The new battlegrounds: food and drink

Tuesday August 16, 2011

The same strategies that have been used to demonise tobacco are now being rolled out across the world in an effort to limit the consumption of alcohol and food, says Brian Monteith

In Australia the anti-tobacco movement is now switching to step up the restriction of alcohol. British MPs are set to devise new personal alcohol limits, while in Scotland various foods are being targeted. All this while new research is contradicting the basis for such bullying by suggesting that lifespan is not determined by avoiding tobacco, excess alcohol and having a healthy diet, but largely by our genes.

The Australian smoke police have changed their hats and are becoming the alcohol police. Not only are the same interventions being advocated, such as graphic warnings on alcohol cans and bottles, but many of the same personnel are leading the charge.

The Cancer Council of Australia is arguing that even one alcoholic drink is dangerous, just as the argument was put all those years ago that a single cigarette was dangerous.

“There is no evidence that there is a safe threshold of alcohol consumption for avoiding cancer, or that cancer risk varies between the types of alcohol beverage consumed,” says the Council.

Michael Thorn, head of the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation, argues there is a growing body of evidence that suggests cancer can be caused even by low-level alcohol intake, while five per cent of all cancers are caused by “long-term, chronic use of alcohol”.

“I think we’re in denial if we don’t think there are harms from even low-level alcohol use,” says Mr Thorn.

Not to be outdone, back in Britain the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee is to review the recommended daily limits on alcohol intake in comparison to those abroad. The fact that the drinking guidelines bandied about by health professionals are utterly spurious appears to have been ignored in the rush to consider the possibility of new guidelines (for which read restrictions) in Britain.

Dr Richard Smith, a member the working group of the Royal College of Physicians that drafted the alcohol guidelines and a former editor of the British Medical Journal, admitted previously in comments to The Times that the ‘safe’ limits of 21 units a week for men and 14 for women were set in 1987 because of “a feeling that you had to say something. Those limits were really plucked out of the air. They were not based on any firm evidence at all. It was a sort of intelligent guess by a committee”.

Further undermining the value of these alcohol limits, retired GP and former independent MP Richard Taylor, a past member of parliament’s health committee, is on record as admitting that you can drink safely above the recommended limits. “Although I would still endorse the old Government limits, I would add the rider that if you step outside them within reason, it will not do you any harm,” he told the London Evening Standard.

No one should be surprised by the escalation of the war on alcohol. The World Health Organisation revealed in 2009 in its Public Hearing on Harmful Use of Alcohol that it wants to see a “Framework Convention on Alcohol Control, modeled on the Tobacco Convention that came into force in 2005”.

In Scotland, where early legislation to ban smoking in all indoor public places was implemented, the smoke police have become the food police and are now saying that obesity is in fact the greater danger.

It is claimed that after the United States (32.2% obese) Scotland is the second fattest country in the world at 25.5%. To change this embarrassing league standing, Scots should eat less fish and chips, fewer kebabs and cut back on creamy curries. A £500,000 advertising campaign will feed the public with inanities such as “Try not eating all of the batter on your fish” and “Avoid creamy sauces”. Foods being targeted include take-away chicken tikka masala, battered fish with chips, doner kebabs and deep-pan pepperoni pizzas. The alternatives being suggested are tandoori chicken, fish in breadcrumbs, shish kebab and thin-crust pizza.

It is no coincidence that such campaigns are becoming more aggressive and intrusive. Scottish public health officials are now moving on to identify obesity as the prime public health issue after claiming that obesity-related early deaths have risen by more than 40% since 2004 (from 139 to 196).

A review of a 28-year study of 3,600 women in the west of Scotland who have never smoked, by Dr Laurence Gruer, Director of Public Health Science at NHS Scotland, claims that the risk of excessive weight to women who have never smoked has been ignored in the past due to the focus on cutting down the numbers who lit up rather than the risks of weight gain.

Dr Gruer found that a wide variation in obesity levels between socio-economic groups only existed among non-smokers. Forty-five percent of those in the lowest occupational group were classed as dangerously overweight while only thirteen percent of those from the highest social group were in that category. For smokers the number that were overweight ranged between only ten and fifteen percent, regardless of their social status.

The study points to smoking cessation campaigns leading to a marked rise in obesity amongst the most disadvantaged groups of Scottish women. This contradicts the claims that smoking cessation campaigns are about achieving health equality across society.

Yet for all the bullying, shaming, demonising and denormalising, the evidence is mounting that our genes determine far more about our health and our longevity than the lifestyle choices we make.

Scientists at Leiden University in the Netherlands believe that what are being called “Methuselah” genes – named after the oldest person in the Bible who lived to 969 – are what make some people likely to live into their nineties or more, and that smoking, heavy drinking and bad diet with poor physical activity make little difference to lifespan.

The Dutch study of 3,500 nonagenarians showed that a combination of genes rather than one gene offers a long life, although the combination is extremely rare with only one person in 10,000 reaching the age of 100.

This research was further backed up by an American study of 500 people aged 94-109 that compared them with 3,000 people born in the same period but who had died before the nonagenarians and centenarians. Again, the survivors had drunk, smoked and eaten just as ‘unhealthily’ as their peers, but had genes that meant they could better cope with the ageing process.

A further study conducted by the University of Southampton with teams in New Zealand and Singapore found that it is what pregnant women eat in their diet rather than how much they eat, or else if they are already fat or thin, that influences the genetic makeup of their babies by altering DNA in a process called epigenetic change. Campaigns against fat mothers are missing the point and simply add more anxiety to already stressful pregnancies.

The evidence that genes are more important than lifestyle choices is gathering but because it challenges the basis for many of the public health campaigns – or bullying legislation – the authorities are choosing to ignore it, just as they twisted the evidence base to create the false spectre of second hand smoke as a cause of death.

If anyone had doubts that the war on lifestyle control and individual liberty was limited to tobacco, it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee – before bans on caffeine consumption are introduced too (and yes, they are already being discussed!).

Brian Monteith is author of The Bully State: The End of Tolerance, published by The Free Society (2009) and available on Amazon