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 Truth be told, I had never heard of Turkey Twizzlers before or that tiresome bore Jamie Oliver's campaign against them. Sadly I don't think they are on sale in Australia.
But going by this photo all I can think at the moment is "yum, yum, I wish they were."
This comes from the Food & Health Skeptic:
Some wide ranging food skepticism from BritainExtracted from "Global Warming And Other Bollocks: The Truth About All Those Science Scare Stories" by Professor Stanley Feldman and Professor Vincent Marks. It reprises most of what I have been saying on this blogTHERE ARE FEW 'BAD' FOODSReceived wisdom, repeated by many doctors and public health professionals, says we can remain fit and avoid disease by cutting out certain 'bad foods' from our diets. Indeed, it is variously claimed that 35-50 per cent of all cancers are caused by the food we eat. But while they are despised by the culinary elite, readily available hamburgers, sausages and pizzas have provided good nutritional value for many low-income families, who in previous days could afford only low-protein, high-carbohydrate, high-fat meals such as bread and dripping, and chip butties.In fact, fears about hamburgers and sausages in
Britain are especially irrational. Most countries have a national dish based on minced or processed meat - and none is suffering from an epidemic of junk food-inspired illness. For example, meatballs are used in many guises in the Middle East, chopped meat on a bed of onions is a national dish in the Balkans, and mince is also used in countless Italian sauces. The terrines and pâtés of France and Belgium also contain processed chopped meat. Obesity is not caused by these foods, but by those who choose to gorge on them. Studies claiming to show the negative impact of a 'junk food' diet usually have little scientific validity.ORGANIC FOOD IS NO BETTER FOR YOUA widespread belief has emerged that organic foods are better for you than others because they do not contain 'chemicals' used in large- scale conventional farming. This dogma is wrong. All plant nutriment comes from the air, in the form of CO2, and from water-soluble
chemicals in the soil. The composition of these chemicals is the same, whether they come from a plastic bag or from 'natural' manure or compost. They are certainly the same by the time they are on your plate.THERE'S NO NEED TO CUT BACK ON SALTSalt is an essential food. Without it, we would die. Land-based mammals-such as humans control their body temperature by sweating and panting. Sweating is impossible without sufficient salt. In fact, strenuous exercise in a person depleted of salt causes overheating and death. The Government has caved in to the anti-salt zealots in its advice to reduce salt intake. However, there is, in fact, very little, if any, truly scientific evidence that cutting back on it will do you any good. TURKEY TWIZZLERS ARE FINEThe much-disparaged Turkey Twizzler, bugbear of TV chef Jamie Oliver, is made of recovered turkey meat and provides the same amino acids as normal turkey breast.
Corned beef, now an unfashionable meat product, is also no less nutritious than any other beef, although, like Turkey Twizzlers, it is also a reclaimed meat product. Turkey Twizzlers are fine: The recovered meat provides the same amino acids as regular turkey breast meatWE DON'T KNOW WHAT CAUSES HEART DISEASE The medical (and social) consensus is that cardiovascular disease is caused by being overweight, by having a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet and by unhealthy activities such as smoking. While being morbidly obese, eating nothing but lard and smoking 60 a day will probably lead to an early grave, there is nevertheless a lot of confusion about the precise link between lifestyle and this, the biggest killer of all. Many people with high cholesterol levels in their blood do not get heart disease. Many people with very low levels do. The very low levels of heart disease recorded in some
populations, notably the Japanese, may have more to do with cultural variation and prejudice than with medical reality (in many societies, what are, in fact, heart attacks are often listed on death certificates as 'strokes'). Furthermore, some of the lowest levels of cholesterol and arterial sclerosis are to be found in populations such as the Inuit and Siberian hunter-gatherers, who live on a diet which is incredibly high in saturated fat.TAKE HEALTH ADVICE WITH A PINCH OF SALTEverything seems to be bad for you these days, but there is also plenty of scientific evidence to the contrary. Eggs seldom contain salmonella, even if some chickens do. Cholesterol in the diet does not cause fatty deposits in your arteries. There is probably little difference between the effect of saturated and unsaturated fats. In those with normal kidney function, salt does not cause high blood pressure. Those with a body-mass index of between
25 and 32 live as long as or longer than those with a lower BMI. And avoiding the sun causes vitamin D deficiency; a suntan is nature's natural sun block, although sunburn is to be avoided. MERCURY FILLINGS ARE PROBABLY HARMLESSAnti-mercury campaigners believe that the mercury used in dental fillings will make you ill (mercury is a potent poison). But a single amalgam filling provides just 0.03 micrograms/day of mercury, which is almost 3,000 times less than the safety level permitted for persons with occupational exposure to mercury, and is too small to be responsible for any symptoms. SOURCE
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This is by David Whitehouse and is taken from the Greenie Watch blog:
It is very interesting to see today's story on BBC News Online about BSE/CJD "vCJD carrier risk overestimated.". It is the latest in a long line of similar assessments of the vCJD situation.
