FOOD, treacherous food! On 5 March the World Health Organization recommended we halve the amount of sugar in our diets. When we saw this, we remembered a prominent report in The Guardian newspaper the day before: “Diets high in meat, eggs and dairy could be as harmful to health as smoking”. Call Feedback a sour cynic, but we wondered whether that could have been spoon-fed as a “spoiler” to spread confusion and doubt about the WHO recommendation. It certainly turned out that there was much less to the story than met the eye. It was based what people aged 55 to 60 had eaten in the 24 hours before a survey (8 March, p 7). When we turn to the declarations of interest on the paper (doi.org/rs2) we find no links to the usual confusion-spreading suspects. But one author, Valter D. Longo, “has equity interest in L-Nutra, a company that develops medical food”. We find at l-nutra.com that “ProLon™ will be L-Nutra’s first product to reach the market. ”So what is it? So far, we have found no list of ingredients, just a statement that it is an “all natural product produced from vegetables… a source of all the important vitamins, minerals and other essential micronutrients”. ProLon is also described as a “Fasting Mimicking Enhancing™ Diet”. We are left with the suspicion that it is food-free food. At least it seems to be free of macronutrients.
BANG on cue, on 6 March, the front page of the Daily Express newspaper blazed: “Fatty food is good for you”. The article beneath that headline proclaims: “America’s leading cardiovascular research scientist Dr James DiNicolantonio argues that… diets low in saturated fat do not prevent heart disease or improve health.” That is a little different. And did the Express, before declaring DiNicolantonio to be the leading US researcher, go through the grief Feedback did tracking down his rather atypical set of affiliations? It is all very confusing. The question that still troubles us is: is this all-natural confusion?
SEX, meanwhile, makes nearly as good an opening to a story as food. Grant Hutchison responded to our mention of researcher Antony Karelis, who believes that sex is worth encouraging in people who baulk at working out (22 February). Grant points out that the aerobic benefit is quantified in, among other places, the article “Clinical practice guidelines for physical therapy in cardiac rehabilitation” from the admirably thorough Royal Dutch Society for Physical Therapy. As an equivalent level of exercise to slow dancing or bricklaying, you could consider “sexual activities (own partner)”. This will burn energy at a rate of 60 watts. You could hit 80 to 90 watts through dancing (not slow) – or “sexual activities (new partner)”. Feedback disclaims all responsibility for any untoward effects of following this advice.
WHILE we were thinking about ingredient-free food, above, we came up with a modest research proposal. Recently, a friend of Feedback experienced unpleasant gastric symptoms after eating wheat-based foods. “Unpleasant”, that is, as covered by the Geneva Conventions. Diagnosis would be prolonged, involving eating lots of wheat. The pragmatic advice “so don’t eat that, then” seems effective. The question that now arises is: how does any increased lifespan gained by detailed knowledge of what we eat compare with the amount of time used up in shops, reading lists of ingredients? We shall be setting a stopwatch. We welcome your data.
PLASTIC carrier bags from the Cotswold Outdoor shop come emblazoned with the intriguing message: “Made from biodegradable”. Feedback wonders how many people consider the things they buy to be composed of virtues, not atoms. Consider the possible power of the slogans “Made of nutrition” and “Contents: cleanliness”… and the time saved by accepting these value judgements, thus avoiding reading the ingredients.
FINALLY, a contender for probably Feedback’s favourite-ever unusual unit arrives in an email from Mark Dowson, and it has the more unusual cachet of likely great antiquity. Apparently, reindeer are unable to walk and pee at the same time: they have to pause at set intervals of distance. In Finnish, this interval is known as poronkusema or “reindeer’s piss” and was an oldfashioned description of rural distances. By Mark’s calculation, it is about 320 blue-whale-lengths. This is a WikiFact, but it seems almost too nice to be true. So Feedback asked a friend – the Finnish journalist Heikki Jokinen. He confirms that it is used in Lapland and was delighted to be diverted from other work to discover its actual value, which is about 7.5 kilometres for a reindeer drawing a light sledge – and that it is important: reindeer eating lichen produce urine as strong as battery acid, he says, and they get sick if deprived of their comfort breaks.
A scam email gave the game away to Joe Hill when it mentioned a tax refund of “lb 1,400”. It’d be so much easier for them if the UK metricated the pound sterling..
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