Quotulatiousness

May 24, 2024

Bernie Sanders finally finds a group of rich people who he thinks shouldn’t have to pay

Filed under: Business, Europe, Government, Health, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As Tim Worstall points out, Bernie Sanders’ latest campaign is starkly at odds with his usual “make the rich pay” schtick:

“Bernie Sanders” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

It’s possible to think that Bernie Sanders, Senator that he is, is more than a little confused. Well, he’d not be the first elderly politician to suffer that fate. Nor the first socialist. It is necessary for me to be fair here though — one of his honeymoons he took in the Soviet Union. Which makes perfect sense to me — after all, there was bugger all else to do there other than your own wife.

However, here we’ve got him complaining about the cost of the new miracle drugs:

    Bernie Sanders has urged Denmark to rein in its most valuable company, Novo Nordisk, and force it to slash prices on popular weight loss and diabetes treatments Ozempic and Wegovy, taking his fight to lower “outrageously high” drug prices in the United States to the company’s doorstep as its profits soar amid ongoing struggles to meet booming appetite for the revolutionary drugs.

Hmm, dunno how well that’s going to work with the Danes really. Yes, to some extent they’re milder than when they tried to rape and pillage the entirety of Europe but not wholly. My brother worked out in Afghanistan (feeding the troops) and he had a Danish unit rotate through. So he tells me their senior sergeant type carried a double bladed axe on his backpack — it didn’t come back clean from every patrol either. They’re not all equality and gender rights these days, you know?

So, we can imagine a certain portion at least of the Danish population celebrating this rapine of Medicare’s pockets by the simple expedient of selling a weight loss drug that actually works — which is, when we come to think of it, something of an innovation. Fen-Fen didn’t work after all. Hey, you know, Vinland failed but we’ll get ’em this time? We’re charging high prices because we can?

A second pass at the argument would be that the drugs are in fact incredibly cheap. When it was shown that the same drug — semaglutide — works in stopping (that’s “stopping” as in ceased, stopped, dead, like Bernie’s career would if it were ever proven he had taken part in an act of voluntary capitalism) chronic kidney disease. So much so that the very day they announced the trials on the drug were being stopped a year early, so obvious was the success, the share prices of all the dialysis provision companies dropped 20 and 30%. That is, at near whatever price, this drug is a money saver. Which is, you know, good. J Foreigner turns up with this thing that saves America, Americans, lives and money and yet Bernie whines — so like a socialist, eh? Capitalism with markets makes us the humans who are living highest on the hog, ever, but they really never do stop whining about it, do they?

But Bernie’s real complaint is that Americans are paying more to burn off the cheeseburgers than everyone else has to. But from everything else Bernie says about anything at all this is at it should be — the rich should pay.

Back to our basics. The basic drug development problem is that the development of a drug is a public goods problem. It costs $2 billion to get a drug through the FDA and gain approval to actually sell it. Yes, of course we should slaughter much of the regulation that makes it cost that much (personally, against character type, I only recommend capture and humane release for the actual bureaucrats) but that’s another matter. It does. But if everyone can just copy the drug at that point then no one will spend $2 billion. So, OK, patents, so the developers have a decade (the patent is two decades, it takes a decade to gain approval) to make their $2 billion back then anyone can copy it. The price falls to manufacturing cost plus normal profit level and we’re about as good as we can get. This is not a perfect system but for mass market drugs it’s about as good as we’re going to get.

March 23, 2024

QotD: The SCIENCE was SETTLED in the 1970s

Filed under: Environment, Food, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When it comes to Leftie, it’s really hard to sort out what’s intentional from what’s merely wrong, or outdated, or stupid, or some combination of the above. So while there really does seem to be some kind of coordinated push to get us to eat grass and bugs, the red meat thing is, I think, just old misinformation that Leftie can’t admit has been overtaken by events (because, of course, Leftists can never be wrong about anything). And I’ll even kinda sorta give them a pass on that, because I know a lot of medical people who learned the “red meat is bad for you” mantra back in the days and still haven’t gotten over it …

For younger readers, back in the late 70s the nutritional Powers That Be got in bed with the corn lobby. It sounds funny, but they were and are huge, the corn lobby — why do you think we’re still getting barraged with shit about ethanol, even though it’s actually much worse for the environment than plain ol’ dinosaur juice, when you factor in all the “greenhouse emissions” from growing and harvesting it? Anyway, ethanol wasn’t a thing back then … but corn syrup was, and so suddenly, for no reason whatsoever, the PTB decided that fat was bad and carbohydrates were good.

