Banning smoking at mental health units. A rant at Bradford's health fascists.

Bradford NHS Care Trust decided to ban smoking everywhere on its sites in Bradford.

A BLANKET ban on smoking has come into force at Lynfield Mount psychiatric hospital in Bradford.

Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust said the ban also affected all its buildings, grounds and vehicles, including the Airedale Centre for Mental Health at Airedale Hospital at Steeton, Keighley.

Nicola Lees, deputy chief executive and director of nursing at the Trust, said the decision had been taken to help patients' mental health as well as theirs and staff's physical health.

This decision has been presented uncritically in the local paper and is accompanied by almost congratulatory quotations from Public Health England.

Let's be clear about this - it is a ghastly, unnecessary and illiberal attack on the rights of mental health patients. These are vulnerable people - they're not in the Care Trust's units for fun, they're there because they want (or need - some are in a secure unit under the provisions of the Mental Health Acts) help with mental health problems. And let's also be clear that forcing them to quit smoking (and this is exactly what the Trust is doing) makes little or no contribution to resolving their mental health problems - indeed, for some, it might even make them worse.

This decision isn't a substantive contribution to bettering the health of Bradford people. Rather, it's a nasty, spiteful and thoughtless piece of tick-box public health introduced by people who care more about being seen to be righteous than they do about the well-being of mental health patients. There is no health and safety justification (it's a ban outside where passive smoking risks are zero), merely a sad conformity with the English NHS's growing attachment of health fascism.

Don't these patients have some rights left. Rights to make their own choice as adults about whether or not to smoke? It would appear not - the health fascists have won again.

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In which our friend Leg Iron explains stuff to the Daily Mail's health experts...

As it’s payday on Friday and I have a little to spare, what took my fancy tonight was a lump of rump steak with a bottle of cut-price Aberlour for dessert.

And so on - quite wonderful. Do read and act on the advice therein.

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Why Boris Johnson should never lead the Conservative Party

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I'm a Conservative. I've been a member of the Party for nearly forty years - much longer than the current Mayor of London. And I am deeply worried that Boris Johnson may become the leader of what I see as my Party.

Let's be clear that this isn't about the Darius Guppy affair. It's not about Boris's inability to keep his trousers on and his serial infidelity. Nor is about his seeming shallowness, the jolly old Boris image all bluff and bluster, bonhomie and bounce. My concern is about what Boris Johnson has done, tried to do and proposes to do as Mayor of London. For me this is the absolute measure of the man and whether he should be allowed anywhere near the leadership of the Conservative Party.

I'm like lots of you. I love Boris, he is charismatic, exciting, different from the average politician. Boris is one of the people with the ability to make you smile, look up and listen - or at least think you're listening and not rather basking in the sunshine of the Mayor's personality. Only - dare I say it - Nigel Farage comes close to Boris Johnson in that sense of approachability. Boris is that rare sort of politician who'll get taxi drivers to peep their horns, and builders to yell his name out as he passes. And all this makes him the most dangerous sort of demogogue - someone who can persuade us to accept what we wouldn't accept from the regular sort of politician.

I also like the fact that Boris Johnson is Mayor of London and not Ken Livingstone. Boris is a much, much better Mayor of London than Ken. But then my cat would make a better Mayor of London than Ken. I like - or rather Londoners should like - the fact that Boris has managed to persuade the UK government to continue pouring nearly all of its limited infrastructure spending into London. This is pretty effective lobbying - with both Labour and Conservative led adminstrations in Westminster suckered into making London their investment priority.

The problem with Boris is simple. He likes government's bossiness all too much. This is the man who thinks it a good idea to buy some second hand water cannon to hose the unwashed and unwanted off the capital's streets. This is the politician whose first act was to impose a blanket drinking ban on the tube just to get a headline. And this is the leader who has supported bans on drinking outside pubs, curfews and the imposition of bouncers on suburban pubs.

Boris, when he got to be Mayor, looked around for a soulmate and found it in Michael Bloomberg, then the Mayor of New York. And Boris, capitivated either by Bloomberg's charm or his billions (hard to tell really), lapped up Mike's particular brand of municipal fascism, a world of bans and controls, greater police powers and the demonising of the homeless, the fatty and the smoker. This nannying fussbucketry has been embraced with enthusiasm by Boris - a man whose private behaviour belies his political desire to boss other people around about the way they live their lives.

