At the IEA blog today I suggest that voting is a waste of time therefore you should waste it properly.
Do have a read.
Tuesday, 5 May 2015
Monday, 4 May 2015
Tobacco black market still growing in Australia
KPMG have published their latest figures on illicit tobacco consumption in Australia. After a large rise between 2012 and the first half of 2014 (11.5% to 14.3%), there was a more modest rise in the consumption of illicit tobacco as a proportion of all tobacco in second half of 2014 (to 14.5%). The resulting tax gap is $1.35 billion.
The Aussie Daily Telegraph notes that there has been "a 30 per cent increase in black market trade in the past two years". It's actually 26 per cent, but the point remains that the rise has been steep. It has, of course, coincided with the implementation of plain packaging (December 2012) and two large tax rises (December 2013 and September 2014). The 'public health' cult still laughably pretends that neither plain packaging nor tax rises fuel the illicit trade.
The KPMG research is based on inspection of 12,000 discarded cigarette packs collected around the country. For roll-your-own tobacco, sales of rolling paper are compared with legal sales of tobacco. This is how governments used to evaluate the size of the black market before they decided it would be cheaper to use guesswork or, as seems to be the case in Australia, not bother at all.
In Britain, HMRC simply estimates how many cigarettes are smoked (based on the number of people who say they smoke) and works backwards from the amount of tobacco duty received to estimate the number of cigarettes sold on the black market. The trouble is, people notoriously under-report their smoking status and smokers drastically under-report how many cigarettes they smoke. Even so, it is estimated that 48 per cent of hand-rolling tobacco does not have tax paid on it and, contrary to tobacco control dogma, HMRC says the illicit trade in manufactured cigarettes has been rising in recent years. Officially, it is currently at between 5 and 15 per cent, but this is very likely to be an underestimate.
It would be nice if governments put a fraction of the billions of pounds they receive in tobacco duty into measuring the illicit trade properly, but it is not in the interests of 'public health' lobbyists to let people know the true scale of the problem. And so it is left to the tobacco industry to commission research, which the aforementioned lobbyists dismiss out of hand because it is funded by industry. This is not a rational response, of course, unless the research itself is flawed. The anti-smoking lobby won't risk libel by calling a respected organisation like KPMG liars and frauds, and since their methodology is the best available, it needs to be taken seriously.
What is interesting about the KPMG data is the way the black market has evolved. I have noted before that it did not move exactly in the direction that was expected after plain packaging, ie. with large quantities of plain packs being counterfeited. Instead, there was a steep rise in the number of 'illicit whites' being sold. These are cigarettes which don't exist legally in the domestic market and, in some instances, have never existed legally anywhere. Well known examples include Manchester and Jin Ling. Interestingly, the surge of illicit whites seen in 2013 seems to have subsided, with unbranded tobacco (loose leaf rolling tobacco, known in Australia as 'chop chop') filling the gap.
KPMG reports a big decline in illicit whites and a big rise in unbranded tobacco. However, as a share of the tobacco market, illicit whites were always a relatively small player (less than 2%) whereas chop chop makes up more than half. The other illicit sector is contraband (ie. legal brands smuggled in from other countries) which has seen its share fall by 8.6 per cent.
Overall, KPMG estimates that 2,549 tonnes of illicit tobacco was bought in 2014, seven per cent more than in 2013. The quantity of unbranded, loose leaf tobacco rose from 964 tonnes to 1,375 tonnes. Most of the rest was contraband shipped in from abroad.
KPMG's estimates are supported by several other sources. The finding that unbranded tobacco is rising at the expense of counterfeit is supported by government figures which show that customs are seizing a greater proportion of the unbranded tobacco than they did in 2013. The overall rise in illicit tobacco is supported by survey data (see below) which shows that an increasing number of people are buying illicit tobacco and that those who buy it are buying more of it.
