Reading this Samizdata quote of the day got me thinking about why devolution in the UK has been a general disappointment and source of endless annoyance.
I remember when arguments were originally made for devolution, commentators would claim that devolution would work in the same way that the federal structure of the US works, or, for that matter, how the cantonal system works in Switzerland. By which they meant that if a state such as Zug in Switzerland or Wisconsin in the US tried a specific policy (encouraging cryptos, or enacting Workfare, to take two actual examples), that the perceived success or failure of these policies would be studied by other cantons and states. Hence the idea that devolution allows a sort of “laboratory experiment” of policy to take place. It creates a virtuous kind of competition. That’s the theory.
What seems to have happened is that since devolution in the UK, Scotland, Wales and to some extent, Northern Ireland, have competed with England in who can be the most statist, authoritarian and in general, be the biggest set of fools. Whether it is 20 mph speed limits spreading to many places and harsh lockdowns (Wales) or minimum pricing on booze and “snitching” on your own family for views about gender (Scotland), the Celtic fringe appears to be more interested in being more oppressive, rather than less. I cannot think of a single issue in which the devolved governments of the UK have been more liberal, and more respectful, of liberty under the rule of law. (Feel free to suggest where I am mistaken.)
One possible problem is that because the UK’s overall government holds considerable budgetary power, the devolved bits of the UK don’t face the consequences of feckless policy to the extent necessary to improve behaviour.
Even so, I don’t entirely know why the Scots and Welsh have taken this turn and I resist the temptation to engage in armchair culture guessing about why they tend to be more collectivist at present. It was not always thus. Wales has been a bastion of a kind of liberalism, fused to a certain degree with non-conformity in religion, and Scotland had both the non-conformist thing, and the whole “enlightment” (Smith, Hume, Ferguson, etc) element. At some point, however, that appears to have stopped. Wales became a hotbed of socialism in the 20th century, in part due to the rise of organised labour in heavy industry, and then the whole folklore – much of it sentimental bullshit – about the great achievements in healthcare of Nye Bevan. Scotland had its version of this, plus the resentments about Mrs Thatcher and the decline of Scotland as a manufacturing power.
[…]
Maybe the “test lab” force of devolution will play a part in demonstrating that, as and when we get a Labour government for the whole of the UK, it will be a shitshow on a scale to put what has happened in the Celtic parts of the UK in the shade.
Johnathan Pearce, “Why has devolution not worked in a liberal direction?”, Samizdata, 2024-04-23.
July 25, 2024
QotD: Why devolution has not worked in the United Kingdom
June 29, 2024
Oh no! The filthy proles are getting too many calories! Let’s re-impose rationing!
Tim Worstall suggests that the regular “viewing with alarm” thumbsuckers about purchased meals having “too many calories” are actually an indication of a strong desire by the great and the good to stick their regulatory noses into the lives of ordinary people:
“Indian take away in Farrer Park” by Kai Hendry is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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This headline is, of course, wrong.
Some takeaway meals contain more calories than daily limit, UK study finds
There is no daily limit. We do not have laws stating how much food we are allowed to eat. Of course, there are those who want there to be such laws but there aren’t, as yet. What there is is a series of recommendations about the limits we should impose upon ourselves:
Some takeaway meals contain more calories in one sitting than someone is advised to consume in an entire day, a study of British eating habits has revealed.
That’s better.
Cafes, fast-food outlets, restaurants, bakeries, pubs and supermarkets are fuelling the UK’s obesity crisis because so many meals they sell contain dangerously large numbers of calories, it found.
That’s not better. Because a plate of food containing a lot of calories is not a danger. Eating many of them might be but that the average household can get a gutbuster for some trivial portion of household earnings is a glory of modern civilisation, the very proof we require that we’re all as rich as Croesus.
And this is actually true too. That we are gloriously rich and it’s our food supply that proves this. As Brad Delong likes to point out back 200 years (yes, about right, 1820s is as it was really changing but 300 years would be better) it took a full day’s work to be able to gain 2,000 calories a day for a day labourer. There are 800 million out there still living at that standard of living. We can buy 2,000 calories — if we go boring stodge — for 30 minutes work now.
By history and by certain geographies we are foully rich these days. Which is the complaint of the wowsers of course. They’re a revival of the puritans and their sumptuary laws. How dare it be true that people fill their bellies with food they actually like?
Six out of 10 takeaway meals contain more than the 600-calorie maximum that the government recommends people should stick to for lunch and dinner in order to not gain weight, according to the research, which was carried out by the social innovation agency Nesta.
One in three contain at least 1,200 calories – double the recommended limit.
And? So, folk can buy lots of food for not much money. This is the very thing that makes having a civilisation possible — cheap food. My wife and I do indeed partake of an Indian occasionally — and find the takeout portions rather large. So, we have one amount for lunch or dinner and we’ve a refrigerator in which to keep the excess for a supper or snack another day. This is not beyond the wit of man to organise.
We don’t order in food very often, but when we do we usually manage to get both dinner on the night and lunch on the morrow from a typical order. If the nosey parkers have their way, they’d limit what we were allowed to buy — for our own good, of course — so we’d almost certainly still pay the same amount for less food. Such a deal!
