Soda down, obesity up

A new study from Australia's Obesity Policy Coalition claims that a 20 per cent tax on sugary drinks would reduce consumption by 12.6 per cent. The authors reckon the tax 'could save more than 1600 lives and raise at least $400 million a year'.

In Britain, we've heard all this before from campaigners with their computer models. Sugar tax models are simple. Too simple. They assume that if prices go up, sales goes down and calorie consumption declines.

The first assumption is reasonable. All things being equal, we would expect sales to fall when prices rise, although the scale of the decline is far less predictable than is implied by the spurious accuracy of the Australian study's 12.6 per cent.

It is the second assumption that is problematic. If people spend less money on one source of calories they might spend more on another source of calories. This is known as the substitution effect and it is not just a theory. It is exactly what happens when people drink fewer sugary drinks. In the USA, where most states already have a soft drink tax, a study of young people concluded that the 'reduction in soda consumption is completely offset by increases in consumption of other high-calorie drinks.'

If, as Jamie Oliver and his cohorts claim, sugar in soft drinks was such a significant factor in the rise in obesity, you might expect obesity rates to fall when sugary drink consumption falls. But consumption has been falling for years. In America, it is at a thirty year low and yet rates of obesity continue to rise.

Surprised? You shouldn't be. As Dr. Rafael Perez-Escamilla, a Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale School of Public Health, recently explained to Discovery News...

'The fact that the obesity epidemic in the USA remains unabated in spite of significant reductions in consumption of sugar sweetened beverages, including sodas, over the past years may be related to consumers simply replacing the lower consumption of calories from sugar-sweetened beverages with calories from other food products. In other words it is possible that individuals deciding to consume diet sodas or water instead of regular sodas, are not ‘saving’ those calories but rather are simply consuming the same amount of calories or even more from other foods.'

The American experience can be filed under 'things that actually happen in the real world' and is therefore of no interest to sugar tax campaigners. Never mind. They will always have their computer models.

Cross-posted at Spectator Health

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Inconsistent alcohol guidelines

From The Times (but you can read it in The Australian):

If you like a drink but are worried about your health, you might want to move to Chile, or the United States. Men there can get through five glasses of wine a night before doctors think they are having too much, according to a study that found huge variations in national alcohol guidance.

... "It’s not scientifically possible that women should drink [a bit] less than men, half as much or the same as men. But we find all these things in the guidelines,” Professor Humphreys said.

He argued that guidance reflected cultural choices, not pure science. “Governments and countries make judgments that are more than empirical,” he said. “In some it’s socially unacceptable for women to drink whereas in others there’s a feminist understanding that women shouldn’t be embarrassed to drink as much as men.”

All countries agreed that large amounts of alcohol were dangerous, he said. The debate was “more around whether it’s one, two or three” daily drinks.

That is pretty much what I said in the recent Spectator Health debate about whether we can trust health advice. I started my speech like this...

Before answering the question of whether we can trust health advice we must first ask: ‘Which health advice?’ It varies so much over time and between countries. In 1979, the government advised men to drink no more than 56 units of alcohol a week. This was later reduced to 36 units, then 28 units and then 21 units. Last month, the Chief Medical Officer reduced it once again, this time to 14 units. Upon announcing this, she also asserted that there is no safe level of drinking and that the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption were ‘an old wives tale’.

Male drinking guidelines vary enormously around the world, from 52 units a week in Fiji to 35 units in Spain, all the way down to seven units in Guyana. There is no other country in the world that has the same guidelines as the UK. The day after Sally Davies released her report, the US National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism announced the results of its review of alcohol guidelines and maintained the recommendation for men of up to 25 units per week. This government organisation estimates that 26,000 deaths a year are prevented by moderate alcohol consumption thanks to reduced risk from heart disease, diabetes and stroke. In America, the guidelines for women are lower than they are for men, as they are in all but a handful of countries worldwide. Britain is now one of the few.

Therefore, in order to trust this latest piece of health advice from our Chief Medical Officer, we must believe not only that every previous Chief Medical Officer got it wrong but that every other country in the world has got it wrong. That requires a degree of patriotism that I am unable to summon up, particularly since the current advice bears no relationship whatsoever to the scientific evidence.

