again:
While it is true that the FDA seized two shipments of electronic cigarettes, it is not true that the Agency has placed a ban on the importation of electronic cigarettes. To the best of my knowledge, these products continue to be imported and sold throughout the country. The FDA has certainly threatened to take enforcement action, but it has stopped short of formally banning the importation of the product, and to my knowledge, is not stopping these products from entering the country.
Finally, an election has been called for May 6. As I wrote some time ago, it will be interesting to see if Gordon Brown mentions the smoking ban when defending his record. I hope my readers will keep me posted. Otherwise, I will try not comment on politics for the next four weeks. I tend to agree with Simon Heffer at the Daily Telegraph:
As the campaign proceeds, the spectacle of inadequates on our television screens – Harriet Harman trying not to appear deranged by fanaticism, George "Sharing the proceeds of growth" Osborne trying to pretend he understands economics, or almost anyone from the Lib Dem front bench (except Dr Cable) trying to be taken seriously – may drive people either into the arms of the minnows, or abroad on holiday until the ghastliness is over...
The tedium to come can be obviated by not turning on the television for a few weeks. Newspapers, believe me, will ensure the diet of politics is kept to the minimum: our readers are precious to us, and we wish neither to bore them with the self-importance of politicians nor to insult them by bombarding them with propaganda. Strong drink and martial music may be useful. That still leaves the problem of how Britain will ever be run properly, whether by a tribal introvert who wishes to suffocate us with his "values", or a PR spiv whose "big idea" is to appoint 5,000 commissars to assist the development of "communities". There will be more absurdity yet. "Democracy," wrote Carlyle, "which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you!" How right you were, Tom, how right you were.
Wednesday, 7 April 2010
Fruit and veg
The Journal of the National Cancer Institute has just published a very large study which finds that eating fruit and vegetables has, at the most, a very weak effect on cancer risk (see BBC report). This could be seen as yet another example of lifestyle epidemiology contradicting itself—only a few days ago a study reported that eating a fried breakfast was a good way of combatting obesity—but there are good reasons to take this particular paper seriously.
Firstly, it is a very large study, involving over 400,000 subjects. Secondly, it is a cohort (or prospective) study, ie. it follows people over a period of years rather than interviewing people who are already ill. In these two respects, it trumps most of the studies that have found lower cancer risk amongst those who eat their 'five-a-day'.
The JNCI study found a relative risk for those with a high intake of fruit and vegetables to be 0.97 (95% CI = 0.96 to 0.99), ie. a 3% reduction, and there are serious doubts over whether even this extremely modest reduction is genuine or the result of confounding factors. There are few areas of science where a 3% reduction would be taken seriously.
Walter Willett, a prominent figure in the epidemiology of diet, has written a frank editorial to accompany the study, calling the association "very weak" and noting that there is not a single type of cancer that is significantly reduced by eating fruit and veg (full free text). The history of how such a belief came about bears repeating:
During the 1990s, enthusiasm swelled for increasing consumption of fruits and vegetables with the expectation that this would substantially reduce the risk of many cancers. Potential reductions as large as 50% were suggested...However, the evidence for a large preventive effect of fruits and vegetables came primarily from case–control studies, which can be readily biased by differences in recall of past diet by patients with cancer and healthy control subjects...
In the late 1990s, the results of large prospective cohort studies of diet and cancer began to accrue, and these did not confirm the strong inverse associations found in most case–control studies. Furthermore, a series of analyses that pooled the data from prospective studies for specific cancer sites confirmed the weak and non-statistically significant associations.
There are clear parallels with the evidence for passive smoking and lung cancer here. In both cases, the largest risks were reported when research was in its infancy (eg. Hirayama, 1981) and most of the evidence came from case-control, rather than cohort, studies. As the years went on, the reported risks diminished, falling from over 2.0 (100% increase) to less than 0.3 (30%).
Just as the World Cancer Research Fund used a meta-analysis of questionable studies in 2007 to condemn almost everything except fruit and vegetables are carcinogenic, so the EPA and SCOTH conducted meta-analyses based on shaky science to condemn secondhand smoke as carcinogenic.