Teh Science (TM) for this was as bogus and politicized as all the other Teh Science (TM) these days, but since we still had a high degree of social and institutional trust back then — living in a country that’s still 85% White will do that — nobody questioned it, and so suddenly everything had to be “fat free”, lest you get high blood pressure and colon cancer and every other damn thing (ever notice how, with Teh Science (TM), everything they decide is bad suddenly correlates with everything that has ever been bad? Funny, that). But since fat is what makes food taste good, they had to find a tasty substitute … and whaddya know, huge vats full of corn syrup just kinda happened to be there. Obesity rates immediately skyrocketed; who’d have thunk it?

… but again, this isn’t a deliberate thing with your average Leftie. You know how they are about Teh Science (TM), even Teh Science (TM) produced by people who thought polyester bellbottoms were a great look, which alone should tell you everything you need to know. They just learned “red meat is bad”, and so, being the helpful sorts they are, decided to boss you around about it. You know, for your own good.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-25.

December 8, 2023

“An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are”

Filed under: Britain, Food, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Snowden notes the proliferation of media and public advocacy groups warning us about “junk food”:

On Monday, the front page of The Times led with a speech from Henry Dimbleby and a cost-of-obesity estimate from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change — the perfect start to the week for any Times reader. According to Sir Tony’s think tank, “the effect on national productivity from excess weight is nine times bigger than previously thought”. An error of this magnitude makes one wonder how robust such calculations are (the previous estimate only came out last year), but Mr Dimbleby saw it as further proof that food should be treated like smoking.

    The NHS “will suck all the money out of the other public services” while “at the same time, economic growth and tax revenue will stagnate. We will end up both a sick and impoverished nation,” Dimbleby will warn.

Would it be unfair to point out that the USA has much higher rates of obesity than the UK and also has much higher GDP growth?

As I pointed out on what I shall continue to call Twitter, the estimates as bunkum. They come from Frontier Economics and were first commissioned by the makers of Wegovy, presumably to make their effective but expensive weight loss drug look like a relative bargain.

Their previous estimate of the cost of obesity to “society” was £58bn. This year’s estimate is £98bn, most of which (£57bn) comes from lost quality-adjusted life years. As I tire of pointing out, these are internal costs to the individual which, by definition, are not costs to wider society. I can’t stress enough how absurd it is to include lost productivity due to early death as a cost to the economy. You might as well calculate the lost productivity of people who have never been born and claim that contraception costs the economy billions of pounds.

Since the previous estimate, the costs have been bulked up by including the costs of being overweight, but there is no indication in the wafer-thin webpage of what these are. Being merely overweight doesn’t have many serious health implications. The healthcare costs have doubled, but as in the previous report, the new estimate does not look at how much more healthcare would be consumed if there was no obesity. No savings are included. What we need is the net cost.

The “report” that The Times turned into a front page news story is no more than a glorified blog post. It contains no detail, no methodology and none of the assumptions upon which it is based can be checked. It comes with an eight page slideshow from Frontier Economics which is described as a “full analysis” but which doesn’t contain any useful figures either.

Estimates like this are bound to mislead the casual reader into thinking that they are paying higher taxes because of obesity. There is no other reason to publish them, as they have no academic merit. They are designed to be misunderstood.

Sure enough, the very next day The Times was explicitly claiming that the putative £98 billion — now rounded up to £100 billion — was a direct cost to government …

    The findings come after an analysis found this week that Britain’s weight problem is costing the state almost £100 billion a year.