Today the crysalis has cracked open and the complete Mayor Boris butterfly has emerged. What a splendid creature it is - a blonde, bouncy worrywart, a gaudy tousled version of Mike Bloomberg, a municipal fascist with a smiling jokey manner. Today Boris has announced proposals to ban smoking in parks and squares, minimum pricing for alcohol, controls and bans on fast food and a host of officious 'nutritional' information on restaurant menus. I'm sure that, given half a chance, Boris - channelling the Bloomberg model - will be taxing fizzy drinks, closing down street vendors and banning horse-drawn vehicles.

Once upon a time the Conservative Party was about choice, personal responsibility, tolerance and freedom. It seems this only applies - in the world of Boris Johnson - if you choose the approved lifestyles and directed behaviours of London's authorities. If you're a smoker, you're to be hounded even further to the margins of society - not for reasons of health but because Boris Johnson has decided - urged on by the health fascists - that you are not normal. And if you want to start a business selling kebabs or burgers, you'll be excluded from much of the capital's high streets by the planners.

This is not the Conservative Party I joined as a fifteen-year-old in 1976. But I am watching as privileged silver-spoon chewing men like Boris Johnson swallow the anti-choice, anti-freedom line of public health directors, chief constables, doctors and council chief executives. I am watching as the political party I have given so much to is destroyed by people who think there's something right in telling people they aren't normal because they smoke. People who want to give the police military hardware because they've lost the trust of big parts of the population.

There are still plenty of people in my party who still believe in choice, independence, freedom and personal responsibility. It's just that Boris Johnson isn't one of them. And if he - god forbid - ever leads my party, I shall have to think long and hard about whether to stay.

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Why I'm right to call them health fascists...

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Sometimes people suggest my description of the public health mafia as 'health fascists' is unfair. I really don't think so and here's why:

Reporters were forcibly removed and restrained Tuesday at the World Health Organization (WHO) meeting on tobacco control in Moscow.

Washington Times editorial writer Drew Johnson told The Daily Caller that he was physically escorted out of the meeting’s convention hall by a guard while another reporter was physically restrained from entering the room, even though WHO never formally voted to restrict the media from the event.

That's right folks. A publicly funded body excluded reporters (and for that matter members of the public) from a meeting to discuss imposing a tax.  Welcome to the world of public health, welcome to health fascism.

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Alan Johnson - nannying fussbucket of the week

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Alan Johnson the chirpy cockney lefty pundit who used to be a health minister under Tony Blair wants to ban Coca-Cola:

One thing: a single proclamation; a dictat that required no pandering to public opinion or consultation with a focus group. It’s simple. I’d ban Coca-Cola and all its offshoots, lookalikes and variants.

Free from the constraints of good sense, this blokiest of ex-MPs reveals himself as just another health fascist. And it helps that Coca-Cola is a faceless American corporation, one of the dark and sinister groups manipulating our gullibility and corrupting our youth. Now I think Coca-Cola is revolting stuff but millions every day enjoy the pleasure of drinking the foul muck and it's none of my business to be calling for bans or anything of that sort.

Fizzy-pop isn't especially good for us but then neither is that lovely chocolate fudge cake Alan's auntie probably used to make or those wonderful hand-made traditional sweets sold in that lovely old-fashioned shop on the high street. Sweetness - whether from sugar, fruit or honey - is wonderful, a joyful pleasure for young and old alike. Johnson, like all the rest of the health fascists, would have us live in a dull, drab world where nannying doctors dictate where, what and when we all eat.  A world where little brainwashed kids - in Johnson's words - lecture us about our sins:

The result will be an army of happy children marching forward together, eyes bright, teeth gleaming; instead of teaching the world to sing, they will teach it to stop consuming sugar.

If anything should be banned, we should start with ghastly, self-righteous health facsists like Alan Johnson.

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Nannying fussbucketry - it's enough to drive you to drink!

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Tracey Crouch MP who is one of parliament's leading health fascists has sent out a 'report' from her All Party Parliamentary Group on Alcohol Abuse. It is - no surprise - a collection of every favoured piece of intervention from the temperance, New Puritan and prohibition campaigns - health warnings on wine bottles, lower drink-driving limits, minimum unit pricing for alcohol, advertising controls and - gleefully jumping on some nonsense from Gary Lineker - sponsorship bans.