June 27, 2024
The Toronto Star wants Ontario to adopt Scottish booze regulation (but ignore the failure)
The Toronto Star always loves a good moral crusade, and if it also happens to fly in the face of whatever Premier Ford wants to do, then so much the better:
The Toronto Star is looking to Scotland to teach it how to reduce alcohol-related deaths. In an article titled “How Scotland started to kick its alcohol problem — and what Ontario could learn from it“, it pushes back on plans to liberalise Ontario’s state monopoly on alcohol retail, saying:
Ontario officials say they are fulfilling a 2018 election promise to increase “choice and convenience for shoppers and support Ontario retailers, domestic producers and workers in the alcohol industry”.
But Scotland has cut alcohol-related hospital admissions by 40 per cent and deaths by almost half. While in Ontario, alcohol-related admissions have risen by a third and deaths by almost half, according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction.
How did Scotland supposedly achieve this public health miracle?
The key part of Scotland’s landmark policy was aimed at reducing drinking by introducing minimum unit prices to make drinking more expensive.,/p>
Ontario already has minimum pricing and Scotland doesn’t have a state alcohol monopoly, so it is not obvious what lessons Ontarians are supposed to be learning, but put that to one side for a moment and consider the main claim.
Anyone who has been following events in Scotland knows that alcohol-specific deaths have risen since minimum pricing was introduced in 2018 and have generally risen since 2012 following a significant downturn in the years prior.
It is that drop between 2006 and 2012 that the Toronto Star must be referring to when it claims that deaths fell by “almost half” (actually a third). But the Scottish government didn’t pass any anti-alcohol legislation in those six years and it certainly didn’t have minimum pricing. The newspaper mentions that the drink-drive limit was cut, but that didn’t happen until 2014 and the evidence is clear that it had no effect on road accidents.
Since the Toronto Star doesn’t mention when the decline in alcohol-specific deaths took place, it is leading its readers to believe that it coincided with the introduction of minimum pricing and the lowering of the drink-drive limit. I call that lying.
It is strangely fitting that Canadians are being lied to about the “success” of Scotland’s alcohol strategy since the Scottish public were conned into accepting minimum pricing, in part, on the basis of lies told about the “success” of minimum pricing in Canada. The neo-temperance academic Tim Stockwell, who is quoted in the Star article, published a series of studies in the 2010s making some absurd claims about minimum pricing that were parroted by campaigners in the UK.
June 22, 2024
“We can learn a lot about our betters from looking at each exception to their rules”
Julie Burchill isn’t a soccer fan, but she points out that the “exceptions” to the usual “rules” that the kakistocrats allow during international soccer tournaments tell us a lot about them:
Patriotism is not the only “bad” thing we’re suddenly “allowed” to do in the weeks when the national team plays on the world stage. The BBC in particular reminds men that they can disregard the finger-wagging for a few brief weeks. In EastEnders, male characters cringingly ask their mates to “get the beers in for the game”. Alcohol would generally be condemned as a public-health menace by Auntie, but during “The Game”, one more “cheeky” tipple apparently won’t hurt you.
We can learn a lot about our betters from looking at each exception to their rules. Don’t be racist – except against Jews. Believe all women about sexual assault – unless they’re Israeli. Oh, and be careful not to “culturally appropriate” the slightest thing from any other nationality, even to the point of never wearing a sombrero in a Mexican restaurant – but it’s fine to be a cross-dressing man culturally appropriating my sex. Meanwhile, if you’re a woman, be a good little Transmaid and stand by smiling, even if you call yourself a feminist.
Like most other places in the West in these dog days of civilisation, England feels like a nation devoid of hope and pride. Even so, being allowed to take pride in some overpaid ball-kickers, but not in the fact that this country contributed massively to ending slavery – lest we be called out as White Saviours – is a somewhat surreal situation to find ourselves in, after all those centuries of blood, sweat and struggle.
Flying the flag for the duration of the Euros is like being a eunuch who’s permitted to have his nuts back for a couple of weeks – for old times’ sake – and wear them as earrings. But those who indulge must be sure to tear their St George’s down sharpish once the festivities are over, lest they be fingered as a fascist for liking their own flag more than others. Remember, the only flag that can be flown constantly now is the Pride flag. This must be saluted respectfully wherever it pops up – failure to do so may identify you as an unworthy citizen of Soft Play Pit Nation.
June 15, 2024
W.H.O. the hell do they think they are?
Christopher Snowden on what he calls a “new low” for the World Health Organization (WHO) in a report issued earlier this week that sounds like Karl Marx was one of the writers:
The WHO European Region published a new report today, written mostly by British ‘public health’ academics. It is quite revealing. For example …
This requires, at a minimum, that governments recognize that the primary interest of all major corporations is profit and, hence, regardless of the product they sell, their interests do not align with either public health or the broader public interest. Any policy that could impact their sales and profits is therefore a threat, and they should play no role in the development of that policy. Similarly, governments must also recognize the now overwhelming evidence (see also chapters 4, 6 and 7) that HHIs [“health-harming industries”] engage in the same political and scientific practices as tobacco companies and that voluntary or multistakeholder partnership approaches do not work where conflicts of interest exist. Instead, they must regulate other HHIs [“health-harming industries”], their products and practices, as they do tobacco.
That’s just one paragraph, but there’s a lot it in.
Firstly, they are clearly not just opposed to “health-harming industries” but to private industry and the free market in general.
Secondly, they want to exclude all industries from the policy-making process, as already happens with the tobacco industry.