The author of the Addiction study sounds surprisingly reasonable...

Uncertainty in the evidence is at least partly a result of people lying about how much they drink and Professor Humphreys said that “a certain amount of humility would be appropriate” from the authorities. “Public health people approach life in terms of risk minimisation but the rest of us approach life at least partly in terms of fun,” he added.

He's not going last long in 'public health' with that kind of attitude.

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Regulation junkies

The Liberal Democrats published a report calling for the legalisation of cannabis last month. I'm afraid I wasn't impressed. I've written a critique for Volte-Face.

After successful experiments in Uruguay and parts of the USA, the relegalisation of cannabis in Britain is no longer a distant dream and the Liberal Democrats should be applauded for spelling out what a post-prohibition cannabis market could look like. It is only a shame that they have allowed their blueprint to be shaped by regulation junkies like David Nutt and Steve Rolles (of Transform) who would restrict the sale of Sherbet Fountains to pharmacists if they were given the opportunity.

... For Rolles et al., cannabis is a Bad Thing and the fewer people who smoke it the better. Drug dealers are also a Bad Thing, however, and their plan is to replace them with benign government and all-knowing regulators. To that end, they call for the creation of a ‘Cannabis Regulatory Authority’ to ‘license the production of a fixed volume of specified products’ for licensed retailers. These retailers would not be able to advertise or create any brands because ‘plain packaging should be mandatory for all retail cannabis, with standardised non-branded designs along the lines of prescription pharmaceuticals’. Resin would remain illegal, as would edible cannabis, and there would be no Amsterdam-style coffee shops.

Products would not only be labelled with ‘mandated information and warnings about key health risks’ but would be sold in ‘re-sealable childproof containers’ with ‘more detailed health information […] on printed inserts […] similar to those that accompany all prescription medicines.’ A eighth of weed in a plastic bag from a man in a pub suddenly seems glamorous.

As if that weren’t enough, retailers would not be able to set their own prices because the government would introduce ‘either direct price fixing, or maximum and minimum price controls’. In other words, in the unlikely event of a Lib Dem government, the state will decide how much cannabis can be commercially produced, where it can be sold, what its packaging will look like, what can be said about it and how much it can be sold for. This is a market in the loosest sense of the word. Indeed, it is barely a market at all. 

The scary thing is that this is how the authors of the report want to regulate tobacco and alcohol as well.

Do read the whole article.

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Slip sliding away

You may recall Aussie 'public health' sociologist Simon Chapman mocking concerns about the slippery slope 2012:
 

Look, if the slope is slippery, it's the most unslippery slippery dip I've ever seen in my life. We started banning tobacco advertising in 1976 and there has been no other commodity where there has been anything like a serious move to do what we've done with tobacco.

So, you know, the comparisons with hamburgers and chocolate bars and alcohol and such with like that, they're just really don't stack up.

Meanwhile, in 2016...

Advertisements for gambling would be treated like tobacco promotions and banned completely under a policy announced by the Greens.

The Greens leader, Richard Di Natale, said on Friday the ban would “make it possible for people to sit down with their kids and watch a game of footy without being bombarded by constant messages to bet”.

He likened it to the prohibition on tobacco advertising instituted in 1992.

This comes a few days after the Royal Australasian College of Physicians called for graphic warnings on alcohol packaging. In the UK, the British Medical Association has been demanding a total ban on alcohol advertising for years, and the campaign to extend plain packaging to food, drink and even toys has already begun. Many other examples are available.

I'm sure Chapman is shocked and appalled to see anti-smoking policies being applied to other products in a way that nobody could possibly have foreseen. No doubt he will condemn the inappropriate comparison between smoking and other behaviours in the strongest possible terms and apologise for giving people the impression that none of this would never happen.

He'll definitely do that, right? I mean, he wouldn't want to get a reputation for being some sort of spiv.

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Australia goes full wowser

Australia is sliding into the abyss. It's nanny state has always been active but in the last seven days the wowsers have gone into full-throttle, batshit crazy, fetch-the-tranquilisers overdrive. Here's the evidence...