How much of this can be attributed to plain packaging and how much can be attributed to the tax rises? The major black market surge occurred in 2013, in the absence of any tax hike, so it is reasonable to attribute most of it to plain packaging. It is impossible to tell whether the decline of the illicit white market and the rise of chop chop is due to better policing of Australian ports or changes in the supply chain. Either way, Australia differs from Britain in that it has the climate for domestic tobacco growing on a large scale. Every tax rise provides an added incentive to budding entrepreneurs and the deliberate positioning of tobacco as a semi-prohibited product—sold from behind shutters in unbranded packaging—can only help them.
What are the lessons for Britain if and when plain packaging comes in? Unlike Australia, we don't have an illicit tobacco growing industry in our backyard, but we do have a great deal of loose leaf tobacco delivered from overseas which is then repackaged in the UK. Also unlike Australia, we have many countries with lower taxes on our doorstep. If smokers like cigarette packaging as much as ASH claim, cigarettes from Belgium and Spain will become even more attractive. Moreover, whereas it is illegal to bring in more than 50 cigarettes into Australia (seriously!), Brits can bring in virtually unlimited quantities from EU countries for their own consumption. In practice, they can bring in very large quantities for sale. The former is legal, the latter is illegal, but everyone knows it happens. Whether legal or illegal, it is bad news from Her Majesty's Treasury and it is they who will be most concerned when plain packaging arrives.
When I was in Australia last August, I saw plenty of cigarette packs that had clearly been brought in from other countries. Some were counterfeit (the giveaway is that they had no health warnings). And yet you could hardly ask for a better place to bring in plain packaging. Australia is a long way from anywhere. Britain is not.
If it does nothing else—and we can be fairly sure it won't reduce legal sales of cigarettes—plain packaging will bring the size of Britain's non-duty paid tobacco market into sharp focus. Any cigarettes that are not in 'standardised' packaging will, by definition, not have had UK duty paid on them. You will see them wherever you see smokers. This observable fact will come too late to prevent the ridiculous policy being introduced, but the reality of plain packaging will make it impossible to deny the reality of Britain's black market.
The KPMG research is based on inspection of 12,000 discarded cigarette packs collected around the country. For roll-your-own tobacco, sales of rolling paper are compared with legal sales of tobacco. This is how governments used to evaluate the size of the black market before they decided it would be cheaper to use guesswork or, as seems to be the case in Australia, not bother at all.
In Britain, HMRC simply estimates how many cigarettes are smoked (based on the number of people who say they smoke) and works backwards from the amount of tobacco duty received to estimate the number of cigarettes sold on the black market. The trouble is, people notoriously under-report their smoking status and smokers drastically under-report how many cigarettes they smoke. Even so, it is estimated that 48 per cent of hand-rolling tobacco does not have tax paid on it and, contrary to tobacco control dogma, HMRC says the illicit trade in manufactured cigarettes has been rising in recent years. Officially, it is currently at between 5 and 15 per cent, but this is very likely to be an underestimate.
It would be nice if governments put a fraction of the billions of pounds they receive in tobacco duty into measuring the illicit trade properly, but it is not in the interests of 'public health' lobbyists to let people know the true scale of the problem. And so it is left to the tobacco industry to commission research, which the aforementioned lobbyists dismiss out of hand because it is funded by industry. This is not a rational response, of course, unless the research itself is flawed. The anti-smoking lobby won't risk libel by calling a respected organisation like KPMG liars and frauds, and since their methodology is the best available, it needs to be taken seriously.
What is interesting about the KPMG data is the way the black market has evolved. I have noted before that it did not move exactly in the direction that was expected after plain packaging, ie. with large quantities of plain packs being counterfeited. Instead, there was a steep rise in the number of 'illicit whites' being sold. These are cigarettes which don't exist legally in the domestic market and, in some instances, have never existed legally anywhere. Well known examples include Manchester and Jin Ling. Interestingly, the surge of illicit whites seen in 2013 seems to have subsided, with unbranded tobacco (loose leaf rolling tobacco, known in Australia as 'chop chop') filling the gap.
