Friday, 8 March 2019

Junk food (part two)


Further to yesterday's post, the IEA has now published my short briefing paper looking at what qualifies as 'junk food' for British regulators. The actual category is HFSS (High in Fat, Salt or Sugar) and my primary conclusion is that...

Polling companies should avoid the term ‘junk food’ in surveys. The legally meaningfully term HFSS should be used (and explained) instead. Politicians and journalists should also familiarise themselves with the definition of HFSS and give the public an accurate impression of the range of food and drink products that will be impacted by further government regulation.

HFSS food is what the rest of us just call 'food'. Much of it is not particularly high in fat, sugar or salt and a lot of it has been eaten for generations, if not millennia. Moreover, Public Health England is in the process of making the lowering the bar even lower to accommodate the unscientific change in the sugar guidelines. Here's the proportion of products that are classed as HFSS currently and the proportion that will be HFSS once Public Health England is through. Click to enlarge.


This is more than a technical issue. After capitulating to Jamie Oliver last June, the government plans to ban HFSS advertising on TV before 9pm, ban HFSS food from being included in meal deals and BOGOFs, and ban shopkeepers from stocking HFSS food at the store entrance, near the till and at the end of aisles. If campaigners get their way, this will only be the start of state control of the food supply.

The ban on discounts could cost households hundreds of pounds a year. As I say in the briefing:

These policies will hinder competition and innovation in one of the country’s biggest and most important markets. The many negative impacts are beyond the scope of this briefing paper but, to take one example, most of the products which could be advertised on television before 9pm under government proposals are raw ingredients - meat, fruit, vegetables, etc. - which are not generally advertised because they are cheap and unbranded. Pre-watershed food advertising would therefore be limited to a relative handful of niche health foods. Broadcasters have not said how much money they would lose, but it would certainly be in the tens of millions of pounds. This is money that could be used to make television programmes. Ironically, HFSS food will continue to be promoted before the watershed in programmes such as Jamie and Jimmy’s Friday Night Feast and The Great British Bake Off, but it will be illegal to promote the same food in the ad breaks

The public has been misled - again.

You can download the briefing paper here.

Posted by Christopher Snowdon at 10:39 am 0 comments

Thursday, 7 March 2019

Junk food (part one)


Action on Sugar/Salt gets acres of news coverage every other week by looking at the labels on food and putting the figures on a press release, accompanied by a quote from some nutritionist who is 'shocked' by the amount of sugar/salt in it.

They were at it again on Monday with some claims about salt in restaurant meals. Their headline figure was that 40 per cent of meals tested have got saltier in recent years. This sounds dubious from the get-go and TGI Friday, whose chicken burger Action on Sugar/Salt claimed was the saltiest, said the pressure group was plain wrong:

“as independent nutritional analysis has shown our kids’ chicken burger meal to contain 1.5g of salt, not 5.3g as cited in the report."

Nevertheless, MacGregor's mob got blanket media coverage, just as they did two weeks earlier when they complained about the amount of sugar in breakfast cereal.

If there is an easier way of getting free publicity than collating readily available data from the side of food packaging, I'd like to see it. And yet the media never seem to get bored of it.

I mention this because today saw the release of an interesting report from the Advertising Association about a subject that has been in the news a lot recently: so-called 'junk food' advertising. The report contains some genuinely original research has some new and useful findings.

For instance, it finds that children's 'exposure' to HFSS food advertising has fallen by 37% since 2008 and that the average child sees a mere 11.5 seconds of it per day. Given that the government wants to ban HFSS food advertising on the pretext of tackling childhood obesity, you'd think that there would be some interest in this. You'd also think that there would be some interest in the fact that childhood obesity has not fallen over the period in which children's 'exposure' to these ads has declined.

Apparently not. Although the Advertising Association press released their report, I can only find one media outlet (City AM) that has reported it.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that there are two reasons for the media's indifference. Firstly, the Advertising Association is an industry body. Secondly, the findings do not serve the moral panic about childhood obesity and 'junk food' advertising.

I understand that journalists are there to sell newspapers and that hysterical claims are more appealing to readers than cold, hard facts, but if journalists insist on only telling one side of a story they shouldn't be surprised when they find themselves accomplices to a scam. 

Take the confusion between 'junk food' and HFSS (high in fat, salt and sugar) food. I have been banging on about HFSS food not being 'junk food' for some time. Here are some recent tweets which predate the Farmdrop episode that finally brought attention to the issue...





And here is the Telegraph's political correspondent yesterday...


Politician engages in spin - stop the press!

If journalists had bothered to do a bit of basic research (like, y'know, reading the second paragraph of the Mayor of London's press release) none of this would have come as a surprise.