After many years of sporadic interest the BSE/vCJD story took off in 1996 after an admission in parliament by the health minister that there was a link between BSE contaminated meat and a new strain of the degenerative vCJD brain disease that had afflicted a handful of people. Initially, few people knew anything definite about the disease and its possible progression and, depending upon assumptions, computer models predicted anything from a small number of people being affected to a large fraction of the population. While such uncertainty existed it was right for journalists to reflect the scientific situation but as I was science correspondent for BBC Radio at the time, I soon began to realise the tension between science and journalism and the changing approach to science within BBC News at the time. In terms of news the potential for a modern day catastrophic plague is a much 'better' story than the possibility that nothing much more will happen. So whilst the uncertainty persisted that was the story that was emphasised with the appropriate caveats. However, it soon became clear to most scientists at least that a major catastrophe was not in the making. The increase in numbers afflicted, despite the unknown incubation of the disease, was not increasing as some predicted, but that fact was inconvenient to some and did not impinge on our general approach to the story. In such circumstances I took the view that journalists should stay close to the data and not let the scientific possibilities, however dramatic and 'newsworthy,' obscure what was actually happening, especially when those possibilities rested on a cascade of debateable assumptions being fed into a computer model that had been tweaked to hindcast previous data. It was not a point of view taken by other arms of the BBC one part of which was repeatedly promoting the same scare story coming out of one institution based on said computer models and predictions. I believed that taking a sober approach was the right one, especially for the BBC, which was looked to for responsible reporting. Wanting to get on air with a story and make an impression with editors and management was one thing, but I took the view that a journalist should not tailor the science to suit ones ambitions, or survival, that way. The political journalist John Sergeant summed it up when he said that there were many journalists who reported what they could get away with rather than what they know. My approach was not favoured by the BBC at the time and I was severely criticised in 1998 and told I was wrong and not reporting the BSE/vCJD story correctly. But with hindsight I was correct in my approach. To date the total number of people afflicted with BSE/vCJD remains very small. In fact, far smaller than many illnesses that never get a mention in the media, and the scientific doom mongers have moved onto new pastures. But the attitude towards science still remains at the BBC and has been evident in its evangelical, inconsistent climate change reporting and its narrow, shallow and sparse reporting on other scientific issues. Reporting the consensus about climate change (and we all know about the debate about what is a consensus in the IPCC era) is not synonymous with good science reporting. The BBC is at an important point. It has been narrow minded about climate change for many years and they have become at the very least a cliché and at worst lampooned as being predictable and biased by a public that doesn't believe them anymore. Times are changing. New data is emerging, the world refuses to warm in the past decade, the sun becomes quiet, and scientists are beginning to study themselves investigating how entrenched positions become established and whether consensus is a realistic concept. History and science will always correct things in the end. It has done so with vCJD and it is not impossible that the judgement of history and science on current environmental reporting will be the same. SOURCE |
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 Dr John Ray asks the pertinent question here - when "will this totally unscientific mania ever fade?"
He reproduces an article from The Telegraph (see at the end of this post) that perfectly highlights the madness that wellness and healthy lifestyle programs are producing.
Let's be clear about this. These programs are often not based upon sound science.
They now form the basis for government advertising, both here and in Great Britain, that can only be described as a largely pointless waste of tax dollars that could have been spent productively elsewhere.
There is no credible evidence to support the claim that even if he were overweight he would be at greater risk of cancer later in life.
None at all. The high quality properly randomised double-blind trials have found no such linkage between diet, overweight and cancer.
The false claim that there is a link rests solely on a number of poor quality epidemiological studies with weak findings.
But the problem is that matters of health have been taken over by a collection of "moral puritans" and "moral entrepreneurs" who have been conducting a crusade against fat. I'm not saying that fat and diet is completely irrelevant to health, rather that this debate has become decoupled from the actual evidence and is not being driven by the evidence.
So it is interesting to see that The Australian and the Weekend Australian Magazine have now blown the lid on the fake childhood obesity epidemic here in Australia.
Junkfood Science comments:
(It'll be worth your while following the embedded links in that quote.)
There are going to have to be some hard questions asked of health academics and government health agencies who have actively promoted this myth, even when any sober consideration of the evidence should have made it clear that there was something terribly wrong with it.
The crucial question here is how is it possible for bad ideas, poorly supported by hard evidence, to take over whole areas of science and public policy and become moral crusades, not carefully thought through and considered policy decisions?
For this I would yet again refer people back to the article by John Tierney, the science writer for The New York Times, entitled Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus, and its notion of informational cascades.
Briefly, this is the process where the loudest voices and not the evidence take over a topic. These voices, because they seem authoritative and most of us don't have the time or the ability to do our own research, accept what others think about an issue and everybody proceeds on that assumption.
Then this becomes entrenched as an orthodoxy and to speak against it carries the threat of being denounced as a "heretic."
This is what happened with our understanding of diet, fat and health.
The loud voices convinced other academics who didn't bother to look very deeply at the claims being made, and then the bureaucracy and politicians came on board, deciding that "something had to be done" and it was their responsibility to do it.
So it got to the point where other scientists would appear before Congressional committees in the US to try and explain why the concern about fat may not in fact be supported by good evidence, only to be ridiculed and derided as enemies of the public good.
And woe unto them if they had ever done any work of any kind for the food industry at any time. Then they were pilloried as the paid stooges of big business, putting the interests of money ahead of people's health and well being.
A kind of McCarthyism prevailed.
It is now dawning on some people that they were probably also right.
The Telegraph's article:
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