KPMG reports a big decline in illicit whites and a big rise in unbranded tobacco. However, as a share of the tobacco market, illicit whites were always a relatively small player (less than 2%) whereas chop chop makes up more than half. The other illicit sector is contraband (ie. legal brands smuggled in from other countries) which has seen its share fall by 8.6 per cent.
Overall, KPMG estimates that 2,549 tonnes of illicit tobacco was bought in 2014, seven per cent more than in 2013. The quantity of unbranded, loose leaf tobacco rose from 964 tonnes to 1,375 tonnes. Most of the rest was contraband shipped in from abroad.
KPMG's estimates are supported by several other sources. The finding that unbranded tobacco is rising at the expense of counterfeit is supported by government figures which show that customs are seizing a greater proportion of the unbranded tobacco than they did in 2013. The overall rise in illicit tobacco is supported by survey data (see below) which shows that an increasing number of people are buying illicit tobacco and that those who buy it are buying more of it.
How much of this can be attributed to plain packaging and how much can be attributed to the tax rises? The major black market surge occurred in 2013, in the absence of any tax hike, so it is reasonable to attribute most of it to plain packaging. It is impossible to tell whether the decline of the illicit white market and the rise of chop chop is due to better policing of Australian ports or changes in the supply chain. Either way, Australia differs from Britain in that it has the climate for domestic tobacco growing on a large scale. Every tax rise provides an added incentive to budding entrepreneurs and the deliberate positioning of tobacco as a semi-prohibited product—sold from behind shutters in unbranded packaging—can only help them.
What are the lessons for Britain if and when plain packaging comes in? Unlike Australia, we don't have an illicit tobacco growing industry in our backyard, but we do have a great deal of loose leaf tobacco delivered from overseas which is then repackaged in the UK. Also unlike Australia, we have many countries with lower taxes on our doorstep. If smokers like cigarette packaging as much as ASH claim, cigarettes from Belgium and Spain will become even more attractive. Moreover, whereas it is illegal to bring in more than 50 cigarettes into Australia (seriously!), Brits can bring in virtually unlimited quantities from EU countries for their own consumption. In practice, they can bring in very large quantities for sale. The former is legal, the latter is illegal, but everyone knows it happens. Whether legal or illegal, it is bad news from Her Majesty's Treasury and it is they who will be most concerned when plain packaging arrives.
When I was in Australia last August, I saw plenty of cigarette packs that had clearly been brought in from other countries. Some were counterfeit (the giveaway is that they had no health warnings). And yet you could hardly ask for a better place to bring in plain packaging. Australia is a long way from anywhere. Britain is not.
If it does nothing else—and we can be fairly sure it won't reduce legal sales of cigarettes—plain packaging will bring the size of Britain's non-duty paid tobacco market into sharp focus. Any cigarettes that are not in 'standardised' packaging will, by definition, not have had UK duty paid on them. You will see them wherever you see smokers. This observable fact will come too late to prevent the ridiculous policy being introduced, but the reality of plain packaging will make it impossible to deny the reality of Britain's black market.
Thursday, 30 April 2015
Dodgy graph of the week
Consensus Action on Salt's threw their toys out of the pram again yesterday in the BMJ. In short, they got a large reduction in salt levels through a voluntary agreement between government and industry, and are now attacking the government for not forcing food companies to reduce it even more.
Since the anti-salt crusade began in the 1990s, new evidence has appeared to show that a low-salt diet isn't actually that good for you (eg. here and here - and see here for a summary). The policy of population-wide salt reduction, as opposed to targeted interventions for high-risk groups, remains contentious, but Consensus Action on Salt claim that the UK's 15 per cent reduction in salt intake has prevented thousands of deaths from heart disease.
I don't know whether this is true or not, but the evidence they present in their BMJ article certainly does not persuade me. Here it is...
