One thing that really, really annoys me is when some inane anchor on the news refers to something as being “x” amount of football pitches long. As if I am supposed to know how big a football pitch is. I don’t, and care even less. Likewise something is measured in London buses. Is that a Route-master or a bendy bus? How the fuck am I supposed to know. What happened to using proper measurements? I am capable of visualising something that is stated in feet, inches, yards, miles, furlongs or even metres, but not fucking pitches used by twenty two prima-donnas prancing about over a bag of wind.
Anyway, that little rant aside, it seems that the principle of using football pitches and other puerile comparisons as a guide is now moving into other areas. Specifically, smoking. Every health scare is measured against smoking because smoking is the great Satan of health and kills instantly on sight anyone who even thinks about a bit of burning tobacco leaf, so dangerous is it.
Today, then, in the Indy.
Middle-aged people who eat protein-rich food are four times more likely to die of cancer than someone who only eats a little, according to a new study.
The researchers said eating a lot of protein increased the risk of cancer almost as much as smoking 20 cigarettes a day.
Fuck me sideways, is there no end to this nonsense? Proteins are an essential part of our diet. We would die if we didn’t eat them. And as we are all different, our dietary needs will vary.
“We provide convincing evidence that a high-protein diet – particularly if the proteins are derived from animals – is nearly as bad as smoking for your health,” one of the academics behind the work, Dr Valter Longo, of the University of Southern California, told The Daily Telegraph.
Ah, yeah, the old “let’s all go vegetarian” undercurrent again. Y’know, my Gran smoked around twenty a day and lived on a diet that was almost exclusively pork chops, mash and peas in her later years. She liked pork chops, mash and peas and saw no reason to eat what she didn’t like. Having lived through the deprivations of two world wars, she made the most of the ready availability of a decent high protein diet. It killed her of course. Or maybe the fags did. Either way, she never made it to ninety-four. Bummer, that. Just think; if she had abstained, she might even have made it to ninety-five.
A high-protein diet was defined as one in which 20 per cent of the calories came from protein. They recommended eating 0.8g of protein per kilogram of body weight a day during middle age.
I’m middle-aged and I eat precisely what is recommended for me. I am the one doing the recommending and I recommend that I eat as much or as little as takes my fancy. I will eat what I like, when I like and if I die a year or two earlier, then so be it.
However Dr Gunter Kuhnle, a food nutrition scientist at the University of Reading, criticised the study for making a link to smoking.
“While this study raises some interesting perspectives on links between protein intake and mortality… It is wrong, and potentially even dangerous, to compare the effects of smoking with the effect of meat and cheese,” he said.
“The smoker thinks: ‘Why bother quitting smoking if my cheese and ham sandwich is just as bad for me?’”
Well, yes, these non-sequiturs have become par for the course with these health Nazis. If you can make a comparison to tobacco, then you get a nice scary headline above the puff-piece in the newspapers peddling your junk science and health freakery. Works every time.
And Professor Tim Key, of Cancer Research UK, said: “Further research is needed to establish whether there is any link between eating a high protein diet and an increased risk of middle aged people dying from cancer.”
For which, of course, there is likely to be a nice fat taxpayer-funded grant. Meanwhile, sensible people will live as they please, eat what they like, drink what takes their fancy in whatever quantities they decide and if they so choose, finish it off with a bit of burning tobacco leaf. None of this being anyone else’s business.
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Update:
While on the subject of junk science and smoking, the BBC carries another propaganda piece today – the assault is relentless, it seems. The wonderful money quote is this:
The research, carried out in Finland and Australia, appears to reveal the physical effects of growing up in a smoke-filled home – although it is impossible to rule out other potentially contributory factors entirely.
So it’s a pile of horseshit dressed up to look like scientific research. Much like the rest of the health Nazi bombardments we’ve been getting of late.
Sounds like an incentive to pile on the pounds if ever I heard one, if I double my weight I can have twice as much meat.
Now there’s a thought…
The BBC seem to be constantly giving poor health advice.
If you are going to try and peddle your hypnotherapy cure for smoking, the least you can do is offer to pay me to host your links. As it is, I’ve de-linked it.
Heh! Good for you, LR! 😈
I grew up in a smoke filled home – Father, Mother, and four siblings all smoked (Players Navy Cut, Capstan and Craven A). We lived over the family run smoke filled cafe and we went to the smoke filled cinema every week. My Mother fed raised me on a diet of meat and two veg.
Clearly my childhood was traumatic and has caused me great physical and psychological distress.
Who can I sue?
