Aseem Malhotra screws up again

Our old friend Aseem Malhotra is starting to become a regular at Retraction Watch. A year after sparking an investigation at the British Medical Journal, Malhotra found himself in hot water with the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

You almost certainly heard about Malhotra's article in the BJSM attacking the 'myth' that exercise helps people lose weight. This risible claim was broadcast around the world. What you probably did not hear is that the article was taken offline within 48 hours and only reappeared last week.

Why was it suspended? Any number of factual inaccuracies could have been responsible (see here for an example), but rumour had it that undisclosed conflicts of interest were the main reason. As I mentioned at the time, Malhotra's co-authors are neck deep in the low-carb/Atkins/banting diet and one of them has a book to sell. This is a fairly mild competing interest, but it is typical of a BMJ publication to be more concerned about an author receiving an indirect financial benefit than about his article being truthful.

The competing interest was not the only reason, however. The article has been subtly altered and the following notice has been added...

Correction notice This article has been amended from the original published on 29th April 2015. The body of the text was slightly edited and a reference removed. Competing interests have been added.

The edited part looked like this in the original...

It now looks like this...

As you can see, the journal has removed the part about the tobacco industry "buying the loyalty of bent scientists". This is important because the paragraph in question accuses the food industry of using "tactics chillingly similar to those of big tobacco."

And, in case anybody was in any doubt that Malhotra et al. are accusing the food industry of hiring 'bent scientists', reference 5 (which has now also been removed) was 'Sugar: spinning a web of influence' by Jonathan Gornall. I wrote about Gornall's article (which was published in the BMJ) a few months ago.

A theme is emerging in his hatchet jobs. First, he takes a policy which is controversial with the public but which has legitimate arguments for and against. He then treats the policy as a no-brainer which could only possibly be opposed by vested interests. He then looks for any kind of funding from business to civil society and the public sector; if he cannot find any he implies that it exists. Finally, he pads out his articles with quotes from activists and presents their failure to persuade government to bring in the controversial policy as being the result of 'webs of influence'.

Last year it was minimum pricing with the Alcohol Health Alliance. This time it's food reformulation with Action on Sugar.

Gornall's articles for the BMJ have all been of a very low quality and the journal embarrassed itself by publishing the sugar article, in particular. Gornall failed to understand that collaborations between the government and the food industry are not a dirty secret. On the contrary, they are the norm, and everybody who works in the field understands this.

The great and the good of 'public health' nutrition lined up in the Rapid Responses to attack the article. Prof Barry Popkin described it as "not only naïve but misguided" and said that Dr Susan Jebb, who bore the brunt of Gornall's poison pen, was "quite incorrectly impugned". The Chief Executive of the Medical Research Council said "please add my name to your 'tangled web'. It would be an honour to stand alongside scientists such as Susan Jebb, Ann Prentice and Ian Macdonald, who are committed to improving public health through research." It's worth reading the Rapid Responses in full.

This should have been enough for the BMJ to end its association with Gornall but I understand that he is currently carrying out more "research" for the journal. Even Gornall, however, did not describe Susan Jebb, Ian MacDonald et al. as "bent scientists". By using that phrase and citing Gornall's article as proof, Malhotra and his chums came very close to doing so. In the eyes of the libel lawyers, they may actually have done so, hence the retraction and correction.

Here we have two people—Malhotra and Gornall—who should not be allowed within a hundred miles of a medical journal publishing utter tripe, with one referencing the other. This Laurel and Hardy act would be quite amusing if it didn't push, and indeed exceed, the boundaries of what can be printed in a serious magazine. As I have shown time and again on this blog, Malhotra writes down the first thing that comes into his head. He is extremely credulous and not terribly bright. This is the second time in twelve months that he has got a journal into trouble, despite the fact that he rarely writes for journals. How many more chances is he going to be given?

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That OECD report on booze

The OECD, a think tank, has produced a report on alcohol which has received worldwide news coverage. Funded by the European Commission, the report contains nothing new and much that is false. Its alcohol consumption stats for the UK bear no resemblance to the usually accepted figures and therefore don't inspire much confidence in the figures it gives for other countries.

The aim of the report appears to be promoting minimum pricing and advertising bans. The fat controller Martin McKee wrote a chapter on the former while Henry Saffer, who is virtually the only economist to have published research which concludes that advertising increases aggregate consumption, wrote a heavily self-referencing chapter on the latter.

It beggars belief that in 2015—after ten consecutive years in which alcohol consumption has declined—journalists still have the nerve to pretend that drinking is on the rise. Nick Triggle, the public health lobby's favourite BBC poodle, put out a report which claimed that alcohol consumption is higher than it was in the early 1990s and that youth drinking is "on the rise". Both claims are demonstrably untrue.