So salt intake fell between 2003 and 2011 and so did deaths from heart disease. What compelling evidence! How wonderfully liberated from historical context it is!
Let's take a look at heart disease mortality over the long term, shall we? (Data from the British Heart Foundation.)
Campaign to your heart's content, CASH, but please don't insult our intelligence.
Since the anti-salt crusade began in the 1990s, new evidence has appeared to show that a low-salt diet isn't actually that good for you (eg. here and here - and see here for a summary). The policy of population-wide salt reduction, as opposed to targeted interventions for high-risk groups, remains contentious, but Consensus Action on Salt claim that the UK's 15 per cent reduction in salt intake has prevented thousands of deaths from heart disease.
I don't know whether this is true or not, but the evidence they present in their BMJ article certainly does not persuade me. Here it is...
So salt intake fell between 2003 and 2011 and so did deaths from heart disease. What compelling evidence! How wonderfully liberated from historical context it is!
Let's take a look at heart disease mortality over the long term, shall we? (Data from the British Heart Foundation.)
Campaign to your heart's content, CASH, but please don't insult our intelligence.
Seizing the narrative
Last year, some researchers from Cardiff University stole headlines from the Office for National Statistics by publishing data of Accident and Emergency admissions on the day before the ONS released its data on violent crime. They claimed that the fall in violence was due to alcohol becoming less affordable, despite the fact that violent crime had been falling since 1995.
This year, they did the same thing again. I believe this is called 'seizing the narrative'. I written about it for the Spectator - do have a read.
This year, they did the same thing again. I believe this is called 'seizing the narrative'. I written about it for the Spectator - do have a read.
Wednesday, 29 April 2015
Are 35% of deaths due to a 'poor diet'?
Graham MacGregor, the chair of Action on Sugar, is in the BMJ today complaining that the government hasn't compelled food companies to reduce salt as much as he wants. (MacGregor is also the chair of Consensus Action on Salt. What a small world.) He begins with this claim...
This may or may not be true, but neither of the references he cites even mention the UK so we can't tell. The first is an op-ed by Marion Nestle about 'Big Food'. The second is a webpage about a study about the USA. Aren't peer reviewers supposed to spot these errors?
MacGregor's claim is modest compared to that of Aseem Malhotra and friends in their astonishing op-ed last week (see here for a reminder). They assert that:
This is a surprising claim to anyone who is familiar with the statistics. Although the authors name the Lancet report, they do not include it in their citations, perhaps because they would then feel obliged to name the page in which the study made the claim. No such page exists because the claim isn't in the study.
Nevertheless, the notion that "poor diet" is worse than smoking, drinking and physical inactivity combined soon told hold. A nifty graphic appeared on the Telegraph website and was soon doing the rounds on Twitter.
These figures are not mentioned in the Lancet report either, but the credit to Simon Capewell gives us a clue as to how they were arrived at. The 34.6 per cent figure for "poor diet" is wrong. Badly wrong.
Here's what Capewell did. He went to the Lancet report and looked at the graph that shows the percentage of disability-adjusted life years attributed to different factors. He added the diet-related factors together and came up with a big number.
I know that's what he did because the slide below comes from a presentation he gave in 2013.
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(Incidentally, I doubt Malhotra and friends would be happy with the content of this slide presentation. It's all about how evil saturated fat is. It was, however, created before the Year Zero of 2014 when Action on Sugar was launched and Capewell declared that "sugar is the new tobacco".)
I can't be certain, but I would bet a few quid that this is the source of Malhotra's claim. When the press release for his study was being prepared, either he or Capewell simply subtracted the 5.4 per cent for alcohol to get the 34.6 per cent seen in the Telegraph graphic.
What's wrong with that? Well, pretty much everything. For a start, he's included every death from high blood pressure, high body-mass index and high cholesterol under "diet". These factors can be influenced by diet, to be sure, but there are many other causes. It is quite wrong to group them together in this way. (As for including alcohol use under "diet" in his original slide, this is unconventional, to say the least.)