Thirdly, they want to regulate all “health-harming industries” in the same way as they regulate tobacco. These industries include alcohol, food and fossil fuels, but the report also mentions pharmaceuticals, infant formula, gambling, firearms, healthcare (!) and sugary drinks. As the quote above makes clear, they think that all private industry damages health in some way.
This is all there in black and white and there is much more of the same in the report. This is not scaremongering or the slippery slope fallacy. It is in an official WHO document.
When people show you who they are, believe them.
I have written about this for The Critic …
If this sounds to you like Bolshie talk, you might be onto something. It is further confirmation that the modern “public health” movement is an arm of the hard left presented as an arm of medicine. It would be tempting to tell the authors to stay in their lane, but anti-capitalist nanny statism is their lane. For over a decade, such academics, mostly from Britain and Australia, have been pumping out studies about the “commercial determinants of health” and the “corporate political activity” of “unhealthy commodity industries”. The new WHO report is a sort of greatest hits collection. Last year they published a whole series of articles in the Lancet in which they claimed that there is “growing evidence that neoliberalism has been damaging to health” and called for “a normative shift away from harmful consumptogenic systems”.
Half-baked Marxist rhetoric has been rife in the social sciences for decades, but these people have a vaguely coherent point to make and are pursuing a serious, if terrifying, agenda. Since they do not believe in human agency, they assume that people only make “unhealthy choices”, such as eating processed ham, because the system that controls them has been rigged by big corporations. They say in today’s report that “consumers do not have capacity (time or resources) to make the ‘right’ choice”. Fortunately, public health academics know what the right choice is and could impose it on a grateful population if it were not for the pesky free market. Hence their rage against capitalism, which extends to suspicion of intellectual property, international trade, share buybacks, impact assessments (because they allow businesses to engage with policy-makers) and even the EU single market.
Further to what I say in the article, I’d add that it is to the UK’s shame that so many of the authors of this report are British. They include quackademics that I have been making fun of for years, such as Anna Gilmore, Mark Petticrew and May van Schalkwyk. Between them, they constitute a small clique of talentless, fanatics and/or grifting social scientists who have constructed a world of unreality for themselves by publishing endless low quality journal articles which they and their colleagues then reference and self-reference. It is profoundly depressing that they are now dangling the corpse of the WHO — which was once a great institution — on pieces of string.
March 24, 2024
QotD: Adolescence
In the old days, of course (in every culture), adulthood came earlier, and adolescence was merely its apprentice form. Now thanks to an extended, debilitating system of “education”, bureaucratically controlled, adolescence itself, or the semblance of it, may be extended past the age of thirty; and with the further interventions of what I call Twisted Nanny State, from birth (when permitted) to death (however caused). The old notion that one must take responsibility for oneself and in one’s neighbourhood (whatever that may be) has come to be replaced by the new notion that one is the member of a demographic group, to be assigned responsibilities by one’s progressive betters.
David Warren, “Against ‘education'”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-09-06.
March 18, 2024
Slimy “nudgers” want to manipulate the food you buy by “denormalizing” what you enjoy
Christopher Snowden on the self-imagined elites’ desire for you dirt people to eat a different diet than you would voluntarily choose for yourselves:
On Thursday, Legal & General Investment Management’s senior global environmental, social and governance (ESG) manager told Nestlé to sell less sugar. It’s not for want of trying. In 2018, Nestlé launched Milkybar Wowsomes with 30% less sugar than a Milkybar. The company described it as a “great tasting product” that was the result of “a scientific breakthrough” but when it was discontinued in 2020, Nestlé lamented that demand for it had been “underwhelming”. In 2021, it launched a non-HFSS version of Shreddies called Shreddies The Simple One which contained just four ingredients. The company said:
We know that consumers are looking to eat more healthily, especially following the pandemic. Shreddies The Simple One is an exciting new addition to the breakfast table that caters to growing demand, with a delicious taste consumers will love.
Consumers did not, in fact, love it and it was withdrawn from sale the following year.
Today, the King’s Fund has added its voice to the call for mandatory reformulation targets enforced with heavy fines. The King’s Fund’s job has traditionally been to get more money for the NHS but it is under new management with Sarah Woolnough, a former trustee of Action on Smoking and Health and former CEO of Cancer Research UK, so it is now involved in lifestyle regulation.
Compelling food manufacturers to strip out large amounts of fat, salt and sugar would help “denormalise” the routine consumption of unhealthy food, Sarah Woolnough, the chief executive of the King’s Fund, told the Guardian.
The word “denormalise” is taken straight from the anti-tobacco playbook. See how it works yet?
As the Guardian points out, the King’s Fund has done some polling which finds that reformulation is hugely popular in the abstract.
Overall, 67.3% of Britons agree that the government should require companies to reduce the amount of fat, salt and sugar they put in their products, a survey for the influential health thinktank undertaken by Ipsos Mori found. Only 5% disagreed.
This is a beautiful example of the difference between stated preferences and revealed preferences. People love the idea of fat, salt and sugar being removed from food. Who wouldn’t, so long as the food tasted the same? But it doesn’t taste the same. It tastes considerably worse. And when reformulation isn’t physically possible — for example, with nearly all confectionery, biscuits and cakes — the only way to meet the target is by shrinking the product. Some chocolate bars are now so small that a dual pack is the default (and so, as with the sugar tax, big business is doing rather well out of it). And, yes, that is because of the government’s reformulation scheme.