The proposals says Tracey are needed because:

“We are experiencing nothing short of a national crisis in the UK because of alcohol – we need to act now to stop it.”

Now we know this is arrant nonsense - alcohol consumption has fallen by around 20% over the past decade and the sharpest falls have been among young people. We already have some of the highest taxes on booze in the world and we invest millions in nannying the hell out of drinkers.

But our Tracey knows better - she waves as £21bn 'cost of alcohol' figure as justification. Yet we also know that this figure - even if it is remotely accurate (which it isn't) - fails to take account of the benefits we get as a society from alcohol. Not just the pleasure a drink brings for most of the population but the wages of over a million people employed making, distributing and serving drinks. Plus the billions our economy gains from the export of drinks - whisky, gin, beer and assorted other drinks are a major export industry for the UK.

Tracey Crouch and her like are po-faced spoilsports, judgemental nannies who use the problems of a few to punish the pleasures of the many. Their proposals would make for a duller, less happy and more controlled society, one where tutting little fascists with clipboards patrol the lives of ordinary folk.

This nannying fussbucketry -it's enough to drive you to drink!

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Public health - might some truth be getting though at last?

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One swallow doesn't make a summer. But there are two current news items that suggest that the truth is gradually seeping through to one or two bits of the public health world.

Firstly there's a letter from fifty odd doctors, researchers and public health folk urging the WHO not to regulate e-cigs out of existence. As one pointed out:

"If the WHO gets its way and extinguishes e-cigarettes, it will not only have passed up what is clearly one of the biggest public health innovations of the last three decades that could potentially save millions of lives, but it will have abrogated its own responsibility under its own charter to empower consumers to take control of their own health, something which they are already doing themselves in their millions." 

Progress (although it didn't stop the BBC running a ghastly phone-in essentially to plug some egregiously misleading documentary it's planning to air on tobacco - at the presenter said to one smoker who called: "that's basically the tobacco industry line" as that chap explained why he wanted leaving alone).

And then the radio headlines were filled with news that we aren't drinking quite so much:

Between 2005 and 2012 the percentage who drank alcohol in the week before being interviewed fell from 72% to 64% for men, and from 57% to 52% for women.

The survey also shows that the percentage of men who drank alcohol on at least five days in the week declined from 22% to 14%.

The percentage of women who drank frequently fell from 13% to 9%.

This was all part of a slightly scaremongering report (so typical of health fascists to wrap up good health news in scary stories about girls drinking) but Radio 5 Live ran a couple of substantial items focused on the core fact - on average, we drink a hell of a lot less than we did ten years ago and the latest cohort of teenagers are the more abstemious since the 1950s.

It may be a false dawn - yesterday I was told by one of Bradford's public health consultants that 'hazardous' drinking would increase in Bradford without 'further intervention. This - as I pointed out - is simply untrue yet these people carry on with the misinformation. Still, though it's a long way to go, I am reassured that some of the truth might just leak into the public health debate for a change.

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Two-and-a-half pints of lager...

"Sorry sir, that's all I can serve you."

"What d'ya mean? I'm not driving, I can have a third pint!"

"Sorry, just a half. Otherwise you're drinking dangerously."

This is the world of the temperance fanatics, nannying fussbuckets and health fascists, a world where two-and-a-half pints of premium lager is 'binge drinking':

Drinking six units of alcohol on one single occasion at least monthly amounts to “heavy episodic drinking”, according to a recent report by the World Health Organisation (WHO), which has said 16% of the world’s population are now binge drinkers.

This is barking. Not only is there no evidence to support describing this as 'dangerous' but it completely undermines genuine efforts to promote a healthy attitude to drinking. But no-one faces up to these fussbuckets, says to them - 'sorry mate but that's plain stupid, now shut up and go away'.

This is a world where sitting down is bad for you, where you can't enjoy sitting in the sunshine and where using a harmless product like an e-cig is deemed bad simple because it looks like harmful smoking. And yet hardly a day passes by without another call for ad restrictions, price hikes, sales control, mandated packaging and outright bans - on salt, sugar, fats, fast food, cigars, lemonade, alcohol in any form, tanning beds, bacon and even fruit juice.

