I was on the Adam Smith Institute's Pin Factory podcast recently talking about tobacco harm reduction, unlocking the economy and the prospects for the UK economy. Check it out.
Tomorrow's a big day for me, with the new Nanny State Index published in the morning and a very special guest on The Swift Half with Snowdon at 5pm. Watch this space.
...it is clear that Hungary has fared much better than many other European countries. Why?
Hungary, in common with several of its neighbours, is fortunate in having a relatively well-developed laboratory system, linked closely to the public health system.
Hungary was a pioneer in developing public health training in central Europe and has benefited from the capacity that this developed
The dangers are all too apparent when looking at the countries that have performed worst, with the USA and Brazil led by politicians that have rejected the evidence, instead putting forward a series of often bizarre proposals that defy the basic laws of science, or even any sense of logic (McKee et al., 2020). This has undoubtedly cost tens of thousands of lives. Again, Hungary was fortunate as the government acted extremely quickly, at a time when closing down even a few days earlier could make an enormous difference.
So Hungary seems to have done very well.
There's a new episode of Last Orders out with special guest Geoff Norcott. We talk about working class Tories, the state of Britain’s pubs and PC policing. It was recorded before the election results came through, btw.
You non-subscribers can listen here.
First published in Spectator Health in August 2018
George Monbiot has written a curate’s egg of an article for the Guardian on the subject of obesity.
Struck by the near-total absence of fat people in a photo of Brighton
beach in 1976, he wondered whether the rise of obesity in the
intervening years was the result of more calories in or fewer calories
out.
What he discovered came as a shock to him. His first revelation will be no surprise to readers of this blog: calorie consumption has fallen over time. Thanks to the National Food Surveys,
we have a treasure trove of information going back to 1940. It shows
that the average Briton was consuming more than the modern
recommendation of 2,500 calories a day during the war. This rose after
1945, peaking in the 1960s, and falling thereafter. Average daily calorie consumption fell from 2,850 in 1970 to 2,560 in 1980. By 2011, it had dropped to 2,269. Figures from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, which began in the 1980s, tell much the same story.
These surveys have raised concerns about mismeasurement. We know that
people under-report what they eat and that fat people under-report more
than thin people. In 2016, Public Health England hired the Behavioural Insights Team to look into this.
Sure enough, they found evidence that people under-reported calorie
intake and that the scale of under-reporting had risen over time, but
even after correcting for this, they found that we are consuming fewer
calories than we did in the 1970s.
All the evidence points in the same direction. Average calorie
consumption – and, indeed, sugar consumption – is lower today than it
was in the 1970s when obesity was relatively rare. The only way to deny
this is to dismiss decades of research as worthless rubbish. That is not
a good look for an empiricist and it is to Monbiot’s credit that he
does not do so.
If we are not consuming more calories then the rise of obesity must
be due to us burning fewer calories off, right? Not so fast, says
Monbiot. He offers evidence that children are doing just as much
exercise as ever and that people in poor countries burn the same number
of calories as people in rich countries.
So what is the answer? Alas, this is where Monbiot’s article descends
into gibberish. If you’re familiar with his oeuvre, you won’t be
surprised to hear that the blame lies with those nasty corporations.
They use advertising to ‘overcome our resistance’. They ’employ an army
of food scientists and psychologists to trick us into eating more than
we need’. They ‘discovered our weaknesses and ruthlessly exploit them.’
This is all standard Guardian banter but it doesn’t make any
sense in the context of Monbiot’s article. It is almost as if – perish
the thought – he decided what his conclusion was going to be before he
began his research.
Even if everything Monbiot says about ‘Big Food’ is true, even if he
is right when he says that ‘the opportunities to load our food with
sugar have boomed’, we are still faced with the inescapable fact that we
are consuming less sugar and fewer calories than we did in the glorious
summer of 1976. As far as I can tell, Monbiot does not subscribe to magical thinking about particular types of calorie. His explanation therefore explains nothing.
So what is the real answer? There are factors that Monbiot does not mention, such as the rise of central heating and the decline of smoking,
which are likely to have had some effect, albeit only on the margins.
It is possible that future research will find that some unsuspected
biological factor has also played a role. And it is important to
remember that averages do not tell the whole story. It would be an ecological fallacy to assume that everybody is eating less just because average consumption has fallen.
Nevertheless, it is puzzling, to say the least, that the rate of
obesity could rise so sharply if calorie consumption has fallen and
people are as physically active as they have ever been. But this is
where Monbiot makes his mistake. Physical activity has declined and his slivers of evidence to the contrary do not stack up against the facts. Public Health England says that levels of physical activity have dropped by a quarter since 1961. The World Health Organisation
says that western countries have seen ‘decreased physical activity
levels due to the increasingly sedentary nature of many forms of
recreation time, changing modes of transportation, and increasing
urbanization.’ Harvard School of Public Health
says that: ‘Physical activity levels are declining’ and that ‘this
decline in physical activity is a key contributor to the global obesity
epidemic’.
Physical activity is not always easy to measure and it is often
confused with leisure time exercise, but there should be little doubt
that we are burning off fewer calories than ever in our day to day
lives.
Britons are walking
less (from 255 miles per year in 1976 to 179 miles in 2010) and cycling
less (from 51 miles per year in 1976 to 42 miles in 2010). This is true
of both adults and children.
In the 1960s, half the jobs in private industry in the United States required at least moderate-intensity physical activity, compared to less than 20% today.
Work in factories and farms has given way to office work, and that has amounted to over 400 kilojoules less each day that adults expend at work. This difference alone results in a weight increase of about 13 kilograms over 50 years, which pretty closely matches actual changes in weight.
‘energy requirements have decreased in all regions … The decrease in calorie requirements is greatest in Classes A2 and B, and is partly explained by the increasingly sedentary nature of their occupations’. In 1971, they mentioned the ‘continuing decline in energy needs as work becomes less strenuous.’