And if the issue wasn't 'junk food' but Brexit or budget cuts or something more obviously political, journalists would have dug a little deeper. But white hat bias means that anything to do with 'public health' gets a free pass.

Still, all of this has been serendipitous timing for me because I have an IEA briefing out tomorrow that discusses the HFSS/junk food confusion in some depth. It was sent off to the graphic designer two weeks ago. Since then, the TfL advertising ban has come into effect and the Farmdrop case has exposed the problem perfectly. I wrote about the latter for The Sun today...

We are sleep-walking into legislation that is far more extensive than most of us realise. Hysterical claims about junk food have been used as cover for tobacco-style regulation being rolled out across the food supply.

The nation’s biggest and most important industry could soon be banned from advertising most of its products during daytime television, costing broadcasters tens of millions of pounds and lowering the quality of programming.

The ban on HFSS products being positioned at the entrance, checkout and end of aisle will cause shopkeepers all kinds of headaches, and the ban on discounts, such as buy-one-get-one-free, could cost consumers hundreds of pounds a year.

Surely a rethink is in order?

Have a read and check back here tomorrow for the briefing. There will be a video too...

Posted by Christopher Snowdon at 5:52 pm 0 comments

Wednesday, 6 March 2019

Bloomberg's army

Last year, Mike Bloomberg gave $20 million to the Bath University's Tobacco Control Research Group (TCRG) to create 'a brand new global tobacco industry watchdog called Stopping Tobacco Organizations and Products, or STOP.' It was a tit for tat move after Philip Morris gave $1 billion (over 12 years) to the Foundation for a Smokefree World.

The TCRG is run by comedy legend Anna Gilmore. It is one of the UK's last hold-outs against vaping and is best known for creating a low quality pseudo-wiki which smears anyone with whom they disagree as as an ally of the tobacco industry. Their newfound wealth will allow them to finally employ some fact checkers, and there will be plenty left over to spend on other projects.

What will they do with the cash? Bath University is an academic institution. The TCRG sits within the university's Department of Health and has the word 'research' in its title. An organisation called Stopping Tobacco Organizations and Products doesn't sound like an academic group. It sounds like a campaign group - and so it is - therefore the challenge for Gilmore et al. will be for them to portray their crusade against vaping and tobacco harm reduction as (a) educational, and (b) pro-health.

It will be interesting to see how they square that circle, but you can expect to hear a lot from in the next couple of years because they are splashing some of the cash on a big recruitment drive.

The Bloomberg funding over three years is huge news and is going to grow the Tobacco Research Group from a team of nine to around 35, it’s amazing. 

So said Jo Cranwell in a recent interview. You may recall Cranwell from Monday's post in which she described the reality TV show Geordie Shore as a 'risk factor' for binge-drinking. An avid television viewer, she has published numerous studies complaining about smoking and drinking in TV programmes. She has found smoking in Love Island, 'inferred alcohol use' in Geordie Shore and has complained about tobacco use in films, alcohol consumption in music videos, and alcohol and tobacco content in music videos. Gilmore has managed to snap up this talent before she wins her first Nobel Prize.

Fromher  interview, we learn that Cranwell worked as a reflexologist before running her own flooring business and then doing a PhD in whatever subject you have to do to call yourself a professor of public health these days. When asked which superpower she would like to have, she replies...

I’m really nosey and interfere with people’s business all the time, so probably invisibility so I could listen in on everyone’s conversations.

This makes her ideally qualified for a job in tobacco control where most of the work involves going through the Twitter feed of people you don't like and reading decades-old industry memos.

I’ve just taken my research on tobacco marketing, and that of colleagues around the world, to report on tobacco in entertainment media to World Health Organisation.

She's never published anything about tobacco marketing. She means people using tobacco on television and in films. She often gets these two mixed up.

I want them to sign up to a revised section of the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control that puts measures in place to limit the exposure of children to tobacco advertising.

The Framework Convention for Tobacco Control already includes a full ban on tobacco advertising. Again, she means people smoking on TV and in films.

In Western countries we may well focus on social media and how vaping is being promoted and used as a marketing tool by the big tobacco companies.

Presumably she means 'how big tobacco companies market and promote vaping'. Vaping being 'used as a marketing tool' makes no sense, unless she thinks that vaping is being used to market tobacco which, come to think of it, is probably exactly what her 'research' will conclude.

My work also includes alcohol and I’d like to develop this area of research further too, perhaps setting up my own related research group.  

Very wise. It's unlikely that the anti-vaping money will dry up any time soon but it makes sense to cover as many bases as possible to be on the safe side.

Speaking of which, another gravy train is rolling into the city of Bath on tomorrow...