September 3, 2023

QotD: The obesity epidemic – a possible explanation

Filed under: Europe, Food, Health, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Around 1970, the provision of food began to change and mightily. Boomers on their European tours — the first where a multitude could afford to travel — brought back cuisine to the New World and the abundance of food skyrocketed. Lower down on the socioeconomic scale fast food joints flooded neighborhoods and cities, and more and more cheap abundant food became available on every corner. Food corps gamed taste, making combinations irresistible to unsophisticated palates. The sugar manufacturers lobbied the FDA to make fat evil and carbs the food of choice. This has all been carefully documented by the New York Times, Harpers, [and] The Atlantic.

When I was growing up as a white supremacist, embedded in a neighborhood of white privilege, before all our communities were broken by forced immigration and vulture capitalism, we all, despite our relative wealth, ate the dullest food you can imagine. Simple, basic, and not a lot of it: fish sticks, hamburgers, a hunk of roast beef or lamb once in a while, canned vegetables, ice cream once a week, no pop, like ever. Mac and cheese. Spaghetti and meatballs. Roast chicken. That’s it. No Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, fusion, Korean, Mexican. Out for dinner once a month. Maybe. Abstemious.

Add to this, the entire culture was Stoic. Suck it up buttercup was pretty much the solution to everything. Life was not fair. Your duty was to make it more fair. That’s was it. That is the entire ethic of white supremacy. You didn’t eat a lot because that was not good for a) you or b) your tribe on whom your survival was based. It meant you were cheating, taking more of scarce common resources. That was not OK. This wasn’t stated or even conscious, but it was hard-wired.

My ever so privileged tribe left the Levant around 30,000 years ago, hived off to the Mongol Steppes, then migrated north to Scandinavia, thence to northern Scotland, and then to Ireland. Pretty much starved all the way. For 30,000 years. Constant famines. Dying by the side of the trail, absorbed into the peat moss. Etc. Like that. Around 500 BC they moved to the Midlands and bred out those who were lactose intolerant. To this day I can live on milk and cheese and meat. Wild greens. Salt. Bread. Their diet.

Then, after 1500 years of breeding and starving in the Midlands, a strike of lightning: the Industrial Revolution leading inevitably to industrial food and abundance. For 300 years afterwards there wasn’t famine for us, but there was pioneering and starving to the point of having to eat squirrel and tree bark, wars and rationing. Then, for the first time, EVER, the massive cohort of boomers got into the job market, started to make money, fall in love, date and party, food got spectacular.

And everyone got fat. Genes taught to horde any excess bloomed into layers and layers of fat around every torso and butt. This is not a moral issue. This is genetic. For every “race” or ethnic grouping.

That’s it. The end. Period. Every one of us has this history embedded in our genetic structure, one way or another. It is a bitch. It means a constant war against your appetite and genetic history which is shrieking EAT EAT! It’s only the left that makes it into a crime. We are hardwired to see fat as dangerous to collective survival, and deep down, we know it’s just not healthy. Near everyone is fat and everyone worries about it.

My white privileged clan developed stoicism as the primary survival tool because it worked. For 30,000 years, it made it possible to survive anything. Today, white culture or rather, the dominant culture filled with people of every race and color still uses stoicism to succeed in every profession or activity. There is no escaping it. Indulge the weakest part of you and you are doomed to failure.

It’s only the left that has made emotional blackmail the determinant survival tool.

Elizabeth Nickson, “The Woke Marxist Agenda to Destabilize Kids’ Health”, Welcome to Absurdistan, 2023-06-01.

August 10, 2023

“Ultra-Processed Food” is so bad that we need extra scare-quotes!!

Filed under: Books, Food, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

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.

July 11, 2023

Western legacy media is suffering from an overdose of Professionally Correct speech

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Friedman can’t help but notice this phenomenon:

When the question of alcohol and health came up on “Doctor Radio”, a satellite radio program, all of the participants agreed that evidence showed that consuming a moderate level of alcohol, something like one beer a day for a woman, one or two for a man, or the equivalent in other drinks, was good for you, better than no alcohol at all. All of them also agreed that they would not advise their patients to do so.