I've written a blog post about this nonsense for The Spectator so please do have a read.

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The non-epidemic of 10 year olds smoking

From the Beeb...

Children as young as 10 'smoke before exams', survey suggests

OMG! We're going to hell in a handcart!!

Children as young as 10 are smoking cigarettes, eating junk food and drinking energy drinks for breakfast before sitting exams, a study says.

Memo to the BBC: a survey is not a study, however much you think calling it one gives it gravitas.

Who are these chain-smoking, Red Bull swilling, junk food scoffing reprobates? The first thing to note is that there are very, very few of them. As usual, the study survey is not available to read, but the Beeb's report says that "more than a thousand" (1,042 in fact) 10 to 11 year olds were surveyed. Of these, eight—yes, eight—said they had smoked on the day of their exam.

It is obviously troubling that any child of this age is smoking, but we are talking about less than 0.8 per cent of the sample. Moreover, the data is self-reported and, as I have said before, there are always going to be some respondents to surveys who don't read the question, don't understand the question, don't tick the right box or are having a laugh.

There have always been children of this age who smoke but there are probably fewer of them today than ever before. The latest figures from the ONS showed that 0.5 per cent of eleven year olds claim to be regular smokers. One child smoking is one too many, blah, blah, blah. The point is that eight kids out of more than a thousand is not a big enough number to be newsworthy.

What's more interesting about the report is the way that eating biscuits, chocolate and crisps is gradually being grouped in with smoking as a forbidden habit. Again, the numbers are remarkably small...

30 children had high-sugar drinks for breakfast on the morning of their exam, while 45 had biscuits, 19 had crisps, and nine had a pasty or sausage roll.

To put it another way, more than 97 per cent did not have a high-sugar drink, more than 96.5 per cent did not have a biscuit, more than 98.1 per cent did not have crisps and more than 99 per cent did not have a pasty or sausage roll.

Nobody would recommend a breakfast of biscuits and chocolate bars, but when did eating them before midday become deviant behaviour? When I was at school, we were sold biscuits and chocolate bars during the morning break. We were even sold pasties at lunchtime. The horror! Thanks to Jamie Oliver, I suppose they would be breaking all sorts of laws if they tried that now.

What is this research trying to achieve? At first glance it looks like it's based on a press release to kick off yet another anti-smoking drive for the chiiiiiildren, but it isn't. The BBC report includes a quote from someone who wants more schools to have breakfast clubs, but it's not from them either. The survey was actually commissioned by Kelloggs, presumably as a way to publicise the benefits of eating cereal for breakfast, but since the 'public health' lobby have turned on cereals that seems a lost cause.

Apparently Kelloggs are donating a load of food to breakfast clubs, but since the media didn't report that part of the story and instead led with the negligible findings on smoking they must wonder why they bothered.

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Eat less, move more

At The Spectator today, I conclude my posts about diet, physical activity and weight loss. This is my final word on the subject (for now).

Do have a read.

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Reflecting on the election

“China will go capitalist. 

Soviet Russia will not survive the century. 

Labour as we know it will never rule again.” 

Arthur Seldon, The Times, August 6, 1980

A couple of hours before the polls closed on Thursday night I had a conversation with a friend who was asked me to imagine people looking back with amazement on the wave of mass hysteria that led them to believe that Ed Miliband ever had a serious chance of becoming Prime Minister. He decided to put £25 on a Tory majority at odds of 25/1. The exit polls came out two hours later. The rest, as they say, is history.

Regrettably, I didn't join him in his bet. I had already put £100 on a Tory majority nine months earlier (at 3/1) with a further £100 on a hung parliament (at 6/5) as insurance. The one thing I have always been sure of over the last five years is that Labour wouldn't win a majority under Ed Miliband, and by Thursday the betting market firmly agreed (it was 100/1 the night before the election).

For five years I have been saying that the Tories could sneak a win if (a) the economy recovered by the time of the election, and (b) if Ed Miliband remained leader of the opposition, but by Thursday night I had accepted that this wasn't going to happen. The opinion polls were unanimous. The Conservatives had, in my opinion, run a campaign so lacklustre that it was hard to tell if it had ever begun. The leaders' debates had moved the Overton window dramatically to the left by including the nationalist parties and the Greens. It seemed that the public really had swallowed the fiction about so-called austerity being an ideological choice rather than a modest attempt to get the country living within its means. They had, perhaps, even fallen for the perennial lie about the NHS being privatised.

David Cameron had already failed to beat Gordon Brown, the worst Prime Minister of my lifetime, and it now seemed certain that he would fail to beat the worst candidate in a generation. If he couldn't beat Miliband, it was hard to see the Conservatives ever winning a majority again.