If pollsters asked people if they are in favour of shrinkflation, I doubt many would say yes. As for reformulation, the only way to get an informed opinion would be to do a taste test using the “before” and “after” versions of popular food products and ask people whether the government should mandate the reformulated version and ban the original version. Again, I doubt many people would give unqualified support for reformulation.
Fortunately, we don’t need to carry out such experiments because the public have been offered reformulated products many times in the real world. Sometimes they become popular — in which case there is no need for government coercion — but very often they are a flop, and in many cases they cannot even be attempted.
The British public have put up with a lot from meddlesome puritans in the last 20 years, but I strongly suspect that if the government tried to force us to eat the likes of Milkybar Wowsomes and Shreddies The Simple One, the thin blue line would finally snap.
March 8, 2024
How the elites used bait-and-switch tactics to sell the idea of “15-minute cities”
In The Critic, Alex Klaushofer outlines how the Oxfordshire County Council introduced the 15-minute city nonsense for Oxford:
This time last year I watched with bemusement as a strange new trend emerged in my native Britain. Councils were introducing restrictions on citizens moving about by car. Living in Portugal had given me an observer’s detachment and I struggled to reconcile what I was seeing with the country I knew.
Oxford — my alma mater and the city where I regularly used to lose my bicycle — was at the heart of it. In November 2022, Oxfordshire County Council approved an experimental traffic scheme in a city notorious for congestion. Traffic filters would divide the city into zones, with those wishing to drive between them obliged to apply for permits.
Residents would be allocated passes for up to 100 journeys a year and those living outside the permit area 25. The zones would be monitored by automatic number plate recognition cameras and any journeys taken without permits would result in fines.
Duncan Enright, the councillor with responsibility for travel strategy told the Sunday Times the scheme would turn Oxford into a 15-minute city: “It is about making sure you have the community centre which has all of those essential needs, the bottle of milk, pharmacy, GP, schools which you need to have a 15-minute neighbourhood”.
The explanation didn’t make sense. The council was presenting a scheme centred around restrictions on the movement of vehicles on the basis of something quite different: the desirability of local facilities. It was part of a plan for a “net zero transport system” which included a commitment to “20-minute neighbourhoods: well-connected and compact areas around the city of Oxford where everything people need for their daily lives can be found within a 20-minute walk”.
Yet the Central Oxfordshire Travel Plan made no provision for new services or even assessing existing amenities. Instead, flourishing neighbourhoods were to be achieved by the simple expedient of making it difficult for people to drive across the city. Residents, visitors and businesses would make only “essential” — the word was highlighted in bold — car journeys. And while they would still be able to enter and exit Oxford via the ring road, “a package of vehicle movement restrictions” would “encourage” people to live locally.
Traffic management or social engineering? The council’s plan looked like a case of bait-and-switch: citizens were being enticed to accept one thing on the promise of another. And, judging by the increasing revenues other councils were collecting through cameras, the scheme would be a nice earner.
The vast amount of media coverage on 15-minute cities fuelled the fundamental confusion at the heart of the Oxford scheme. Instead of examining its implications, journalists characterised those questioning the proposals as “conspiracy theorists” who were wilfully refusing leafy roads and local markets. “What are 15-minute cities and why are anti-vaxxers so angry about them?” ran a headline in The Times.
The Guardian published a piece titled “In praise of the 15-minute city” which mocked “libertarian fanatics and the bedroom commentators of TikTok”, claiming they belonged to an “anti-vaccine, pro-Brexit, climate-denying, 15-minute-phobe, Great Reset axis”. What had happened to the newspaper I’d read for decades and on occasion written for, with its understanding of the effects of policies on ordinary people?
The public debate around the Oxford experiment completely bypassed the obvious practicalities. What about a typical family, juggling work with school runs and after-school activities? Having to drive out of the city and around its periphery for each trip could make their lives impossible. How would those whose work wasn’t accessible by public transport manage on the two permitted journeys a week?
January 30, 2024
The foul “nudgers” are at it again at Cambridge
Christopher Gage reports on a recent fun-reducing experiment by paid psychological meddlers at Cambridge University:
“Wineglass” by quinn.anya is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Researchers found they could “nudge” people into drinking less wine when they denied the unsuspecting blighters a large 250ml measure.
Last summer, these wholly well-adjusted people convinced 21 Cambridgeshire pubs and restaurants to offer only small or medium glasses of wine. The result left the boffins breathless. But sadly, not in the medical sense of the word.
When denied a large, vivifying glass of wine, the subjects drank eight percent less than usual, and the pubs didn’t lose any money — smaller measures cost more. Puritans: two. Oenophiles: nil.
The usual suspects cooked up this obscene waste of time and money. Professor Dame Theresa Marteau, director of the behaviour and health research unit at Cambridge University, boasts lurid form in control freakery.
Her previous studies read like an almanac of neurotic impulses. The mad mullah dreams of shrinking plates and sinking sodas. This finger-wagger-in-chief obsesses with the vinous, porcine masses and what they may slip into their faces when she’s not looking. Marteau chillingly laments that large wine glasses “increase the pleasure of drinking wine”.
The fundamentally nosey swear these are the first murmurs of Utopia. Next, they’ll bend boozing regulations into a truncheon to batter the gastronomic swine over its head. They don’t stop. First, they shrink the large glass. Then, the medium glass affects as the large. What happens next? Take a wild guess.