Moreover, you simply can't add these figures together. One of the counter-intuitive aspects of epidemiology is that it creates attributable fractions for risk factors which, if added together, would suggest that there are many more deaths than there are people dying. If this seems peculiar, I sympathise, but that's how it is and researchers in the field are quite sanguine about it (Carl Phillips gives an explanation for the layman here).
The authors of the Lancet report make this clear at the very start of the section on 'results', saying:
In other words, if you added all the risk factors in their report together (there are many), you would conclude that there are four times as many deaths as there actually are. You would be double-counting all over the place and that's why you don't do it.
But even if you did try to compare different risk factors, you wouldn't use Capewell's method. It is bizarre that he chose to work out the percentages from the graph above (presumably using a ruler!) when the exact figures are listed in Table 2 and Table 3. If you look at those figures, you'll see the following estimates for disability-adjusted life years:
You only need to subtract the figure for physical inactivity from the figure for 'dietary risk factors and physical inactivity' to get the total DALYs attributed to a 'poor diet'. It is 185,015. This is much lower than the combined figure for alcohol, tobacco and inactivity, which is 362,219.
You can do the same with the figures for mortality in Table 2:
Again, subtracting the inactivity total from the top total gives 9,319,430 for dietary risk factors. This is much less than the 14,341,395 for alcohol, tobacco and inactivity combined.
Adding alcohol, tobacco and inactivity together entails some of the problems of confounding discussed above, but these risk factors are more likely to independent of one another and therefore less problematic than bundling a bunch of dietary risk factors together (drinking doesn't cause lung cancer, smoking doesn't cause liver cirrhosis, etc.)
But if you start adding 'diet low in fruits' to 'diet low in fibre', for example, you begin the process of double, triple and quadruple counting. Sure enough, if you add together all the deaths from 'diet low in calcium', 'diet low in milk' and so on together, the total exceeds 18 million, which is fifty per cent more than the figure for all dietary risk factors and physical inactivity combined in the Lancet report itself. This is why—if I may labour the point—you don't do it.
To an epidemiologist, this really is a schoolboy error, but it is exactly what Capewell did. He compounded the error by adding in a huge numbers of deaths that are not diet-related and are not considered to be diet-related in the original report. This misinformation was then passed onto Malhotra and friends who used it in their op-ed, a graphic was created and a meme was born.
But if "poor diet"—which, by the way, at the global level usually means malnutrition rather than excessive sugar and salt consumption—does not cause 34.6 per cent of all disease, how much does it cause?
You don't need to crunch numbers or estimate percentages from graphs to work this out. All you need to do is go to page 2,253 of the Lancet report and you will see these words...
So it's 10 per cent, not 34.6 per cent (and the researchers also say that "we stress that these results should still be interpreted with caution"). This is not a trivial difference, by any means. It amounts to claiming that a quarter of all deaths worldwide—some 14 million—are due to poor diet when they are not. And since more than 10 per cent of deaths are attributed to smoking, alcohol and physical inactivity, this means that the claim in the Malhotra op-ed is also wrong.
May I humbly suggest that the media start asking questions of these people and that peer reviewers start doing their job?
Poor diet is now the biggest cause of death and ill health in the United Kingdom and worldwide.
This may or may not be true, but neither of the references he cites even mention the UK so we can't tell. The first is an op-ed by Marion Nestle about 'Big Food'. The second is a webpage about a study about the USA. Aren't peer reviewers supposed to spot these errors?
MacGregor's claim is modest compared to that of Aseem Malhotra and friends in their astonishing op-ed last week (see here for a reminder). They assert that:
According to the Lancet global burden of disease reports, poor diet now generates more disease than physical inactivity, alcohol and smoking combined.
