Bradford Council's latest nannying nonsense - the "salt pot amnesty"

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Not content with trying to - incorrectly - blame takeaways for obesity, Bradford Council has leaped into action over salt:

Takeaway owners in Bradford are being urged to help save lives by joining in a salt pot amnesty.

The district’s Good Food Team want to see as many as possible standard 17-hole salt pots exchanged for five-hole ones to reduce how much comes out. 

We know - we've known for ages - that the huge campaign against salt isn't merely pointless it borders on the dangerous:

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death. 

Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time.

Yet useful idiot councillors like Bradford's ubiquitous Val Slater are rolled out to peddle the lie about salt consumption.  The truth - the facts if you like - is that there has been a remarkably stable level of salt intake in the UK during a period when heart attacks and heart disease incidence has fallen:

Deaths from heart attacks have halved since 2002 and no one is quite sure why. Similar changes have occurred in countries around the world but the death rate in England, especially, has fallen further and faster than almost anywhere.

Nothing to do with salt. Nothing at all. This jolly scheme isn't the worst bit of nannying nonsense but I'm absolutely sure it won't save a single life. Not one.

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Salt is good for you - season those chips!

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We've known for ages that salt - the wicked and evil thing we must remove from our diet - is, in truth, a pretty benign substance at the levels most of us consume. And we also need it in our diet.

Slowly people are beginning to realise this - here's the New York Times:

With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.

Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time.

Got that folks - cutting down salt consumption isn't healthy at all and may even be dangerous! But - as that same NY Times article reports - the food fascists still resist the truth:

When several agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, held a hearing last November to discuss how to go about getting Americans to eat less salt (as opposed to whether or not we should eat less salt), these proponents argued that the latest reports suggesting damage from lower-salt diets should simply be ignored.

A classic public health response - we've seen it with the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption, with e-cigarettes, with meat and with being  slightly overweight - faced with evidence that they might be wrong, the nannies simply ignore it and return to their discredited misrepresentation of the facts. Nothing can stand in the way of public health 'experts' controlling and regulating our diets - they are the ghastly successors of Douglas Jay:

‘...in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.’

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Ban restaurants!

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They're killing our children with obesity:

In their report, the authors argue that restaurants are clearly responsible for making children less healthy and that government intervention will be required to improve the health effect of restaurants on children: “Public policies that aim to reduce restaurant consumption — such as increasing the relative costs of these purchases; limiting access through zoning, particularly around schools; limiting portion sizes; and limiting exposure to marketing — deserve serious consideration.”

We're not just talking about McDonalds and KFC here folks but all those wonderful little places that you've discovered that are so child-friendly.

These people need stopping. Not the restaurants but the hideous prohibitionists who want to regulate pleasure out of existence. And the funny thing about this is that the sort of people - Shadow Health Spokesman, Andy Burnham springs to mind here - who want to introduce legal limits on salt and fat content don't realise that they'll kill off artisan ice-cream and will force restaurants out of business. They're looking at the easy target of the wicked "food industry" and missing the self-evident fact that lots of those celebrated foodie wonders are every bit and fat and sugar loaded (it is of course the best butter and prized sea salt but it's still salt and fat).

And people have spotting the problem with Burnham's search for a headline:

"Such an approach could paradoxically undermine public health by, in effect, the banning of products that actually contribute to a healthy diet. Whilst a product such as raisins can contribute to one of five-a-day portions of fruit and vegetables, it could be classed as high sugar."

But, of course, the nannying fussbuckets don't care about whether it works or whether their science is accurate. They just want to ban stuff - for the children or worse still:

...to save the NHS money

These people need stopping. There isn't an 'obesity crisis' and children are not being made fat by advertising. These are lies that cover up simple truths - people are fat mostly because they eat too much and exercise too little. But most people aren't obese and most children aren't fat. So let's concentrate on informing, persuading and helping the ones who are fat rather than blaming it on society or corporate greed.

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In which George Monbiot lets his dislike of fat poor people - and their food choices - get the better of his grasp of facts

OK let’s start with George Monbiot’s assertion that Alzheimer’s Disease is just another form of diabetes (although what seems to be said is that having diabetes – including diabetes linked to brain sugars – significantly raises the risk of getting Alzheimers Disease which isn’t quite the same thing).

There’s a problem with George’s assertion that this is entirely down to diet – and crucially the evils of junk food:

A scarcely regulated food industry can engineer its products – loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup – to bypass the neurological signals that would otherwise prompt people to stop eating. It can bombard both adults and children with advertising. It can (as we discovered yesterday) use the freedom granted to academy schools to sell the chocolate, sweets and fizzy drinks now banned from sale in maintained schools. It can kill off the only effective system (the traffic-light label) for informing people how much fat, sugar and salt their food contains. Then it can turn to the government and blame consumers for eating the products it sells. This is class war, a war against the poor fought by the executive class in government and industry.

Let’s take this diatribe piece by piece and see whether it stacks up.

“A scarcely regulated food industry”.

This is a statement of mind-blowing ignorance. Or maybe just deliberate misinformation from George.  I’m not going to list all the controls and regulations governing food production, food processing, distribution and retailing of food. You can experience the joy of knowing these regulations here at the Food Standards Agency. And that’s before we look at the control and regulations governing the sale of food for consumption on and off a given premises.

“...loading them with fat, salt, sugar and high-fructose corn syrup.”

Here George picks up every food scare going – the lies and myths about too much salt, the largely disproven attacks on saturated fats and the nonsense about sugar:

This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure.

In 2000, a respected international group of scientists called the Cochrane Collaboration conducted a "meta-analysis" of the scientific literature on cholesterol-lowering diets. After applying rigorous selection criteria (219 trials were excluded), the group examined 27 studies involving more than 18,000 participants. Although the authors concluded that cutting back on dietary fat may help reduce heart disease, their published data actually shows that diets low in saturated fats have no significant effect on mortality, or even on deaths due to heart attacks.

A new study says that childhood obesity is not caused by soft drinks and sweetened beverages. The study, undertaken by researchers at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada and published in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, reports that most children who consume such drinks are at no greater risk of obesity than those of their peers who do not.

 As you can see, most of these scares are nonsense.

“..to bypass the neurological signals...”

Nope. This doesn’t happen either. Or not at least outside the pages of junk science and public health campaigns. And even if it did (the argument is essentially that eating is pleasant and that this is why we eat passed being full), it applies to a whole host of other foods than burgers, chips and cake. Try some of that wonderful sourdough bread with butter and a selection of good English cheese – tell me you’re not going to eat passed being full!

“It can bombard both adults and children with advertising”

How many times can people like George get away with parading their ignorance of advertising? It is a fact – not a question of debate or discourse but a fact – that in mature markets (and food markets are all mature) advertising is about brand equity, protecting market share and occasionally switching. After all we didn’t start eating because a food company advertised did we? And before you all start correcting me, I really am much more of an expert on advertising and marketing than George.

“This is class war...”

And George does a triple back somersault over the shark. Because poor people are more likely to be obese (and only yesterday George’s friends were telling us the poor didn’t have any food), it is the food industry waging a class war!  I’m sorry George but you are completely wrong. Indeed, the opposite is true. It is you and your middle-class fussbucket friends who are waging the class war. It is you who is trying to take away little pleasures from people who aren’t fat, don’t have diabetes and won’t get Alzheimers. It is you who wants to ban McDonalds but haven’t even taken a peep at the fat, salt and sugar laden wonders in the Michelin starred restaurants your Guardian-reading pals like to frequent.

To be fair to George he tells the truth right near the end of his snobby bigoted rant:

We cannot yet state unequivocally that poor diet is a leading cause of Alzheimer's disease..

Absolutely. The truth is that Alzheimer’s, like type 2 diabetes, like many cancers, like coronary heart disease is overwhelmingly a condition associated with old age. And the main reason why there are more of these conditions is because we are living longer.

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Why does no-one in the media ever question what these people say?

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The "salt is evil' lobby have found a new target - bread:

A third of breads contain more salt than recommended under guidelines being introduced next year, a survey found.

Most breads were within the current guidelines of 1.1g of salt per 100g - but this is being cut to 1g per 100g.
Campaign for Action on Salt and Health (Cash), which looked at 300 breads, said it was "outrageous" that bread contained even the current level.

This is more junk science - there's very little evidence that fingers salt as a cause of high blood pressure yet the  media and worshippers at the Church of Public Health persist in the 'salt is bad for you line.

People who ate lots of salt were not more likely to get high blood pressure, and were less likely to die of heart disease than those with a low salt intake, in a new European study.

The findings "certainly do not support the current recommendation to lower salt intake in the general population," study author Dr. Jan Staessen, of the University of Leuven in Belgium, told Reuters Health.

Perhaps one day we'll start looking at the science?

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If we’re to have bread and circuses – we’ll need some acrobats!

Yesterday two things struck me – as they do sometimes.

The Riverside Studios in Hammersmith and the Derby and Exeter theatres were among the 206 theatre companies, galleries and arts venues who learned yesterday their government grants would dry up in 2012.

Others had their budgets significantly reduced, with the critically acclaimed Almeida Theatre Company in Islington, north London seeing their grant cut from £1 million this year to £700,000 in 2015 – a real terms drop of 39 per cent.

This was amongst announcements about funding from the Arts Council as part of an overall reduction (to £957 million) of 15% in grants to nationally-funded bodies.

At the same time I read this:

“Health experts are trying to see a shift in public eating habits which could add to improved general health. ASK is a unique Greater Manchester initiative to reduce the amount of salt added to food.

“Participating businesses display the ASK logo in their windows and use cards on tables to demonstrate their support. Most food cafes and restaurants already season their food adequately. For customers, reaching for salt has become a habit rather than it being a necessity.”

Now leaving aside the fact that salt does not cause hypertension (it is a risk factor for people who already have hypertension), this encapsulates the priorities of government to me. There may be a case for reducing funding of pleasure, animation and fun in a time of austerity but I am deeply offended when, at the same time as theatres close, art galleries reduce their hours and dance troops fold, we are spending money on scaring people about health risks.

On the back of other attacks on our simple pleasures – fags, booze, red meat, bacon – this speaks to me of a society obsessed with survival at the expense of pleasure. A place where the little tin gods of the medical profession suck up ever larger sums of other peoples’ cash to berate us with their “healthy living” obsessions.

All this while festivals go unfunded, arts groups fold and films aren’t made. A dour, dreary place filled with safety lectures, health concerns and a dread fear of anything that might seem a little untidy.

So here’s a little suggestion – let’s take all the cash we spend on nannying fussbucketry and spend it on having some fun! On plays, paintings, music, country walks, food festivals, markets – on animation and excitement. Surely that would do more to for mental health, for happiness and for health that all these dreary lectures from doctors and their pals.

After all, if we’re to have bread and circuses – we’ll need some acrobats!

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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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