The University of Bath Postgraduate Group Bath Science in Policy is very pleased to co-host a lunchtime seminar with The University of Bath’s Tobacco Control Research Group. Our visiting speaker, Dr. Mélissa Mialon from the University of Sao Paulo, will present her research on The influence of the ultra-processed food and beverage industries on public policies and public opinion.

Speaker profile: Dr Mélissa Mialon is a food engineer with training in public health nutrition. She is currently a research fellow at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. In her research, she has adapted methods used in the field of tobacco control research to identify and monitor the influence of the ultra-processed food and beverage industry on public policies and public opinion.

I'm calling it now: the Tobacco Control Research Group will be called the Tobacco, Alcohol and Obesity Control Research Group within five years.

Now that these people have a billionaire sugar daddy, can we taxpayers stop funding them please?

Posted by Christopher Snowdon at 11:09 am 0 comments

Tuesday, 5 March 2019

The tobacco levy - a dead parrot

The zombie idea of a tobacco industry levy re-emerged at the weekend when ASH's puppet All Party group included it in their new list of demands. ASH are trying to portray the levy as 'making the polluter pay' as if it were a Pigovian response, overlooking the fact that there are no net financial costs of smoking and tobacco taxes are already sky high.

The conceit behind the levy is that the money will come from the industry's profits rather than from smokers (rather like the idea that the sugar tax is a levy on businesses). A childishly simplistic infographic from Cancer Research showed how this was supposed to work.


But that's not how it would work. After the idea was first mooted by George Osborne in 2014, there was some dispute about whether the cost would be passed onto the consumer (ie. 'public health' groups said it wouldn't while everybody else said it would). When HMRC ran the numbers they concluded:

Legally, the Tobacco Levy would be a direct tax, as traders would be liable for the tax. Economically, it would be entirely equivalent to an increase in the specific tax that currently exists on tobacco products.

... Evidence from the consultation, supported by evidence from changes to tobacco duties in recent years, was clear that manufacturers and importers would pay for the levy by fully passing on the Levy to consumers by raising retail prices.

Furthermore, HMRC estimated that a £150 million levy would only actually raise £25 million because of behavioural effects:

Higher prices lead to reductions in consumption of duty-paid tobacco and further switching to lower priced products. This reduces revenue from existing tobacco duties. Tax makes up a large proportion of tobacco prices, leading to large behavioural effects that almost completely offset the revenue raised by the Levy.

DEFRA's chief economist reviewed HMRC's work and concluded:

Based on this review and discussions, and the applications of economic theory and evidence, we believe that HMRC’s assessment is reasonable and appropriate. In particular, we believe that the crucial assumption that a significant proportion of the levy will be passed-on to consumers in the form of higher tobacco product prices as reasonable.

In late 2014, the Treasury ran a public consultation and Deborah Arnott of ASH said:

“It’s almost like Christmas come early to have the government launch a consultation on how to make the tobacco industry pay for the damage it does.”

Alas for Debs, it wasn't to be. Despite the majority of respondents being taxpayer-funded organisations who strongly supported the levy, when the results were published the following year the Treasury concluded that it was a dumb idea.

As announced in Summer Budget 2015, the government has decided not to introduce a levy on tobacco manufacturers and importers.

... Analysis of the responses shows that the impact of a levy on the tobacco market would be similar to a duty rise, as tobacco manufacturers and importers would pass the costs of a levy on to consumers. This is supported by HMRC analysis which shows that a levy of £150 million would only raise £25 million after behavioural effects.

This could be the first time a public consultation on tobacco has resulted in the policy not going ahead. I can't think of another. Either way, we are four years on and ASH are still banging their head against the same wall. Give it up, ASH. The tobacco levy has ceased to be. It has run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. It is an ex-parrot.

ASH's 'new' list of policy demands is the same tired neo-prohibitionist wish list that they have been banging on about since 2015 with the addition of raising the smoking age to 21. The latter is a policy borrowed from the USA where the drinking age is 21. It doesn't make a lot sense there, but you can see how it could be defended. It makes no sense in Britain where you don't have to be 21 to do anything.

ASH's desperation to keep themselves relevant (and keep the grants rolling in) is palpable. They have had a good run but there's really no excuse for funding this dreadful organisation any longer. It has done quite enough damage. Put it out to pasture and spend the money on healthcare.

Posted by Christopher Snowdon at 10:50 am 0 comments

It turns out that 'junk food' doesn't actually exist

As I have been saying for some time, a ban on 'junk food' advertising is nothing of the sort. Reality has just caught up with a company called Farmdrop who have had this advert rejected by TfL because it shows bacon and butter.



I've written about this for Spectator Health.