All the things people like - especially the things that working class people like - are to be controlled. We are to live a purposeful, sober, salad-filled life for the good of our health. Indeed government will mandate the times you can drink, the places you can smoke (are there many left) and the size of the portions you eat.

Two-and-a-half pints of lager. Remember that the next time someone links 'binge drinking' to ten-year-old photographs of a girls lying pissed on a bench - two-and-a-half pints of lager, three glasses of white wine, two large vodka and cokes. That's the limit of the fun you're allowed on a Friday night if you aren't to fall foul of the health police.

Two-and-a-half pints of lager. It's a bloody joke.

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Nannying fussbucket of the week: Tracey "Ban Alcohol" Crouch MP

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Some "charity" or other has got some headlines by saying that serving drinks at school events 'sets a bad example' to children. And, as ever there's a politician on hand to call for the ban:

Swanswell (that's the "charity" in question) has given evidence to an all-party parliamentary group on alcohol misuse.

Tracey Crouch, Tory MP for Chatham and Aylesford, who chairs the committee, said she would support reforms to ensure that the sale of alcohol was not permitted in schools. "Alcohol is so visible elsewhere that I don't think it needs to be on school premises."

Ms Crouch has form and joins a growing list of Tory MPs I'd find it very difficult to vote for.

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Dear Government: It's my life and what I eat, drink and smoke is none of your bloody business. Not even a little bit.

A global drive to tackle the causes of cancer linked to lifestyle, such as alcohol abuse, sugar consumption and obesity, has been urged on Monday by the World Health Organisation as it predicted the number of new cases could soar 70% to nearly 25 million a year over the next 20 years.

Others will point out the idiocy of the World Health Organisation's latest manifesto for nannying fussbucketry. Suffice it to say that the reason for the increase in what the WHO egregiously calls 'preventable' causes of ill-health isn't changes in human behaviour or, heaven forbid, people making the 'wrong' personal choices. The reason for there being more cancers, more coronary heart disease and more dementia is that fewer people are dying from communicable disease, fewer people are in abject poverty and fewer people don't have access to at least basic health services.

I'm prepared to accept that the world faces an increase in the number of people suffering from cancer - that 'tidal wave' the WHO's scaremongers are predicting. But to single out a couple of things we consume - alcohol and sugar - as the main problem (plus a nod towards those other evils red meat and sausages) is a complete misrepresentation of the facts as we know them.

This is how the news is presented to us - loads more cancer because of fast food and lager is the central message. This is quite simply, utter rubbish. However, when you look at what the WHO says elsewhere there are some good, sensible public health suggestions:

"Governments must show political commitment to progressively step up the implementation of high-quality screening and early detection programs, which are an investment rather than a cost,"

 Rather than this sensible focus on raising risk awareness (although perhaps not to the scare levels loved of our media), screening and early intervention, what we hear is another set of demands for "adequate legislation" to "encourage healthier behaviour".

With the result being comments like these:

On drinking:

"Labelling, availability and the price of alcohol should all be on the agenda,"

On soda pop:

"So should taxation of sugar-sweetened drinks, he said. The report says efforts to reduce the percentage of fizzy drinks that contain substantial amounts of added sugar should become a high priority."

And good beef and sausages:

"About half of Britons do not recognise the importance of diet in protecting them against cancer, according to a poll carried out by the World Cancer Research Fund. Eating a lot of red meat – especially processed – increases the risk of bowel cancer."

Add all this to the existing ostracising of smokers, campaigns against sun-bathing and even claims that mouth wash is dangerous - to name just three of the things on the health fascist agenda - and we get a campaign directed against the pleasures and choices of ordinary people.

Let's be clear, if people want to eat bacon, drink lemonade, go out for a beer, put salt on their chips and have cake in the tea shop that's great. It's what life's about rather than the pinched, sad, narrow, uninteresting and pleasure free existence that these nannying fussbuckets would 'nudge' us into.

This manifesto of nannying fussbucketry should be torn up and used to fuel a good barbecue - accompanied by lager and, if you want, a good cigar. It's time we looked these health fascists in the eye and told them straight:

It's my life and what I eat, drink and smoke is none of your bloody business. Not even a little bit."

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BMA silent on e-cigs evidence...