This is not the work of some rogue Colonel Kurtz. One Daily Telegraph writer seized on the study. Employing the presumptuous “we” beloved of oppressive minds, they offered tips to help us drink less, assuming we drink large wines only because we are weak-willed effigies desperate for professional helpers to show us what’s best for us.
Advocates of “nudging” drive themselves senseless over this psychological thimblerig. The potential to correct “undesirable” behaviour proves too great to resist. They are a species of featherless biped with which I share nothing but the right to a trial before a jury of my peers.
As I write, I’ve just returned from a five-mile jaunt with 33 pounds strapped to my back. Loading a bag with weights burns double the calories. Therefore, whatever I do after that trek is my business alone. On my desk is a large glass of Portuguese red blend. Beside that soul-tingling measure sits a smouldering, hand-rolled, menthol-tipped cigarette.
Why strangers stake their mental well-being on what others put into their bodies, I will never know. Why they wish I’d sit here choking on sparkling water and its vegetable equivalent — celery — I’ve not the foggiest of insights. All I do know, friends, is that I am not the one in dire need of a few sessions with a psychoanalyst. My professional advice: Seven letters. Vulgar slang. A phrasal verb rhyming with “duck cough”.
August 10, 2023
“Ultra-Processed Food” is so bad that we need extra scare-quotes!!
Christopher Snowden seems, for some inexplicable reason, to be skeptical about the hysterical warnings of people like Chris van Tulleken in his recent book Ultra-Processed People: Who Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop?
If Jamie Oliver is the fun police, Chris van Tulleken is the Taliban. The selling point of books like Ultra-Processed People is the idea that everything you know is wrong. Van Tulleken, an infectious diseases doctor and television presenter, takes this to extremes. In this book, almost everybody is wrong, many of them are corrupt and almost no one is to be trusted. Only Dr. van Tulleken, a handful of researchers and anyone who pays £25 to read this book knows the real truth. The problem is not sugar. The problem is not carbs. Artificial sweeteners don’t work. Exercise doesn’t work. Willpower doesn’t work. Every scientist who has published research contradicting his theory is in the pay of the food industry or — how’s this for an ad hominem argument? — has cited studies by people who are. The British Nutrition Foundation, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the British Dietetic Association, the Centre for Social Justice, the Institute of Economic Affairs, Tortoise Media, Diabetes UK, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation are all tainted by food industry funding. Even Jamie Oliver – Saint Jamie, the Sage of Essex — is guilty by his association with Tesco and Deliveroo, and because he makes ultra-processed food (“albeit fairly marginal items”).
It is this ultra-processed food (UPF), argues van Tulleken, that is the real cause of obesity and diet-related diseases in the world today. Food is classified as UPF if it is wrapped in plastic and contains an ingredient you don’t have in your kitchen. This includes everything from mustard to Magnums but, counter-intuitively, doesn’t include sugar, salt or fat. Van Tulleken doesn’t quite put it like this but, in effect, anything you make at home is healthy while nearly anything you buy in a supermarket, aside from raw ingredients, is bad for you.
The evidence for this striking proposition can be briefly outlined, and van Tulleken deals with it swiftly in a single chapter. Firstly, there are a number of studies using observational epidemiology which find a correlation between diets which are high in UPF and various ailments, including not only obesity, heart disease and type 2 diabetes, but also dementia, depression, cancer and more. Secondly, there is a randomised controlled trial which gave a small group of volunteers a two-week diet of either ultra-processed food or minimally processed food. The nutritional profile of each diet was similar (the same levels of salt, sugar, etc.) and the volunteers were offered twice as much as they needed to maintain a healthy weight. The people on the ultra-processed diet ended up eating 500 calories more than the people on the minimally processed diet and put on nearly a kilogram of weight.
The randomised controlled trial was published in 2019 and already has over 1,200 academic citations. Van Tulleken considers it to be extraordinarily robust, but it only really stands out because the general standard of dietary research is so poor. The volunteers were not given ultra-processed versions of the same meals. They were given totally different meals, plus very different snacks, and they could eat as much as they wanted for free. What does it actually demonstrate? Arguably, all it shows is that if you give people unlimited quantities of tasty food, they will eat more of it than if you give them blander food. Van Tulleken assures us that “the two diets were equally delicious”, but this would seem to contradict his claims elsewhere that UPF is “hyper-palatable”, delicious and irresistible.
As for the epidemiological correlations, what is it that actually correlates? UPF is an incredibly broad category encompassing most foods that are known as HFSS (high in fat, sugar or salt) and many more besides. People who eat a lot of UPF tend to have lower incomes, which correlates with all sorts of health conditions. In the study van Tulleken cites to demonstrate that UPF causes cancer, the people who ate the most UPF had the highest smoking rate and were least likely to be physically active. Epidemiologists attempt to control for such factors, but with so much going on in the data, it is an heroic assumption to think that the effect of food processing can be teased out from the effects of fat, sugar, salt, obesity, smoking, stress, exercise and numerous socio-economic influences.
May 12, 2023
The crusade against (insert scare quotes here) Ultra-Processed Food
In The Critic, Christopher Snowden traces the orthorexist journey from warning about the dangers of saturated fat, to protesting against sugar content in foods, through an anti-carbohydrate phase to today’s crusade against “Ultra-Processed Food”:
How the Daily Mail represented the three categories of processed food.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11286753/What-ultraprocessed-food-MailOnlines-guide-help-tell-apart.html
It is barely ten years since Denmark repealed its infamous “fat tax”. It was supposed to be a world-leading intervention to tackle obesity but it proved to be hugely unpopular and lasted just 15 months.
