Gordon prefers locally grown seasonal food. Good for him. But he wants to throw you in jail for buying strawberries from Kenya. That’s bad news for you and Kenyan farmers.

Amazingly I agree with something someone from Oxfam says: “the million farmers in east Africa who rely on exporting their goods to scrape a living would see Gordon Ramsay’s assertions as a recipe for disaster”.

Then again, on their website: “we support calls for strong political action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.

Hmm.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties, Enviro-Mentalism at 2:14 PM EDT

1 Comment »

If you look around the world, you will find that freer countries tend to be richer, and less free countries tend to be poorer. Meanwhile, rich countries are better equipped to deal with natural disasters because people have mobility and can escape, and buy food from various sources.

That explains the situation in Burma, a military dictatorship.

Food aid, and the kind of infrastructure aid the US Navy provided Indonesia after the tsunami, would help people in Burma in the short term. In the long term, they need to get rid of their oppressive government.

Al Gore, on the other hand, blames global warming.

Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 9:41 PM EDT

2 Comments »

The blog Junkfood Science takes a critical look at media reports of health studies. One exemplary article debunks a study that finds that fat people are at greater risk of heart disease even if they exercise.

Looking at actual incidences of strokes reported, for example, only 1.1% of ‘normal’ weight women suffered a stroke (221 of 19,849), compared to 1.4% of the ‘obese’ women (103/7,126). When reported as a relative risk, that’s a 30% higher risk associated with obesity. But it is an actual difference associated with obesity of 0.34% after 11 years or 0.03% a year difference — clinically meaningless and statistically untenable.

And 0.7% (140) of the ‘normal’ weight women had heart attacks compared to 1.27% (91) of the ‘obese’ women. Reported as a relative risk, it’s an 81% higher risk associated with obesity. But it’s an actual difference associated with obesity of 0.55% over 11 years or 0.05% a year difference — again, not clinically meaningful.

Credible evidence-based medical care does not take an untenable correlation and claim it proof of a causation and then flop it around into a treatment recommendation. The take-home lessons for us are to always ask ourselves what researchers are actually measuring and if they are asking the right questions. Next, always be suspicious of secondary analyses using data from a study that wasn’t designed to answer that question and is trying to splice meaning from untenable findings. Finally, don’t fall for scares based on relative risks or odds ratios, keep the actual data in perspective.

So far, no surprises for me. I’ve always been suspicious of “20% more likely to get disease X” type claims.

But the article goes on to question the benefits of exercise in general. Apparently, some exercise correlates to longer life, but additional exercise does not. In fact, the correlation reverses. This is news to me.

Other articles on the site talk about something I’ve never heard of: the Obesity Paradox. Study after study has found that fat people live longer.

Fat people live longer.

Can everything we are told by government and the media be so completely wrong? I need to read more (and from more sources) to be sure, but I already know that everything we are told about global warming is wrong, so why not health?

Perhaps what happens is that institutions (government agencies; NGOs; charities) start off with an issue, then grow and make that issue so central to their existence that they simply can’t admit they are wrong and end up fabricating, spinning and lying to cover up the holes in the evidence. For some reason, the media goes along with all this. Lazy journalists, presumably.

Hat tip: Counting Cats.

Update: Some papers from the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society that show that if you get fatter when you get older it’s probably a good thing: Association Between Body Mass Index and Mortality in an 80-Year-Old Population; Body Mass Index and Nine-Year Mortality in Disabled and Nondisabled Older U.S. Individuals; Weight, Mortality, Years of Healthy Life, and Active Life Expectancy in Older Adults; Body Mass Index Is Inversely Related to Mortality in Older People After Adjustment for Waist Circumference. (First link followed from another Junkfood Science article.)

Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 7:35 PM EDT

1 Comment »

I am glad Boris won. He’s been accused of being a joke, and has said that he intends to take the job seriously. I am sure he will continue to be a bit of a buffoon. That’s a good thing. The last thing anyone needs is efficient politicians. The less Boris does the better.

Posted by Rob Fisher as News at 12:19 PM EDT

1 Comment »

Tonight I am going to spoil my ballot paper. London doesn’t need yet another layer of parasites. It has managed without a mayor before. I want my money back.

I can’t quite bring myself to vote for UKIP. I don’t like the EU, and the candidate makes libertarian noises, but I like immigration. I’m also in favour of freeing up planning and building more houses, and the UKIP man is against this.

I’ve read a good argument for simply not turning up, but low turnouts get interpreted as apathy. I’m not apathetic, I want to abolish the office of mayor. There’s no tickbox for that. Of course, I’m not sure how a lot of spoiled ballots would be interpreted. It would be quite funny if there were more of them than votes for the greens or that awful communist woman, though.

Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft, News at 5:46 AM EDT

3 Comments »