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The BMA wants to ban electronic cigarettes. Recently 'Sense about Science' wrote to them:

We sent this letter to the BMA on November 15th asking for the evidence behind their claims about ‘re-normalising smoking’ and ‘passive vaping.’ Despite a number of reminders, we have not yet received a response.

This is probably because there isn't any evidence to support their ban proposal. None.

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We sent this letter to the BMA on November 15th asking for the evidence behind their claims about ‘re-normalising smoking’ and ‘passive vaping.’ Despite a number of reminders, we have not yet received a response. - See more at: http://www.senseaboutscience.org/news.php/364/whats-the-evidence-for-banning-electronic-cigarettes#sthash.qa29sXWF.dpuf

The truth about evidence-based policy making...

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Via Dick Puddlecote, the low down about the manipulation of truth by so-called academics:

Evidence based policymaking (EBPM) is about power: to decide what counts as evidence; to ignore or pay attention to particular studies; to link the evidence of a policy problem to a particular solution; and, to ensure that policymakers have the motive and opportunity to turn a solution into policy. Indeed, an attempt to portray EBPM as a technical or scientific process is often an attempt to exercise power: to rule some evidence in and most evidence out; and, to use particular forms of evidence to justify political action.

There you have it from Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Stirling Paul Cairney. This is, as I have said many a time, the misuse of science to justify political control. While there are no uniforms it is objectively little different to the abuse of science practiced by certain 20th century regimes.

Bear in mind that the writer is a sociologist not a scientist. And understand that it is people like Prof Cairney who are misusing the science - the scientists themselves are, in the main, just useful idiots providing the substance from which the control freaks of government can carve their judgemental, nannying state.

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...and they want to stop you using them?

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...e-cigarettes that is:

In smokers not intending to quit, the use of e-cigarettes, with or without nicotine, decreased cigarette consumption and elicited enduring tobacco abstinence without causing significant side effects.

This is proper science showing how effective electronic cigarettes are as a means of quitting. And the health fascists, public health obsessives and new puritans want to stop you using them because there might be some unspecified, unknown way in which they aren't 'safe'.

It isn't about health. It's about control.

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"Minimum pricing to be shelved" - we're not quite there folks

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It's looking more likely that minimum pricing for alcohol - a ghastly piece of health fascism - is to be dropped:

Plans for minimum pricing on alcohol in England and Wales may be dropped because Conservative ministers are split over the proposals. 

Whatever the reason this is good news - the proposal was just another vote-losing attack on the less well off. But we're not yet there - the prohibitionists, fussbuckets, puritans and health fascists will be redoubling their efforts, churning out their lies and half-truths so as to get this 'back on track'.

So let's keep up the pressure, keep saying this is unwarranted, without evidence and punishes the moderate drinker as well as the serious toper.

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It's for the kids...

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“This is not about curbing the freedoms of existing adult smokers; it’s about giving kids one less reason to start smoking in the first place.” 

...the ones whose Dad's are going to lose their jobs no doubt:


...or the ones shot and killed in the turf wars of smugglers and counterfeiters

If you get a chance before Friday tell the government that the police, business and the unions oppose plain packs, that there's no evidence at all to support their introduction and that the idea won't stop one single "kid" from taking up smoking.

The consultation is here.

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Meet Cllr John Butcher - the real deal health fascist

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I pity the poor electors of the nice Surrey town of Cobham who have this John Butcher as their Councillor:

“If the NHS in Surrey were to be run on the basis that patients with self-inflicted morbidity (mainly smoking, alcohol, narcotics, obesity) and injury (dangerous activities) are, following due warning, placed in a much slower-moving queue for healthcare than ‘other’ patients, this would encourage the self-inflicted to move away from Surrey, to areas where there is no differentiation between patients on the grounds of their contribution towards their condition."

So if you smoke, drink, drive fast cars round a track or climb rocks (not sure whether Cllr Butcher's 'dangerous activities' includes horse riding and playing rugby) you'll be made to wait longer in the hope that you'll move away from Surrey. Indeed, it seems that Cllr Butcher thinks that, by doing this, all these people with "self-inflicted" illnesses will move to places where the authorities believe in equal treatment.

What I found yet more bizarre is that, when challenged for his unalloyed health facism, Cllr Butcher digs his hole even deeper with this proposal:

Everyone in, or aspiring to, a position of public responsibility and everyone in a position to influence the public, including entertainers etc, should be asked to sign a voluntary pledge not to take illegal narcotics or consume excessive alcohol, or drive when so affected..