It seems almost strange now that it targeted saturated fat. In hindsight, it was the last gasp of the crusade against fat before all eyes turned to sugar. The anti-sugar crusade seemed to come out of nowhere in 2014 with the emergence of the tiny but phenomenally successful pressure group Action on Sugar. Within three years, the British government had announced a tax on sugary drinks, but by then the anti-sugar movement was morphing into a campaign against carbohydrates. That began to run out of steam a couple of years ago when many of the leading anti-carb personalities found that they could get more attention — and, dare I say, money — from being “sceptical” about COVID-19 vaccines.
They come and go, these food fads, but they all rely on the belief that there is something in the food supply that is uniquely dangerous, something hitherto unknown that only independent free thinkers can see is the cause of all our problems.
The new dietary villain is “ultra-processed food” (UPF), a concept that didn’t even exist until a few years ago but is now everywhere. There have been two books about UPF published in recent weeks and a third — Henry Dimbleby’s Ravenous — dedicated a lot of space to it.
The simple definition of ultra-processed food as used by those who are concerned about them (I am not making this up to make them sound silly) is anything that is “wrapped in plastic and has at least one ingredient you wouldn’t find in a home kitchen”. Since you probably don’t have emulsifiers, preservatives and artificial sweeteners in your kitchen, this rules out a lot of products.
The argument is that these products make you fat and should be avoided. The evidence for this comes from a study published in 2019. In a randomised controlled trial, ten people were given an ultra-processed diet and ten other people were given an unprocessed diet. Both diets were similar in their overall sugar, fat, protein and salt content, although the meals themselves were very different.
The participants were given all the food for free and they could eat as much as wanted. The people on the ultra-processed diet ended up eating 500 calories per day more than the other group and, after two weeks, had put on nearly a kilogram of weight. By contrast, the people on the unprocessed diet lost weight.
If you look at the food that was offered to the two groups, the explanation is obvious. The meals and snacks available to the UPF group were delicious whereas the food given to the other group was rather Spartan and was unlikely to make anybody ask for a second helping. If you give people tasty food for free, they will tend to eat more of it.
February 8, 2023
“Smoking has been a net gain for the Treasury ever since King James I started taxing it heavily in the 1600s”
Christopher Snowden asks whether we should believe the consistent claims of public health advocates on how much things they disapprove of (smoking, drinking, etc.) “cost” the taxpayer:
If smoking costs the taxpayers £173 billion, then how much does widespread forced feeding of office pastries cost?
If you say that a certain activity costs society £10 billion a year, most people would assume that if that activity disappears, society will save £10 billion a year.
They might have different ideas of what “society” means. Some will assume that the £10 billion is a cost to taxpayers while others will assume that some of the cost is borne by private individuals and businesses. But the majority will, quite reasonably, assume that the cost is to other people, i.e. those who do not participate in the activity.
And nearly everyone will assume that the £10 billion is money in the conventional sense of cash that can be exchanged for goods and services.
But when it comes to estimates from “public health” campaigners about the cost of drinking/smoking/obesity, all these assumptions would be wrong. Most of the “costs” are to the people engaged in the activity and they are not financial costs. Taxpayers would not pay less tax if they disappeared. In general, they would pay more.
Last month I mentioned an estimate of the “cost” of gambling in the UK and said:
These studies have no merit as economic research. They are purely driven by advocacy. The hope is that the average person will wrongly assume that the costs are to taxpayers and agitate for change.
The main aim of these Big Numbers is to convince the public that heavily-taxed activities place a burden on society that exceeds the tax revenue, thereby justifying yet more taxes and prohibitions.
In the case of smoking, this has become more and more difficult. Smoking has been a net gain for the Treasury ever since King James I started taxing it heavily in the 1600s. Today, as the smoking rate dwindles and tobacco duty rises ever higher, anti-smoking campaigners have got their work cut out duping non-smokers into thinking otherwise.
Tobacco duty brings in about £12 billion a year. For years, groups like Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) used a figure of £13.74 billion as the “cost of smoking”. This came from a flimsy Policy Exchange report which included £5.4 billion as the cost of smoking breaks and £4.8 billion as the cost of lost productivity due to premature mortality. Neither of these are costs to the taxpayer. They are not even external costs, i.e. costs to non-smokers.
Last year, in a review commissioned by the Department of Health, Javed Khan came up with a figure of “around £17 billion” as the “societal cost” of smoking. This included “reduced employment levels” (£5.69 billion) and “reduced wages for smokers” (£6.04 billion). Again, these costs fall on smokers themselves and are not external costs. They are, in other words, none of the government’s business.
Last week, a report commissioned by Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) pulled out all the stops and announced that the cost of smoking to Britain was now — wait for it! — £173 billion. Go big or go home, eh?
January 20, 2023
Christopher Snowden on our latest “Clown World” alcohol guidelines
At Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, Christopher Snowden pokes gigantic holes in the stated justification for the latest Canadian drink consumption recommendations (also mentioned in this post yesterday):
“Pelee Island winery”by John Kannenberg is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Canada is on the brink of making itself an international laughing stock by cutting its drinking guidelines from two drinks a day to two drinks a week. The previous guidelines were only set in 2011 so Canadian drinkers can be forgiven for being suspicious about this dramatic change. The evidence base has not significantly changed in the interim. The evidence for the health benefits of moderate drinking has continued to pile up.