In both cases, larger and more reliable studies found no risk. In the case of secondhand smoke, one of the most important null studies came from the World Health Organisation's IARC with Paolo Boffetta as lead author (1998). It found no statistically significant association with lung cancer despite one of the largest sample groups every studied. In the case of fruit and vegetables, the lead author is, again, Paolo Boffetta, and he finds a significant, but very weak, association.
In 1998, the WHO went to the unprecedented lengths of issuing a press release to contradict one of its own studies, so important was passive smoking (and thereby, smoking bans) to the battle against active smoking. It will be interesting to see if there is any backlash against this new study.
As it is a less heated area, possibly not. Willett concludes his editorial by calling for "heightened efforts to reduce smoking and obesity" which remain the key battlegrounds, but there are many food faddists and vegetarians who will not be happy to hear that their lifestyles are not as healthy as they believed. There will also be many epidemiologists who will (justifiably) feel their work has been discredited.
Ultimately, after a brief period of controversy, the IARC's secondhand smoke report was forgotten about and attention shifted back to the grab-bag of smaller studies which had been favorable to the passive smoking theory. This new study may meet the same fate; already the tiny association it reported is being taken as fact, with all the caveats and doubts ignored:
In any event, a reduced risk of 2.5% should not be dismissed out of hand, the World Cancer Research Fund argues.
"For the UK, this works out as about 7,000 cases a year, which is a significant number," says Dr Rachel Thompson from the charity, which in a major 1997 report said there was "convincing evidence" of the protective effect of fruit and vegetables.
In Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, I described the World Cancer Research Fund's report as "a veritable encyclopedia of weak associations and questionable meta-analyses" (p. 310). Today's JNCI study only reinforces that view. Whatever the truth about this particular issue, basing policy on statistical studies that change like the weather is a fool's errand.
Tuesday, 6 April 2010
Gimme a pack of low birth weights
From the Daily Telegraph:
Women who exercise during pregnancy produce 'lighter babies'
As Tim Worstall points out, haven't we been told that low birth weights are a bad thing ever since they were associated with smoking in pregnancy? So are we now going to stop these women exercising?
Dr Paul Hofman, from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, said: ''Our findings show that regular aerobic exercise alters the maternal environment in some way that has an impact on nutrient stimulation of fetal growth, resulting in a reduction in offspring birth weight.
''Given that large birth size is associated with an increased risk of obesity, a modest reduction in birth weight may have long-term health benefits for offspring by lowering this risk in later life."
I can't say with any confidence whether low birth weights are good, bad or indifferent, but a little consistency from the medics would be nice. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that 'lighter babies' are good/bad depending on whether the researcher is involved in the crusade against smoking or the war against obesity.
And if larger babies really do grow up to be fatter, doesn't that suggest that some people are just born fat and that the so-called 'obesogenic environment' has got nothing to do with it?
Incidentally, I remember reading somewhere (can't find it now) that the weight difference between smokers' and nonsmokers' babies was ridiculously small—something like 9 grammes. Do any of my learned readers have the figures?
Thursday, 1 April 2010
NYC: First smoke, now salt
From The Guardian, the city that brought you the smoking ban is now bringing in the salt ban:
New York restaurant kitchens face threat of salt ban
City politician proposes £600 fines for restaurants that use salt in recipes
Over the past few years New York has gained a reputation for taking the health of its citizens seriously – or nannying them, depending on your point of view.
Now a member of the city's legislative assembly has gone a step further by introducing a bill that would ban the use of salt in restaurant kitchens.
Bill A10129 would forbid the city's chefs from using salt in any of their recipes. The ban's proposer, Felix Ortiz, a Democratic member from Brooklyn, says it would give consumers the choice about whether to add salt to their meal.
Restaurants trying to sneak a bit of sodium chloride on to the plate would be fined $1,000 (£600) every time they were caught.
Ha, ha! Gotcha. April fools!!!
Er, actually no. This is from The Guardian three weeks ago. I tried to think of an April's fool wind-up, I really did, but considering what I have to write about every day, it's impossible to come up with anything so ridiculous that it hasn't already happened, is happening or will happen.
If you want a real bit of tom-foolery, The Guardian and Tom Harris have got the goods. At least I think they're joking. It's hard to tell anymore.
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