...(a)nyone who fails to sign that pledge, or who signs it and breaches it, should be excluded from positions of public responsibility and influence. All public organisations, included regulated broadcasters etc, should agree to impose this exclusion..

...(t)here would be a Trust to manage this pledge and to determine breaches, with a right of appeal. The costs of running it would be funded by fees from signatories, donations from philanthropists and a grant from the government – the grant being greatly exceeded by the savings in cost to the Exchequer, due to the substantial reduction in such abuse that will follow. 

Amazing stuff! It is, however, quite depressing that this health fascist is a Conservative Councillor.

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The impact of the smoking ban on the old...

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For all my opposition to the smoking ban, I never really thought about how it would create loneliness, depression and illness in the old. Here's one real example (lifted from here): 

“I am getting too old to stand outside pubs or restaurants. Plus I was taught that it was only 'ladies of the night' that stood in the street smoking. 

I have been 3 years away from any social contact other than the odd hello with neighbours. 

Being a widow with no family it was always going to be hard to get back into some semblance of normality with regard to socialising, but I didn't think that it would be this bad.

I used to meet up in a cafeteria with some lady friends, but now that has stopped as a few of the ladies were smokers and didn't want to stand in the street to have a cigarette. 

I went to a quiz night at the local pub as there were quite a few elderly 'singles' there. That has stopped. I also played bingo once a week and that too has stopped as there is no pleasure in having a drink there with no cigarette. 

I am now on anti depressants and wish that I had the courage to kill myself and join my dear husband.

Thank you politicians for making my life not worth living after working from age 14 until 68. I am now 74 and have lost my soul and will to live in this lonely place.”

Depression, loneliness, even suicide - what have we done to these poor folk with our insistence on a total ban. The 'Freedom2Choose' site records a dozen of so examples - real examples of real people with their pleasure destroyed by the smoking ban. Plus this comment from some kid:

“OMG these ladies are my nans age and its people who are younger than them who made these horrible laws that make them stand out in the cold and they should be ashamed at throwing their parents in the street, my nan smokes and says she would rather be at home and i thought it was because she was old but now i think its because she dont want to stand in the street, i cried when i read this letter and wish that my nan could go out to see people and not sit indoors unhappy, they are bastards who do this to old people.”

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Aim! Fire! - salty thoughts on targeting

Many moons ago I was Account Planning Director at a direct marketing agency. And there we talked about targeting. Obsessively. None of that exploitative ad-gabble about 'brand equity' or 'share of mind' - we talked about targeting. About improving targeting - getting ever closer to the direct marketer's holy grail. To contacting you at the very moment you want to buy what I have to sell you.

At the heart of improved targeting is information - data about you and what you do. There's the obvious stuff - name, address, telephone number and, these days I guess, e-mail. But these are just ways to reach you - on their own these data simply allow me to contact you, they do not allow me to target. If all I have is your address my targeting is determined randomly since I do not know whether you are more or less like to want my goods of services.

So we collected other information and we developed very clever (we thought) systems based on geodemographics (the 'birds of a feather flock together' principle) and psychographics (or 'lifestyle targeting' as the salesman would put it). These systems - built on the back of the electoral register, credit referencing information and other available behaviour data - were aggregated. We didn't know the information about each individual just a set of likelihoods determined by multiple regression analysis. But, couple with a list, we were able to identify the places where the birds who liked our product were flocking, and in doing this to improve our targeting from random.

But this 'profiling' approach - for all its merits and efficiencies - doesn't work that well from the marketers perspective. Despite all the clever number crunching and the melding of more and more information, real behaviour data was always better. Let me explain. Geodemographic profiling will tell me where my customers are concentrated - but it won't tell me enough about my customer's immediate neighbour to generate a sufficient uplift in response.

So why - other than Sunday afternoon indulgence - am I burbling on about targeting? Well, it seems to me that we have to resolve the use of targeting - not by businesses but by public authorities. I recall trying to persuade Bradford Health Authority to use targeting to improve the performance of public health campaigns. Rather than scattering information far and wide in the hope that it reaches the target group, why not use thse geodemographics and other data to get the message directly to the person at risk.