Why? They mentioned that there were problems with prescribing something that depended on the exact dosage and that a higher level of consumption was likely to lead to auto accidents, but distinguishing one beer a day from three is not a difficult problem even for those who are not doctors. My conjecture was that the real explanation was the reluctance of doctors to appear to be on the wrong side. Everyone knew that alcohol was a bad thing, a source of auto accidents and various medical (and other) problems. By giving a truthful account of the medical evidence the doctors on the program might appear to be pro-alcohol; all good people are anti. Hence they had to qualify their conclusion as a purely theoretical matter, not something that would affect what they told their patients. Think of it as a different version of PC — Professionally Correct speech.

A similar pattern exists for ice cream. Multiple independent studies have found evidence that consuming ice cream reduces the chance of getting diabetes — and found ways of explaining the evidence away. In several cases they have gone so far, in public statements, as to report that yogurt is protective against diabetes, other dairy products are not, when ice cream in their study showed as strong, in some studies a stronger, effect than yogurt.

Yogurt, as everyone knows, is a healthy food. Ice cream, as everyone knows, is bad for you.

From time to time I see a news story on some piece of scientific research that somewhat weakens the case for taking strong action against global warming. I believe that every time I have seen such a report it was accompanied by a quote from the researchers to the effect that global warming was a serious problem and their work should not be taken as a reason to be less worried about it. They almost certainly believed the first half of that, but their work was a reason to be less worried even if not to stop worrying.

Good people are on the side that believes that warming is happening, is anthropogenic, is a serious problem that needs to be dealt with immediately. Bad people deny one or more of those claims. If that is what all the people who matter to you, such as the fellow members of your profession, believe, and you are so unfortunate as to produce results that strengthen the bad people’s case, it is prudent to make it clear that you are still on the side of the angels. Just as, if you are so unfortunate as to be an honest doctor aware of the evidence in favor of alcohol, it is prudent to make it clear that you have not transferred your allegiance to demon rum.

The obesity crisis … fuelled by iatrogenic public health warnings about certain food groups

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Food, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Here’s The Armchair General with another example of what he calls COGOs – Crisis of Government Origin:

So, after the decades-long crusade against saturated fats, we have a population that has been repeatedly told that fat will kill us. So, many people eschewed fats in favour of salt and sugar. Which, apparently, are also bad for us.

But without saturated fats, remember, people are not going to feel sated. So, what is likely to happen? Well, just what did happen — never feeling full, people feel hungry throughout the day so eat continually through the day: a behaviour known as “snacking” …

    Nutritionists believe many people are obese not because they binge on fatty main meals but because they indulge in constant grazing throughout the day without even realising it.

    This pattern, dubbed “auto-eating”, involves resorting to snacks and treats at the slightest indication of hunger.

Or, rather, people always feel hungry because they have been told to avoid saturated fats. And they snack on chocolate bars and biscuits and small things that provide a pleasant sugary boost.

Combine this with an increasingly sedentary population — both at home and at work — and other comforts (such as central heating which leads to fewer calories being expended on maintaining body temperature), and…

BOOM! You have an obesity problem.

And now — nearly seventy years after some arrogant doctors used some extremely dodgy studies to enhance their reputations, we now know that what we were told about the harms associated with saturated fats was all absolute bollocks.

And so, once again, we can demonstrate another Crisis of Government Origin (COGO), ably assisted by the arrogant fuckers of the medical profession.

Unfortunately, the government legislation is already in place, and it will take at least three years for the fuck-nuggets in politics to catch up — if they ever do. After all, they are going to have to undo decades of medical advice, government food advice, leaflets, bus adverts, nutritionist training, and social conditioning.

Just another reason why governments should stay the hell out of our private lives. Such up — and fuck off.