My parents didn’t smoke, but my grandparents did. When I was a student, I worked in a busy city pub full of smoke. My wife smokes. Like you, I was raised on meat and two veg. Funnily enough, I’m still here.
Well at 64, I still eat as I’ve always done, and love the occasional burger etc.
I reckon that at my age, my body needs all the preservative it can get… 😉
How many people in the real world eat so much protein that they endanger their health anyway? My approach has always been to eat a varied diet, it’s more interesting that way and you never eat any one thing to excess. Eating one thing to excess seems to be what most of these scary reports are about, something that almost nobody actually does.
Probably no-one, SG. But, following the tobacco template, that’s how they start. I recall the early days of the anti-smoking movement when all those doom-laden “health links” were only associated with people deemed to be “heavy” smokers. Then the same links were made to people who were lighter, but regular, smokers – for a long time even the campaigners held to the idea that anything up to 10 cigarettes had at most a negligible effect on health. Then it came down to 3 (why such a sudden and exactly-numbered jump I don’t know). Then to 1. Then, of course, we got the “no safe level of …” line which was always their ultimate goal from the start.
The meat/sugar/salt/alcohol people are just following the same route – it’s a tried and tested “softly-softly” approach, which worked well for the anti-tobacco crew, so why change a winning formula? They, like Tobacco Control, will be aiming to achieve – little by little and bit by bit – exactly the same mindset amongst politicians, health professionals and the more intellectually-challenged of the general population (which is most of them), and will, unless stopped (which, to be honest, is unlikely), ultimately achieve their much-aspired to “no safe level …” moment.
My pet hate unit is the ‘home’. Apparently it is some sort of unit of energy, or do they mean power, these journalists never seem to know the difference.
Shock news: The probability of dying is 100%, far in excess of the proportion of people who smoke!
The other totally meaningless soundbite constantly trotted out by the anti-tobacco lobby is the “50% of smokers will die prematurely”.
No shit, Sherlock? Here’s some news – 50% of everybody will die prematurely, given that average age is a median figure, and by extension 50% will exceed that figure and 50% won’t attain it.
Maybe there should be a study of body builders. After all, muscle is stored protein and body builder eat an exceptional amount of it in all it’s forms.
Is the cancer rate disproportionally high in body builders? Where do I get my research grant from?
I cannot say anything about cancer rates but I do know a number of ex body builders that have diabeties, too much protein does the Pancreas no favours either, apparently
What I want to know is, can you get second hand protein?
My mum and dad provided roast dinners on Sunday for us as children, and I fed my kids meat and cheese as they were growing?
Should I have malnourished them for their own good?
If so, and I deprived my children of meat, but ate it myself, would I have still damaged them?
Are we all destined to die at sometime or other before an as yet unknown date?
I propose further tax payer funded research.
At last someone else who is irritated by the ‘size-of-a-football-pitch’ comparison. I too have no idea how big a football pitch is having no interest in the game whatsoever. I’ve always thought it was a patronising phrase implying that as the ordinary person on the street is obsessed with football that is the sole way he/she could visualise the size of an area.
As for this week’s cobblers about protein and sugar – I’m heartily tired of all this never-ending, nagging, scaremongery.
‘Wales’ and the ‘Isle of Wight’ are two geographical units of measure that I find particularly useless….
Too right Voyager03, I am Welsh and even I don’t know how big it is… Most people don’t even know WHERE it is.
My grandparents and parents, ate anything they could get their hands on… bacon that was 90% fat with a thin streak of pink, buttermilk, butter by the ladleful not marge, salt and sugar etc etc, and they smoked and drank too. My gramp even used to have two blokes in nuclear suits from Selafield come round every night to make sure his pipe was out properly, so virulent was the mixture he was smoking, but they all lived past 90 (my mum is still going at 91 with bacon butties and Sandwich Spread sarnies). It’s all down to the Genes folks.
Has anyone else noticed how much more airtime on TV and radio (and maybe in the hard-copy papers – don’t read them, so I don’t know) this and the “sugar” stories have got compared to the “multi-billions lost productivity through cigarette breaks” story got? In fact, if I didn’t come here and to other pro-choice blogs then I wouldn’t even know that the “multi billions” story even existed. So I suspect that the non-Internet-using (except for porn and gambling, that is!) majority of the public don’t know about it, either.
Hmmm, interesting. There was a time when a story like that would have been front-page news, especially in austere economic times such as we are experiencing now. I wonder what on earth has gone so badly wrong for the erstwhile unassailable health “saints” in the anti-smoking movement? Might they be in the process of falling from grace, I wonder …