The only thing that has really changed is that neo-temperance zealots like Tim Stockwell have tightened their grip on alcohol research. Stockwell and his “no safe level” pal Tim Naimi both live in Canada and are both authors of the report that has made the ludicrous new recommendations.
I have been saying for over a decade that the “public health” plan is to get the guidelines down to zero so they can start regulating alcohol like tobacco. The evidence does not support this fundamentally ideological campaign and so the evidence has been dropped in favour of fantasy modelling and cherry-picking.
[…]
A Canadian “standard drink” contains 13.45 grams of alcohol. Three standard drinks equals 40 grams. Four standard drinks equals 53 grams. The meta-analysis has no data on people who drink so little, so the claim that colon cancer risk increases at three or more standard drinks is not supported even by the authors’ own preferred source.
As for breast cancer, which can only affect half the population and is partly why most countries have different guidelines for men and women, the report cites this meta-analysis of 22 studies, 13 of which found no statistically significant association with drinking. It pooled the studies and reported a 10 per cent increase in risk for people drinking 10 grams of alcohol a day. As with the colon cancer study, this was the minimum quantity studied so it tells us nothing about Canadians who drink 3-5 standard drinks.
In terms of mortality, another meta-analysis found that light drinking was not positively associated with any form of cancer, including breast cancer, and was negatively associated with cancer in a couple of instances […]
As countless studies have shown, heart disease and stroke risk is substantially reduced among light and moderate drinkers. For example, a meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies (which track people’s drinking habits and health status over a number of years and are the most reliable studies in observational epidemiology) found that drinkers were 25 per cent less likely to die from coronary heart disease than teetotallers. The evidence for strokes is similar.
This is main reason why life expectancy is longer for moderate drinkers and the relationship between alcohol consumption and mortality is J-shaped.
The authors of the Canadian report essentially ignore all this evidence and instead focus on a cherry-picked meta-analysis written by Stockwell, Naimi and pals which massively adjusted the figures to arrive at their desired conclusion. This is inexcusable.
At The Line, Jen Gerson points out the utter absurdity of public health officials doing their best Carry Nation bar-smashing imitations while at the same time pushing for “harm reduction” policies for cocaine, heroin, and other illegal narcotics:
“Bayer Makes Heroin” by dog97209 is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 
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“The guidance is based on the principle of autonomy in harm reduction and the fundamental idea behind it that people living in Canada have a right to know that all alcohol use comes with risk,” noted the CCSU and, hey, yeah!
I like to understand my risks so that I can make informed decisions.
But you know what else poses significant risk?
Lots of morphine and cocaine.
I think this is generally known. But God help you if you want to engage in a conversation about the risks society might be courting with safe supply or even harm-reduction strategies, and have fun being labelled a Conservative troglodyte who just wants suffering addicts to die in the street. You’re probably just a rich, callous asshole who opposes all of these evidence-based policies who blows second-hand smoke into the faces of your children while drinking your sixth beer of the night at the local pub. Just shut up and pick up those discarded needles in your yard, you monster.
I was picking on Health Canada previously, but they’re hardly the only ones who display a bizarre split-personality on these issues. Any story by or on the CBC on the matter of alcohol use now sounds like something straight out of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Yet just try to find critical reporting on safe consumption sites or safe supply policies. Almost all of it is uniformly glowing.
[…]
Obviously, I don’t think that our public-health officials are telling Canadians that heroin takes the edge off a hard day better than a glass of red or a pint of beer. But did we learn nothing over the course of the pandemic about the importance of consistent and clear public-health communications? The target audience for this is not those who have carefully studied harm reduction and substance use disorders. It’s people who just like to have a drink with dinner.
If our governments want to maintain any credibility, they can’t be uptight about how many glasses of pinot noir we drink, and then appear to be loosey goosey on heroin. It’s just impossible to take that kind of suck-and-blow at face value, but that’s exactly how this messaging will come across to people who aren’t closely engaged with this issue. “The government wants to give free hard drugs to junkies but thinks my cocktail is a problem?”
January 19, 2023
You must be protected from coworkers who threaten your health … by bringing in cake?
Christopher Snowden knows a slippery slope when the media pushes another nanny state health concern as serious as cake in the workplace:
If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them.
Who is this co-worker from hell? Who is this whining, snivelling infant demanding that the rest of the world forfeits their small pleasures because she has no self-control?
It is none other than the head of the Food Standards Agency, Susan Jebb, who is in The Times tomorrow comparing cakes to passive smoking.
The full quote reads:
“We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time and we undervalue the impact of the environment”, she said. “If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, OK, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”
Indeed they were, Susan, before people like you took that choice away to such an extent that even a pub that put up a sign saying “SMOKERS ONLY” on the door and employed no one but smokers would still forbidden from accommodating them.
I’ve made a few slippery slope arguments in my time — contrary to midwit opinion, they are often valid — but even I never imagined that a workplace smoking ban would evolve into a workplace cupcake ban. Talk about the thin end of the wedge!
While saying the two issues were not identical, Jebb argued that passive smoking inflicted harm on others “and exactly the same is true of food”.