June 3, 2023

Kids, obesity, and the woke agenda

Filed under: Education, Food, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Elizabeth Nickson isn’t a fan of the “healthy at any size” mantra, especially when it comes to kids:

If I were a kid today I’d be out scouting the neighborhood for a home school or church to take me in as long and teach me latin and math and give me a reading list as long as I didn’t have to have someone’s jiggly bits pushed in my face or be shown diagrams of sexual positions, and asked ceaselessly about my food intake, my BMI measured (25 states mandate this) and no doubt entirely invasive questions about my family and father and weird uncles and so on. It would be like living in a perpetual inquisition, danger everywhere, with no privacy in any area of one’s life, with every sentence and expression evaluated on whether I am being a good member of the inclusive collective and will step aside so someone less privileged can have a chance.

But I am not nine and therefore spared all that, but God in heaven I feel sorry for them. Schools have stepped up to take the place of the at-home mother who had a relationship with her kids strong enough so that their emotional needs were being met and they didn’t have to stuff food down their throats for a relief from the ceaseless pressure to conform, and severe emotional loneliness from the absence of a family system.

Instead of your mind, the dominant focus seems to be your body, and at the most vulnerable time in your life. I know they think they are raising good little socialist citizens, who are acutely aware of the struggles of the less fortunate, but add in the bullying of Middle School and little wonder 49% of kids are overweight or obese, and the rest stuffing their feelings 24/7. Great for the food pushers, sucks for the medical system.

Virginia Sole-Smith who is the anointed high priestess of Fat Positivity Culture, has been pushing fat is AOK and in fact, possibly superior to thin-ness, which she never fails to excoriate, for the New York Times, Slate and Science and various other high-end publications for 20 years. Her latest book Fat Talk, which sits on the NYTimes bestseller list is about raising fat children, or not fat children, it’s kind of confusing. Ok, to be fat, but not obese, but you can’t put obese kids on a diet because that will make them fatter, and besides everyone is criticizing them and that has to stop.

Every leftie cliché is brought out of the barn and groomed within an inch of its life. White privilege, thin white privileged women, BIPOC exclusion, thin privilege in sport, entertainment, business, and so on, a system systematically prejudiced against fat people.

Basically, however, Sole-Smith is staking her ground and that is that “small fat”, which is how she defines herself, is normal and we should adjust our eyes to see pudgy tummies as “something to aim for” – as she states in her last chapter called “How to Have The Fat Talk”. We have to start “reclaiming (sic) fatness as a perfectly good way to have a body”.

April 16, 2023

QotD: Homo electronicus and the permanent caloric surplus

Filed under: Britain, Food, Health, History, Quotations, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Finally, I suggest that the permanent caloric surplus that has obtained in the West since about 1950 has done more than anything to speciate us Postmoderns. It would take someone who Fucking Loves Science™ way more than I do to assert that the vast, obvious changes in the human race in the 20th century were merely physical. Consider the oft-remarked fact (at the time, at least) that British officers on the Western Front were a full head taller than their men. Then consider (ditto) the more-or-less open secret that a lot of those tall subalterns were gay. Correlation is not causation — growing up in the infamous English public schools probably had a lot to do with it, as Robert Graves himself says — but … there’s a pretty strong correlation.

Excess fat cranks up estrogen levels. You don’t need to be House MD to interpret this finding:

    In males with increasing obesity there is increased aromatase activity, which irreversibly converts testosterone to estradiol resulting in decreased testosterone and elevated estrogen levels.

Or this one:

    A study supports the link between excess weight and higher hormone levels. The study found that estrogen and testosterone levels dropped quite a bit when overweight and obese women lost weight.

This is not to say those swishy subalterns were fat — indeed, they were comically scrawny compared to Postmodern people. But a little goes a long way when it comes to hormones, especially in a world where “intermittent fasting” wasn’t a fad diet, but a way of life. Any one of us would keel over from hunger if we were forced to eat the kind of diet George Orwell described as his public school’s standard fare.

Follow that trend out to the Current Year, when pretty much everyone is grossly obese compared to even the Silent Generation. Heartiste and other “game” bloggers loved pointing out that the average modern woman weighs as much as the average man did in the 1960s. And while I think that’s overblown — we’re also several inches taller, on average, than 1960s people — there’s definitely something to it, especially when you consider how far the bell curve has shifted to the fat end. Not only do people weigh a lot more on average, the people who weigh more than average now weigh a hell of a lot more than heavier-than-average people did back when. See, for example, the ballooning weight of offensive linemen, who are professionally fat — in 2011 a quarterback, Cam Newton, weighed more than the average offensive lineman in the 1960s.