This is a surprising claim to anyone who is familiar with the statistics. Although the authors name the Lancet report, they do not include it in their citations, perhaps because they would then feel obliged to name the page in which the study made the claim. No such page exists because the claim isn't in the study.
Nevertheless, the notion that "poor diet" is worse than smoking, drinking and physical inactivity combined soon told hold. A nifty graphic appeared on the Telegraph website and was soon doing the rounds on Twitter.
These figures are not mentioned in the Lancet report either, but the credit to Simon Capewell gives us a clue as to how they were arrived at. The 34.6 per cent figure for "poor diet" is wrong. Badly wrong.
Here's what Capewell did. He went to the Lancet report and looked at the graph that shows the percentage of disability-adjusted life years attributed to different factors. He added the diet-related factors together and came up with a big number.
I know that's what he did because the slide below comes from a presentation he gave in 2013.
(Incidentally, I doubt Malhotra and friends would be happy with the content of this slide presentation. It's all about how evil saturated fat is. It was, however, created before the Year Zero of 2014 when Action on Sugar was launched and Capewell declared that "sugar is the new tobacco".)
I can't be certain, but I would bet a few quid that this is the source of Malhotra's claim. When the press release for his study was being prepared, either he or Capewell simply subtracted the 5.4 per cent for alcohol to get the 34.6 per cent seen in the Telegraph graphic.
What's wrong with that? Well, pretty much everything. For a start, he's included every death from high blood pressure, high body-mass index and high cholesterol under "diet". These factors can be influenced by diet, to be sure, but there are many other causes. It is quite wrong to group them together in this way. (As for including alcohol use under "diet" in his original slide, this is unconventional, to say the least.)
Moreover, you simply can't add these figures together. One of the counter-intuitive aspects of epidemiology is that it creates attributable fractions for risk factors which, if added together, would suggest that there are many more deaths than there are people dying. If this seems peculiar, I sympathise, but that's how it is and researchers in the field are quite sanguine about it (Carl Phillips gives an explanation for the layman here).
The authors of the Lancet report make this clear at the very start of the section on 'results', saying:
The effects of multiple risk factors are not a simple addition of the individual effects and are often smaller than their sums, especially for cardiovascular diseases, which are affected by several risk factors (eg, table 2). The sum of the individual effects of just the metabolic risk factors at the global level is 121% and the summation of all the risks is greater than 400%.
In other words, if you added all the risk factors in their report together (there are many), you would conclude that there are four times as many deaths as there actually are. You would be double-counting all over the place and that's why you don't do it.
But even if you did try to compare different risk factors, you wouldn't use Capewell's method. It is bizarre that he chose to work out the percentages from the graph above (presumably using a ruler!) when the exact figures are listed in Table 2 and Table 3. If you look at those figures, you'll see the following estimates for disability-adjusted life years:
Dietary risk factors and physical inactivity: 254,333,000
Alcohol use: 136,063,000
Tobacco smoking (including second-hand smoke): 156,838,000
Physical inactivity: 69,318,000
You only need to subtract the figure for physical inactivity from the figure for 'dietary risk factors and physical inactivity' to get the total DALYs attributed to a 'poor diet'. It is 185,015. This is much lower than the combined figure for alcohol, tobacco and inactivity, which is 362,219.
You can do the same with the figures for mortality in Table 2:
Dietary risk factors and physical inactivity: 12,503,370
Alcohol use: 4,860,168
Tobacco smoking (including second-hand smoke): 6,297,287
Physical inactivity: 3,183,940
Again, subtracting the inactivity total from the top total gives 9,319,430 for dietary risk factors. This is much less than the 14,341,395 for alcohol, tobacco and inactivity combined.
Adding alcohol, tobacco and inactivity together entails some of the problems of confounding discussed above, but these risk factors are more likely to independent of one another and therefore less problematic than bundling a bunch of dietary risk factors together (drinking doesn't cause lung cancer, smoking doesn't cause liver cirrhosis, etc.)