We now know that the leftward shift in public opinion was a chimera. The polls were so wrong that few people will ever take them seriously again. But it was the polling that was shocking, not the result. There is nothing shocking about a centre-right party winning a slim majority against a weak opponent in a growing economy. If, in 2011, you gave the following information to anybody who is familiar with how the British electorate has voted for the last 40 years, they would have correctly predicted the result:

1. The Liberal Democrats are unpopular and are no longer a protest vote.
2. The economy is doing well and the Tories are perceived to be tackling the national debt.
3. Ed Miliband is the leader of the opposition.
4. Lots of people are determined to vote UKIP.
5. There is a huge swing to the SNP.

All of these facts were well established by the time people went to the ballot box. The only question was where the UKIP votes would come from and where the Lib Dem votes go. Even now, the answer is not fully clear, but overall the Tories benefited from the decline of the Lib Dems and UKIP damaged Labour more than it damaged the Tories.

For all the talk about the SNP, the simple truth is that their landslide in Scotland had no impact on the final outcome. The Tories would still have a majority if Labour had held every one of their Scottish seats. Labour was not defeated by a wave of nationalism, as Miliband has implied. The battle was won and lost in England. Insofar as the SNP had an influence on the result, it was by making people vote Tory out of fear of a Labour-SNP pact, but even this aspect of the election has, I think, being overhyped.

With hindsight, it is obvious that the Lib Dems would not merely lose half their seats, as the conventional wisdom had dictated, but would lose nearly all their seats. Why did we ever buy into the nonsense about dozens of Lib Dem MPs clinging on because of their local popularity? Because the opinion polls said so.

As for UKIP, it does not even require hindsight to see that they were never going to win the dozen or even half-dozen seats that were predicted after they won the European election. The logic of first past the post made this impossible. My own prediction was two or three seats, and most people I spoke to thought this was unrealistically low. In the end, they got one. Is it unfair that a party which received four million votes has only one MP? Arguably so, but everyone knew how the voting system worked before the election took place and UKIP themselves set themselves the more realistic goal of coming second in many seats as a springboard for 2020.

So much rubbish has already been written about Labour's failure to win. I'll tell you in six words why they lost: England is not a socialist country. The only Labour politicians who have won elections in the last 60 years are Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, both of whom were on the right of the Labour party and both of whom could have comfortably joined the Conservatives. Wilson's government was considerably more left-wing than Blair's, I grant you, but that only goes to show that Britain has become less left-wing over time.

The opinion polls led us to believe in a fantasy. All of the political chat of the last few months—nay, years—was based on an illusion, an illusion that many people were eager to believe. You could see it on Twitter, on Newsnight and in the pages of The Guardian. The illusion of the progressive consensus. The illusion of the leftward lurch. The illusion that inequality, not growth, was the defining issue of our time. It was an illusion that ultimately guaranteed Labour's defeat because it prevented the party from doing the one thing that would have given them a chance, ie. getting rid of Ed Miliband.

Looking back, there were two moments in the campaign which illustrated the clash between fantasy and reality. The challengers' debate provided the fantasy. By sheer force of numbers, three leaders—Bennett, Sturgeon and Wood—portrayed Miliband as something akin to a right-wing fanatic because he was not deemed to be sufficiently 'anti-austerity'. What an extraordinary sight this was, this amen corner of socialist utopianism in which money fell out of the sky and government solved everything. This was political debate as seen from the coffee shops of Islington, where the centre-ground lies somewhere between the left and the far-left. In this company, the risible, economically illiterate quasi-Bolshevism of the Green party was taken more seriously that the views of Nigel Farage, whose party would go on to win more votes than the SNP, the Greens and Plaid Cymru combined.

That was the fantasy. The reality came later when the leaders faced a Question Time audience in Leeds. This time the real questions were asked. Did Labour overspend? How can Labour be trusted on the economy? How are you going to cut the deficit? Do you understand, let alone support, business? After stumbling in front of this audience, Ed Miliband must have been relieved when the media focused on him merely stumbling off the stage. The lefty Twittersphere erupted with complaints about the supposed right-wing bias of the audience. Another fantasy. It was simply the English electorate.

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Obesity balls

In 2006, they said a third of men would be obese by 2010. They were wrong.

In 2007, they said a third of men would be obese by 2015. They were wrong again.

Now they say 36 per cent of men will be obese by 2030. I'll put money on them being wrong yet again.

And the predictions they've made for women are just as bad.

Read my take at The Spectator...

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Physical activity and obesity revisited

The fake controversy about physical activity and obesity—new blog post from me for The Spectator. Do have a read.

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