Put the two trends together and you have, on average, a hormone cocktail way, way different than even 50 years ago … and that’s before you add in things like all-but-universal hormonal contraception, lots of which ends up in municipal drinking water.

Severian, “Recent Evolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-28.

April 2, 2023

Ozempic versus the make-believe world of “Healthy at Every Size”

Filed under: Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Poor Americans are being propagandized that being fat — even to the point of being unable to carry on ordinary tasks — is “perfectly healthy” at the same time that the glitterati, the wealthy, and the mediagenic are getting thinner thanks to diet, exercise, and (it’s an open secret) drugs and cosmetic surgery. Along comes an antidiabetic drug that was found to have an interesting off-schedule property:

If you, a commoner, encountered a feudal lord in the year 1200, the latter would likely be wearing fine armour, carrying a well-polished sword, and riding a horse. Upon seeing these visual cues, you would address him properly, lest he punish you for failing to show proper deference. But as the centuries passed, particularly in the years following the American and French revolutions, this notion of privilege faded; the rich might be a class apart, but at times they might be dressed much like you, even if their apparel was slightly better-made.

Today, however, the rich are separating themselves in perhaps the most obvious way of all: by perfecting their bodies, rather than what they put on them. The rich are fit and the poor are fat: reams of research confirms that the prevalence of obesity decreases as income increases. In the United States, where 41% of the entire population is obese — compared with 25% in the United Kingdom — it is a rare wealthy person who is morbidly overweight (blimp-sized Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker and portly former New Jersey governor Chris Christie are outliers). Increasingly, the rich in late middle age have come to resemble Jeff Bezos and Sarah Jessica Parker: ripped to shreds and almost certainly “enhanced” with various anti-ageing drugs and techniques, ranging from steroids and growth hormones to Botox injections and liposuction.

Into this mix comes semaglutide, an antidiabetic medication better known by its trade name Ozempic. Sold by pharmaceutical manufacturer Novo Nordisk, the drug, which reduces food intake by curbing appetite and slowing digestion, was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration to treat obesity in 2021. Since then, celebrities and fitness influencers have routinely shared before-and-after pics captioned with details of their courageous weight-loss journeys, which entailed jabbing themselves with a 1.5ml pen that contains a month’s worth of doses and costs roughly $900 without insurance.

Predictably, stories about Ozempic have proliferated in the tabloids and on social media. Some see the drug as a challenge to the celebrity movement that touts “fat acceptance”, and brought us the “slim-thick” era of curvy female superstars. They argue that Ozempic may work hand-in-hand with the return of the “heroin chic” look of the late Nineties. As interesting as it is to consider where these mixed messages might lead us — to a culture in which poor people are told it’s fabulous to be obese, while the rich get ever thinner and fitter — if this is a conspiracy, it’s not a new one. The rich have lusted after youth, beauty and fitness, in others and themselves, since time immemorial, always keeping the poor as downtrodden as possible while pacifying them with bromides about equality, liberty and fraternity. Ozempic, then, is not simply the key to thinness; those who pay for it are buying even more distance between themselves and the hoi polloi.

In short, this appears to be yet another sign that the elite are headed toward some sort of crude transhumanist utopia, complete with gene therapy and designer-baby selection. Some may scoff that this is science fiction, but this future looms: once they’re sufficiently fine-tuned, gene editing tools will likely eradicate heart disease, muscle wasting, neurodegenerative disorders, and other conditions in embryos that are still in utero — but their price will be nothing short of staggering. Similarly expensive gene therapies will enhance the overall performance of already-healthy humans, raising ethical questions about whether these procedures should “improve” a person or merely “fix” a condition. The rich, of course, will leave those debates to the philosophers and pay upfront for the best bodies that their considerable resources can buy. Already, news stories abound of billionaires pursuing immortality, with a few commentators trying to sanitise the pursuit by arguing that the research will somehow benefit even the least of us.