Exhibit A (April 4th): Women of child-bearing age should be teetotal

The Royal Australasian College of Physicians has called for all women “of reproductive age” who consume more than two standard drinks a day to be subject to “interventions” on the basis that they might be pregnant, in a remarkable submission to a Senate inquiry.

...These guidelines mean that drinking just two 375 ml full-strength beers or two average-sized glasses of wine a day is risky, and drinking three is “binge drinking” of more than four standard drinks on any single single occasion.

The RACP would therefore appear to want all woman below, say, 50 to be subject to monitoring and “early intervention” if they drink two beers or wines a day or drink three beers or wines on a single occasion; these are distinguished from the “brief interventions”  (one-on-one doctor-patient counselling) discussed elsewhere in the submission.

Exhibit B (March 31st): Plain packaging for toys

Children’s toys should be subject to plain-packaging laws similar to cigarettes, an inter­national women’s group says. 

In a submission to the domestic violence and gender inequality Senate inquiry, ​the Adelaide branch of Zonta International says some toys teach girls to be sexy and submissive and boys to be macho and dominant.

“Sexualisation of young children through products, dress, toys and cosmetics reinforces that girls should be sexy, submissive, and boys should be dominant, macho, important and strong,” it says. “These products reinforce boys to grow to males that can be powerful and strong, and that girls need to be attractive and submissive to males. (We) suggest making a campaign like the successful plain packaging of cigarettes.”

Exhibit C (April 4th): $758 fine for smoking outdoors

Beer gardens and outdoor areas of cafes would become entirely smoke-free under a new Victorian proposal supported by more than a dozen leading health and community groups.

The government announced last year that smoking would be banned in outdoor venues where food is served from August 2017, with on-the-spot fines and a maximum penalty of $758 for people who break the law.

But the heads of 15 organisations including the Australian Medical Association, Cancer Council Victoria and the hospitality workers union, United Voice, say the new rules do not go far enough and could lead to bans on diners eating outside.

Exhibit D (April 3rd): Anti-gambling academic claims companies are trying to normalise normal things

Sports betting agencies are adopting similar marketing techniques used by the powerful tobacco lobby to convince people that online gambling is an intrinsic part of Australian culture, new research suggests.

As the Turnbull government prepares to unveil reforms to crack down on foreign bookmakers, a study has found that betting giants are increasingly using gender stereotypes, fan rituals and images of mateship to "normalise" online wagering through highly targeted advertisements.

"The same playbook that we saw in tobacco and alcohol is happening again," said Samantha Thomas, a public health academic at Deakin University, which led the study.

"It's being depicted in advertising as though it's part of Aussie culture – this idea that if you're a true Aussie bloke, you go to the pub, you hang with your mates, you watch your sport and now you also gamble on sport as well. [This women lives in Australia, right? That's what they do - CJS] We should all be smarter about the way these companies seek to normalise their product."

Exhibit E (April 2nd): Graphic warnings and other wowser lunacy for alcohol

Access to alcohol would be drastically reduced under a radical rethink of liquor laws, taxes and sales being urged by one of the country's most influential groups of doctors.

The proposed regime recommends:

• The legal age for buying takeaway alcohol should be raised immediately, ahead of a public debate about lifting the drinking age
• State governments should ramp up last drinks and early closing laws such as those implemented in NSW, including shorter trading hours for bottle shops and bars
• Local councils should be given the power to reduce the number of licensed premises in their communities by challenging existing liquor licences and implementing caps on the number of bars
• Sports sponsorship by alcohol companies should be banned, as a precursor to a total ban on advertising alcohol to young people
• Alcohol packaging should carry warning labels, akin to cigarettes, under the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code

Australian control freaks are only ever half a step ahead of the British nutters so brace yourself.

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Last Orders podcast

In a new Spiked podcast, Tom Slater, myself and a special guest will be providing a monthly update on the decline of Western civilisation. In the first episode, we are joined by Clare Fox (Moral Maze, Institute of Ideas) to discuss the failed Welsh vaping ban, the sugar tax and the youth of today.

Listen/subscribe here.