To inflict something on someone implies that it is done without their consent. In that sense — and leaving aside the question of whether wisps of secondhand smoke are actually harmful — passive smoking doesn’t inflict harm on a person who knowingly goes to a smoky pub. The same is obviously true of someone who offers you a cake. If they held you down and physically shoved it down your throat, that would be a different matter, but surely that is already illegal under some law or other?
Meanwhile, Canadian nanny state enablers are trying to do battlespace prep to get the government to mandate new warning labels to containers of alcoholic beverages and to significantly cut the already low maximum “recommended consumption”:
… a report on the new drinking guidance released Tuesday by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction says the warning labels could inform consumers about serious health risks including cancer, the number of standard drinks in a container and the benefits of limiting consumption to two drinks a week.
“Consuming more than two standard drinks per drinking occasion is associated with an increased risk of harms to self and others, including injuries and violence,” the report says.
The guidance is based on the findings of a panel of 23 experts who reviewed nearly 6,000 peer-reviewed studies as part of a two-year process that also considered feedback from 4,845 people during an online public consultation process in spring 2021.
The most recent available data show that alcohol causes nearly 7,000 cancer deaths each year in Canada, with most cases being breast or colon cancer, followed by cancers of the rectum, mouth and throat, liver, esophagus and larynx. Liver disease and most types of cardiovascular diseases are also linked to alcohol use.
The guidance updates Canada’s Low-Risk Drinking Guidelines set in 2011, when two drinks a day were considered low risk and it was believed that women could safely consume up to 10 drinks a week and men could have 15 drinks.
December 15, 2022
The hot new thing for municipal politicians is the “15-minute city”
Elizabeth Nickson on how some of the building blocks of a global police state are being laid at the local level in pretty much every municipality in the western world:
Every single ministry or government department has been writing police-power regulation into their revised policy statements for the last 20 years. It is incremental and surreptitious. I mean come on, if you were going to abrogate democracy, cheat in every election, remove property rights from every citizen, bank that property in multinational/UN hands, you would need a police state, amIright?
That said, the province where I live, which is so crazy, it’s where California gets most of its bonkers ideas, has turned, locally-speaking. The socialists and greens were so confident of sweeping their elections that they didn’t bother to cheat, and as a result most every town and city was taken back by people saying, nope, you’re done. We are going back to basics. Like no more outdoor drug bazaars, silly wasteful green projects, and here’s an idea: let’s respond to our voters and not try to steal everything they have.
This would happen in every single state and county if we managed to stop them cheating. Because trust me, in every election in every jurisdiction, they are cheating.
The catastrophe even reached Davos. When one of their extra-special places is under threat time to roll out the big guns.
Hence 15-minute cities. Get this damn thing done before the slow learners, i.e. city people, wake up.
Therefore Oxford City Council this past week instituted their trial of 15 Minute Cities. This is a UN/WEF project meant to continue the lockdowns by scaring us to death using the nonexistent climate crisis. And if you think this is local to the UK, it’s not. This is being trialed in Brisbane, Portland, Barcelona, Paris and Buenos Aires.
Here are the basic rules. You are allowed out of your neighborhood for fifteen minutes a day and out of your region, 100 days a year. Fifteen minutes is enough to shop, take your kids to school and pick them up. Trespass that and you’re fined. Oxford has approved the installation of electronic traffic filters, placed strategically, which will be able to track your car, wherever it goes. That will cost citizens around $15,000,000. We get to build our own prisons!
The trial lockdown goes into effect January 1, 2024
People voted for this. Or rather they didn’t, but did.
Seems preposterous doesn’t it? Yet those who still read and watch legacy media know about it. They have been selling it hard. When I mean “they”, I mean the massive PR firms paid by WEF and the UN, strategized no doubt by McKinsey.
To refresh, this is what they want: drive people out of rural areas, and place them in 15 minute cities. Take all the resources, and divide them up among multi-nationals who will then tax our use of water, air, minerals, etc. Creating a world of renters, of serfs. You will have a lovely category: Amazon serf, Tesla serf. Bill Gates’ serf.
Pretty much every city council in every city in the world has had 15 Minute Cities pitched to them. Without doubt, every single city council in the world, has some committee and elected officer assigned to the 15 Minute city project. They are “researching” it with your money, which means they are trying to find a way to convince people to sign onto it.
They only got here because we stopped paying attention. No one went to meetings, no one followed what they were doing in committee. We trusted them. As someone pointed out, WEF and the UN during COP26 hold meetings and lectures that show precisely what they are planning to do, that are videotaped and available to anyone who wants to know what they are planning. Views of each? 26 people. 50 tops.
I’d like to advise you to get involved with your local government, because they have undoubtedly gone rogue and are amassing power and attaching funding requirements to each project. Many of them, if green-based, and locally everything is green-based, will be ill-founded, the science can be exploded. At our last virtual meeting here, a man from the real world, with real skills made a presentation showing that our local government was selling a fraudulent idea, and had put itself at risk legally. They had used a flawed study checked by no adult, sloppily researched and written by a university student to create the climate policy. Instead of being an ideal carbon sink, as was claimed, it turned out the islands were much less effective in that regard than other parts of the province.
Our local government had used this study for the past year, to harangue citizens and senior governments to push for more restrictive regulation on islanders.
The New World Order is built on sand, it is feather-weight, it can be blown over by a single honest consultant who can read legislation and do math. Become one. It is super satisfying. And the friends you will make will last beyond the grave.