February 12, 2023

JunkScientific American

Filed under: Media, Politics, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The editors of Scientific American have been steadily injecting more political and progressive content into their traditional coverage of hard scientific topics:

Scientific American magazine has been around since 1845, evolving into a reader-friendly purveyor of hard science, a respected, slightly intimidating denizen of supermarket checkout lines. But judging by the recent ridiculous trend of stories and editorials, it’s been wholly captured by the woke blob.

On the surface the monthly still does what it says on the label in providing long articles, short reviews, and cool photographs for an intelligent audience, with almost-comprehensible stories on the physics of black holes for science buffs, and stunning photos of deep-sea creatures for the rest of us.

But then there’s the ludicrously left-wing ideology that seeps into every issue. A NewsBusters perusal of the contents of each 2022 regular-release monthly issue revealed 34 stories grounded in liberal assumptions and beliefs, nearly three per issue. That’s even after skipping stories with liberal themes that were nonetheless science-based — for example, a cover story on melting glaciers in Antarctica wasn’t included.

Of course, the COVID pandemic in particular tugged the magazine toward government interventionism and the smug rule of health “experts”.

Some of the most bizarrely “woke” material is online-only, with a wider potential reach. The most notorious recent example is a January 6, 2023 opinion piece, cynically seizing on the on-field collapse of a Buffalo Bills player to label the NFL racist: “Damar Hamlin’s Collapse Highlights the Violence Black Men Experience in Football — The “terrifyingly ordinary” nature of football’s violence disproportionately affects Black men“. It’s written by Tracie Canada, who is, no surprise, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology.

So what’s the solution? Surely Canada wouldn’t recommend banning blacks from the National Football League for their own protection?

But plenty of bizarre pieces fill the print edition. Here’s a headline from the July 2020 issue of this purported science magazine: “The Racist Roots of Fighting Obesity“. Yet a June 2019 SA article argued that the nation’s “biggest health problem” was obesity. So is Scientific American, for being concerned about obesity, by its own bizarre standard racist as well?

February 8, 2023

“Smoking has been a net gain for the Treasury ever since King James I started taxing it heavily in the 1600s”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

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?

September 28, 2021

“Eating healthy”? You’re doing it wrong

Filed under: Europe, Food, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Joanna Blythman pulls some useful tasty tidbits out of a recent Swedish study that contradicts much of what western governments have been pushing as “healthy” eating habits for the last fifty-plus years:

The NHS Eatwell Guide, fondly known to its critics as the Eat badly guide, still tells us to choose lower-fat products, such as 1% fat milk, reduced-fat cheese, or low-fat yoghurt. This is based on the inadequately evidenced postwar belief that saturated fat is bad for your heart.

How embarrassing, then, for government dietetic gurus, that a major study of 4,150 Swedes, followed over 16 years, has last week reported that a diet rich in dairy fat may lower, not raise your risk of cardiovascular disease.

This Swedish study echoes the findings of a 2018 meta-analysis of 29 previous studies, which also found that consumption of dairy products protects against heart disease and stroke.

A body of research also suggests that consumption of dairy fat is protective against type 2 diabetes.

[…]

Five a day
A slogan invented to shift more fruit and veg, but not one to live your life by

This catchy slogan, now a central plank of government eating advice, came out of a 1991 meeting of fruit and veg companies in California.

Five a day logos now appear on many ultra-processed foods, from baked beans to ready meals, imbuing them with a questionable aura of health.

But other than as a marketing tool, any justification for this slogan is thin.

[…]

The health case against meat is predicated on cherry-picked evidence from low-quality, unreliable, observational studies that fail to draw a distinction between meat in its unprocessed form and multi-ingredient, chemically altered, ultra-processed meat products, such as hotdogs.

Association doesn’t mean causation. Confounding factors exist; someone who eats bacon butties daily might also be eating too much sugar, be consuming lots of additive-laden bread, be under stress, or smoke – the list goes on.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer’s 2015 claim that red meat is “probably carcinogenic” has never been substantiated.