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Endless obesity babble

Here we go again. How many prophecies have to fail before we build up a resistance to them? I have written about obesity predictions before so I won’t bore you with the details again, but the key facts are these. In 2007, the government’s ironically-titled Foresight report predicted that 36 per cent of men would be obese by 2015. When this forecast was made, the male obesity rate in England was 24 per cent. By 2014 - the year for which we have the latest data - it had rocketed to, er, 24 per cent. 

In 2011, the Lancet predicted ‘a rise in obesity prevalence in men from 26% to 41–48% and in women from 26% to 35–43% [by 2030].’ The female obesity rate is currently 27 per cent whereas the male obesity rate has dropped slightly to 24 per cent. There is still time for the Lancet to be proven right, but the current trajectory is way off target.

Figures from the rest of the UK are similar to those from England. Adult obesity in Wales is currently at 22 per cent. In Scotland it is 28 per cent. In Northern Ireland it is 25 per cent.

If obesity rates are rising, they are doing so very slowly. I would not be foolish enough to make a prediction of my own, but the evidence from the last decade is more consistent with a levelling off than a surge. Since 2002, the male obesity rate in England has hovered between 22 and 26 per cent. For women, it has kept within the range of 23 and 27 per cent. At the most, adult obesity has risen by two percentage points since the Foresight report was published under Tony Blair. Childhood obesity peaked in 2004 at 19 per cent and has since fallen to 17 per cent.

The woeful track record of obesity predictions can be explained in four words: ‘If current trends continue…’ Between 1993 and 2002 there was a clear and steep increase in obesity. The adult rate in England rose from 15 to 23 per cent. If that trend had continued we would indeed be looking at half the population being obese by 2030. But it didn’t and there was never any reason to assume it would. It now seems clear that the 1993 to 2002 period was exceptional. It is absurd to assume that an exceptional trend is going to continue in a linear way indefinitely, particularly when the trend in question is no longer 'current'.

Extrapolating from current trends is a terrible way to make a prediction. At the time of the Foresight report, the bankers had looked at current trends and decided that house prices would keep on rising forever and, therefore, that there was no risk in lending money to people who had no chance of paying it back. Like the obesity forecasters, they were making a crude and naive error.

Given what has happened to obesity rates in the UK over the last ten years, you might expect obesity forecasters to be more circumspect, if not apologetic, but you would be wrong. Today saw the publication of yet another study from the Lancet which doubles down on its previous gamble by forecasting a 38 per cent obesity rate in Britain by 2025.

Actually, it doesn’t. The study contains no specific predictions for the UK. The 38 per cent figure only appears in a sexed-up press release sent to journalists. Readers can make up their own minds about what this says about standards at The Lancet these days, but it cannot be denied that they know how to play the media. The 38 per cent prediction is all the newspapers and, as always with these guesstimates, is being treated like the written word of God.

Contrast this media fanfare with the radio silence that greeted the publication of the official obesity figures in December. Those figures went almost entirely unnoticed, presumably because they once again failed to show any change. For the umpteenth year running, the Health Survey for England noted that around a quarter of adults are obese. Ho-hum.

Something has surely gone wrong when highly implausible, unpublished obesity predictions are given blanket media coverage while actual data is routinely ignored. No one has reflected on the dismal track record of all previous obesity forecasts, nor has anyone asked how the two percentage point rise in obesity seen in the last ten years translates to a twelve percentage point rise in the next ten years (as would have to take place for the Lancet’s latest piece of soothsaying to be correct). The increasing reliance on outrageous predictions about the obesity 'time bomb' seems designed to deflect attention from the stubborn refusal of the bomb to go off.

Cross-posted at Spectator Health


PS. Sarah Knapton, the alleged science editor of the Telegraph, confirmed that she is a nitwit with this gem in her article about the Lancet's claim...

Obesity currently costs the health service £47 billion a year,  just under half the entire NHS budget.

Half of the NHS budget spent on obesity?! It beggars belief that anyone could type these words and not think 'hang on, that can't possibly be right'.

It's not right, of course. The £47 billion is made up of societal costs (intangible costs, lost productivity, etc.). The costs to the NHS are a tenth of that. 

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