Back then we were sending messages about AIDS to 75 year old grannies and I'm sure not much has changed today. Take salt. For some (but not all) people with hypertension reductions in salt intake are highly recommended as a means to manage heart attack risk. For the rest of us it really doesn't matter - our salt intake in no way constitutes risky behaviour even if it is far above so-called recommended levels. The 20% of the population for whom salt is a risk factor can be easily identified through a simple test (GPs could do this) and the rest of us could go on with having food actually tasting of something.

The same approach could be adopted with other risky behaviours - rather than spending millions sending messages to a general population that isn't at risk (for example in their drinking, smoking or drug habits) we could direct that funding towards those whose risky behaviour does present a problem. We could target but we don't. We could use geodemgraphics, medical records and much else to improve public and primary health but we don't. We opt - for reasons of 'fairness' and equity - to spend the money on general campaigns produced by grand, flash and fancy ad agencies rather than intelligent, targeted direct marketing agencies. And we prefer to ban the agent rather than address the problem user.

Targeting public health campaigns would have a number of beneficial outcomes; Firstly it would mean we get better health outcomes from the spending; secondly, it would get away from the finger-wagging nanny state approach to health campaigns; and third it would allow more risky behaviours to receive public health campaigns. And, of course, it would mean that folk like me who are not massive public health risks and know what we're doing are less pissed off by the hectoring doctors and their chose fake charities.

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Dear Health Fascists, Ronald McDonald isnt making kids fat. Really.

I have never eaten anything from McDonald’s in my life. I think that being mutilated with a chain saw is too good for Ronald McDonald. And I despair at the society of grazing, chewing and scoffing that goes with today’s society.

But the idea that McDonalds are evil or somehow responsible for levels of childhood obesity is utter and complete rubbish. Yet again we see the health fascists swarming all over the clown and his pals

“In a poll conducted for the Value [The] Meal campaign, it was found that two out of three Americans hold a favorable view of Ronald McDonald (that's the work of fifty years of branding and over a billion dollars in advertising each year in the U.S. alone). But roughly half of people support retiring the clown and "favor stopping corporations from using cartoons and other children's characters to sell harmful products to children.”

Well let me tell you “roughly half of people” – it’s your fault not Ronnie’s. You’re the one’s who give in to the pestering, ‘gimme-gimme’ of your children and take them to McDonalds. That awful clown isn’t cornering your kids like some modern day child-catcher and dragging them through the golden arches to be turned overnight into gross blubberballs. Nope – it’s you.

So stop blaming the bloody messenger.

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Friday Fungus: don't just eat your mushrooms raw - marinade them!

My natural instinct when told that something is bad for me (usually by some self-appointed nutritionist or a jumped up, ill-informed health fascist) is to tell them to bathe their heads in guano until they’re thought of a better livelihood. However, you trust me don’t you? I’m going to give you some advice on eating mushrooms raw.

“The mycochitin composition of mushroom cell walls, as opposed to cellulose walls of plant cells, is difficult for humans to digest. Our stomachs resent indigestible items, and often forcibly reject them without further ado. The cooking process helps break down fungal cell walls, rendering mushroom flesh not only more readily digestible, but also releasing significant nutritional value contained within the cells.”

As is the case with most raw vegetables, mushrooms contain substances that “may be carcinogenic” (and if you’re really worried about this don’t eat that raw celery and keep those radishes out of your salad). The article from which the quote above – and the carcinogen warning – comes is pretty unequivocal: don’t eat mushrooms raw.

For my part, I don’t wholly agree. I certainly wouldn’t recommend building your diet around raw mushrooms and would advise against eating field collected wild mushrooms raw (although the Italians routinely do this and seem to live long, happy and healthy lives in the main). But the domesticated shop mushrooms are fine for most folk – just make sure they’re clean and don’t feed them to people with over-sensitive tummies.

My suggestion, if you want to enhance your salads with mushrooms, is to marinade them. Do this just as you would pieces of chicken, meat or vegetables – make the marinade (whatever you fancy but wine vinegar, good olive oil and herbs is a good starter or you might try lemon juice and rapeseed oil), chop up some sweet pepper, and mix the whole lot together and leave to stand for a few hours in the fridge.

Great in a salad with the juice as a dressing or just use as a condiment with cheese or cold meat. And don’t forget a big glass of Chianti!

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