Posted by Christopher Snowdon at 8:56 am 0 comments

Monday, 4 March 2019

The sockpuppet state in action

Last week, the IEA released my report Still Hand in Glove? which takes another look at state-funded activism. It would be nice to report that the problem is shrinking. In truth, it is evolving. Blatant sockpuppetry is alive and well in Scotland and Wales. In England, the baton has been largely passed onto Public Health England, local authorities and PHE's legion of Directors of Public Health, with assistance from a growing band of activist-academic 'research' institutions.

Over the weekend, there were a couple of small examples of how this works in practice. One of Britain's oldest sockpuppets, Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), was back, this time acting through the parliamentary mouthpiece it set up in the 1970s, the All Party Parliamentary Group on Smoking and Health, of which ASH is still the secretariat.

Having exhausted every other anti-smoking policy, ASH are really scraping the barrel in an effort to keep themselves relevant. Their next phase of action involves banning 18-20 year olds from buying tobacco, censoring television programmes and raising prices even further with a tobacco levy.

Deborah Arnott, chief executive of Action on Smoking and Health - which assists the group ["ASH wrote the report" - CJS], said: "Legislation to strictly regulate smoking used to be considered controversial and extreme by all mainstream political parties.

"Thanks to the dedication of the All Party Group, working closely with civil society, that's no longer the case."

'Civil society' was straight out of the blocks to lend these extreme measures their support on Saturday, with a series of similar tweets. First up was ASH, of course, which got £160,000 from the unwitting taxpayer in 2016/17 and has recently started getting mysterious grants from Public Health England (£108,000 in the last quarter of 2018).


Then the regional sockpuppets piled in, including our old friends at FRESH, which is wholly funded by local authorities in the northeast...


And Breathe 2025, which is wholly funded by local authorities in Yorkshire and Humberside although you'd never guess that from looking at its website...



 And the recently formed History Makers, wholly funded by local authorities in the northwest...


In my report, I noted that History Makers had 'not yet begun active campaigning' and that state-funded anti-tobacco groups, in general, had been fairly quiet recently:

The lack of overt political activity by these groups since plain packaging was introduced in 2016 probably reflects a dearth of new policies to lobby for and the government’s stated intention not to pass further anti-smoking legislation in this Parliament.

Now they have their new policies, expect to hear more from them.

Meanwhile, in the northeast...

Five areas in the North East are among the top 10 worst places for underage drinking in the UK.

.. Dr Jo Cranwell, from the University of Bath, has specifically researched Geordie Shore and says that in scenes with “real people who young viewers in particular relate to” viewers are exposed to “extreme levels of alcohol content including high levels of intoxication”.

She found that nearly 80% of scenes throughout season 11 of the MTV show featured alcohol.

Dr Cranwell said: “This all suggests Geordie Shore might be a risk factor and could be exacerbating serious problems ­associated with binge drinking.”

Regular readers will be familiar with Ms. Cranwell and her laughable research. It takes quite an imagination to believe that young geordies like to binge drink because they've seen it in Geordie Shore rather than that young geordies like to binge drink and therefore binge-drinking features in a reality TV programme about young geordies. Cranwell worked at the state-funded UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies when her 'study' was conducted and her research was supported by grants from the taxpayer-funded Economic and Social Research Council, Medical Research Council and the Department of Health.

No austerity for quackademia. 

And, of course, there's a political dimension...

Her fear is shared by Colin Shevill, of North East alcohol awareness charity Balance.

It's not a charity. It's a neo-temperance pressure group that shares an office with FRESH and, like FRESH, is entirely funded by local authorities.

He said: “This north-south burden of harm long pre-dates Geordie Shore [well spotted! - CJS], but it does highlight the way alcohol is glamorised in TV shows and through advertising.

"There is overwhelming evidence that exposure to alcohol marketing increases the risk.”

He also believes the Government must push up the current “pocket money prices” of booze, as has already happened in Scotland.

Of course he does. That's all he ever says.

The article contains no opposing viewpoints and is rounded off with a message from the £4.5 billion a year mothership...

Rosanna O’Connor, director of drugs, alcohol and tobacco at Public Health England, said: “This is a top priority.”

Keep digging deep, taxpayers.

Posted by Christopher Snowdon at 10:32 am 0 comments

Friday, 1 March 2019

Last Orders with Geoff Norcott

A great bunch of lads
There's a new episode of Last Orders out. This month our guest was the comedian Geoff Norcott. You may know him from his appearances on The Mash Report, Live at the Apollo and Question Time, among others. I've been a fan of his work for a while and was delighted he could join us. We discuss Tom Watson, Tony the Tiger, booze and cannabis.

Have a listen and subscribe on iTunes or whatever.

Posted by Christopher Snowdon at 11:22 am 0 comments
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