But if you start adding 'diet low in fruits' to 'diet low in fibre', for example, you begin the process of double, triple and quadruple counting. Sure enough, if you add together all the deaths from 'diet low in calcium', 'diet low in milk' and so on together, the total exceeds 18 million, which is fifty per cent more than the figure for all dietary risk factors and physical inactivity combined in the Lancet report itself. This is why—if I may labour the point—you don't do it.
To an epidemiologist, this really is a schoolboy error, but it is exactly what Capewell did. He compounded the error by adding in a huge numbers of deaths that are not diet-related and are not considered to be diet-related in the original report. This misinformation was then passed onto Malhotra and friends who used it in their op-ed, a graphic was created and a meme was born.
But if "poor diet"—which, by the way, at the global level usually means malnutrition rather than excessive sugar and salt consumption—does not cause 34.6 per cent of all disease, how much does it cause?
You don't need to crunch numbers or estimate percentages from graphs to work this out. All you need to do is go to page 2,253 of the Lancet report and you will see these words...
We have expanded the set of components of diet included from a combined category of fruits and vegetables in the 2000 comparative risk assessment to 15 components in GBD 2010; together these dietary risk factors account for a tenth of global disease burden.
So it's 10 per cent, not 34.6 per cent (and the researchers also say that "we stress that these results should still be interpreted with caution"). This is not a trivial difference, by any means. It amounts to claiming that a quarter of all deaths worldwide—some 14 million—are due to poor diet when they are not. And since more than 10 per cent of deaths are attributed to smoking, alcohol and physical inactivity, this means that the claim in the Malhotra op-ed is also wrong.
May I humbly suggest that the media start asking questions of these people and that peer reviewers start doing their job?
Tuesday, 28 April 2015
More evidence on physical activity and obesity
Tim Olds has written a nice article about the bogus controversy about whether burning off calories helps people lose weight.
He even dares to tell the truth about calorie consumption...
It's not often that The Conversation publishes a sensible article so do read it.
People don’t seem to be exercising more or less than they used to. Studies show little historical change in leisure time physical activity. But there have been big declines in occupational physical activity as workplaces have become automated and the service economy replaces manufacturing and farming.
A study looking at work-related physical activity over five decades showed declines of about 500 kilojoules a day in energy expended on the job by US workers. Another spanning 45 years suggests the time women spent on domestic chores required about 1,000 kilojoules less each day in 2010 than they did in 1965.
Declines in energy expenditure of this magnitude are more than enough to account for historical increases in fatness.
He even dares to tell the truth about calorie consumption...
In 2008, one of my graduate students, Jo Stevenson, systematically reviewed studies reporting the energy intake of children. She found 2,148 reports dating back to 1856, covering 425,905 mainly European, North American and Australian children.
There was a consistent decline in energy intake of school-aged kids from 1920 onwards, at the rate of about 2% to 3% per decade, flattening out in the late 1990s. By 2000, kids were eating about 20% less than they did in 1920. Even conservatively allowing for under-reporting by fatter kids and methodological differences, the decline was still of the order of 1% to 2% per decade. Unfortunately, this research wasn’t published so I can’t link it here.
The evidence that adults are eating more may also be very suspect. Data from the periodic National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES) in the United States are often used to indicate upward trends in energy intake. But Blair’s team has previously convincingly argued – in a peer-reviewed article published in a well-respected journal – that these trends are likely to be artefacts resulting from changes in research methodology, and that dietary data are inherently unreliable anyway.
So historically, the evidence is that it ain’t the meat it’s the motion.
It's not often that The Conversation publishes a sensible article so do read it.
Monday, 27 April 2015
Exercise doesn't help people lose weight?!
I've started writing for the Spectator blog. My first post went live today and looks at The Dodgy Science Behind the Claim that Exercise Doesn't Help You Lose Weight. Please pay it a visit.
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