In fact, a subsequent risk assessment concluded that this is not the case.

July 30, 2021

The British government reaches deep into the bag of “nudge” tricks yet again

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, Government, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Britain’s public health boffins have got the government agitated enough to try major incentives to encourage British shoppers to buy healthier, lower-calorie foods. Tim Worstall explains that, because those shoppers are human beings, this suite of incentives won’t do at all what Nanny expects them to do:

Now consider how it has to work. You go shopping, you present your DimbleCard and gain points for the healthiness of that shopping basket. Lettuce and carrots galore, super, free ticket to London on the choo choo.

So, where are the chocco biccies? If you buy them when presenting your card then no choo choo for you. What happens?

The lettuce and the carrots are bought on the card, the chocco biccies are not. Everyone simply does two transactions, with DimbleCard and sans. Lots of free choo choo and no change, whatsoever, in diet.

Yes, of course people will do this. For that’s what people do. Survey the landscape of incentives in front of them then maximise their utility, the outcome, in the face of them. It’s a restricted rationality, restricted by knowledge, but it is there. Everyone will fiddle the system because that’s what it is to be human. Collecting the fire from the lightning strike is fiddling the universe, that’s just what we do.

This being why so many clever schemes to encourage or deter this or that just don’t work. This being why those detailed plans for men, if not mice, gang aft into idiocy. Because we out here, hom sap, will play whatever system there is to our benefit.

No, this will not work out like supermarket loyalty cards. Yes, it’s true, most of us do use them. But the incentive is for us to do so. The more we do use them then the more discounts we gain, the better off we are, even at the cost of that data. How does this new government one work? The less we buy of certain things the better off we are. So, less of those things will be bought using the cards.

It is not possible to insist that people must use the card to buy things. Well, not unless we’re about to descend into the dystopia desired by Caroline Lucas it’s not. There might be a card reader at the point of purchase but the supermarkets will not demand that a sale can only happen when a card is read.

Therefore there will be those sales which gain points which make prizes. There will also be those DimbleCardless sales which do not gain points, or even demerits, and are done without their being registered in the system.

July 8, 2021

The initial findings of our months-long dietary natural experiment

Filed under: Britain, Food, Health — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As we’ve all been told many, many times by the food nannies, access to fast food restaurants makes us fat. The food is too greasy, too salty, too tasty for our feeble wills to fight so we just engorge ourselves on those bad calories. We eat too much fast food and we get fat. Case closed. Well, that’s what we’ve been told. Our recent fast food deprivation diets say something else again:

“Camden Fast Food” by It’s No Game is licensed under CC BY 2.0

OK, well, we’ve just had a grand experiment, haven’t we? Peeps haven’t been able to queue at Maccy D’s to get their greaseburger. People have had to – and have had time to – buy actual food and then prepare it for themselves at home.

Which is something that does rather kill the case about those burgers. Because what has been happening is that we’ve been – in the absence of greaseburgers – been eating more.

No, really:

    Using data on millions of food and non-alcoholic drink purchases from shops, takeaways and restaurants, the study found that the pandemic led to calories from restaurant meals falling to zero during the UK’s first national lockdown. That increased somewhat over the summer and declined again as restrictions in the hospitality sector were reintroduced in the autumn.

    However, this was more than offset by a large increase in calories from takeaways, which peaked at more than double the usual levels in the UK’s second national lockdown in November 2020.

    Overall, people increased their calories from raw ingredients by more than those from ready-to-eat meals and snacks and treats, with the pandemic leading to a shift in the balance of calories towards foods that required home preparation.

It’s that last paragraph that’s important. More home food preparation was being done from raw ingredients. And yet calorie consumption rose.

The report said the most plausible explanation for the sustained increase over the pandemic was higher consumption rather than changes in household composition, food waste or stocking up.

The study is specific to Britain, but it’s highly likely that the same results will be observed in Canada, the United States, Australia, and many other places. But I wouldn’t expect it will be given much coverage, like so much these days that contravenes the messaging that our dying media all seem to prefer to spread.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress