Saturday 8 October 2011

Food, gormless food.

The tobacco companies fund antismoking initiatives. They say it's because they are obliged to but where do you think all that nicotine comes from for the alternatives? The tobacco companies are businesses. When they process tobacco, they spray the wash-water back onto the leaves because the wash-water has extracted nicotine.

How much easier and more profitable just to sell the wash-water to the patches and gum makers? The tobacco industry is not at all bothered whether you smoke it or stick it on your arm. Profit is profit.

The booze industry funds the anti-booze lot. The anti-booze lot insist that the booze industry charge more for weaker booze.

Why would the booze industry object to that?

Now the food industry is all bothered about people getting fat from eating too much food. They are into 'weight management' now.

What does 'weight management' mean? It means diet food. Higher prices and lower calories. For the food industry, this is fantastic. "I will sell you food that is so low in anything useful that you will just shrink away, and it will cost you only a little bit more than real food. Aren't I just the saviour you've been looking for?"

Eat the same amount, pay more, get less nutrition and lose weight and regard it as a good thing. It's a business dream.There really is one born every minute.

So it's not surprising that it's also full of pseudoscience.



• Where does the science stand with dairy?

Dairy science has been going on for a long, long time  There is an enormous amount of it if anyone cares to look and it mostly predates the internet so you'll only find a fraction there. I'm afraid that any serious research will involve dusty tomes.

• What are the active ingredients – is it just related to calcium? 

There are no active ingredients where weight loss is concerned. In anything. Get real and grow up.

...but people who consume a lot of dairy are slimmer, so says the epidemiological evidence

People who consume a lot of yoghourt and who routinely have carboard cereal with milk for breakfast, who eat boiled egg, and Feta cheese with olives, are not the same people who eat a lot of pie and chips and burgers and who prefer their cheap cheese melted over a bacon-enhanced Big Mac.

There is no magic in that epidemiological study, other than the 'magic' that is bad science.

There is no active ingredient. The answer lies in people's choices. That is no longer a consideration because the notion that people might make their own choices is now far in the forgotten realms of history, ie over a decade ago.

The good news? This is some idiots in commerce in America. We're not paying for it.

Phew.


3 comments:

JuliaM said...

"The good news? This is some idiots in commerce in America. We're not paying for it."

We always get what the US gets. Weather, tv shows, dumb ideas.

Always...

David Davis said...

I'm not sure where the "slim" = "good" meme actually began. It can't have been during WW2 or the 1950s (which I remember) since as a child I was always berated by my parents without mercy for "NOT BEING LIKE PATIRCK IMRIE, WHO EATS SIX POTATOES FOR DINNER, [every day!] EAT YOUR ******* POTATOES!)

I was a rather small thin child who didn't fancy food a lot of the time because it was so disgusting. (Patrick Imrie was a child at my kindergarten, a little older than me. He, today, would be branded "obese" by the school-NAZIS and taken into "care", even though he was only what we then would have called "a biggish boy, well-boned, well-muscled for his age"....)

Could someone tell us what is the advantage to being "slim"?

Anonymous said...

Has anyone seen how mnuch food they consumed in the old days - coal miners , ditch diggers and the like had to eat enormous amounts of food - they actually worked. And they were well hard.

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