The WHO now thinks that artificial sweeteners don’t help with weight loss and may be dangerous, contradicting its previous advice. So how do we know it’s got it right this time, asks Christopher Snowdon in the Telegraph, as he calls for “a total and complete shutdown of nutritional epidemiology until someone can figure out what is going on”. Here’s an excerpt.
“I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke,” tweeted Donald Trump in 2012. “This stuff just doesn’t work,” he explained. “It makes you hungry.”
The World Health Organisation now seems to agree. This week it released new guidelines stating that the use of artificial sweeteners “does not confer any long-term benefit in reducing body fat in adults or children”. It also warned that there may be “potential undesirable effects” from long-term use.
This does not mean that sugar is back on the menu. The WHO says it hopes people will simply “reduce the sweetness of the diet altogether”, but if they have a sweet tooth they should stick to fruit. Fat chance. Rather than give up cakes and cookies, the main lesson the public will draw from this latest U-turn is that the WHO doesn’t know what it’s doing and should be ignored. First it said SARS-CoV-2 wasn’t airborne, then it said it was. It said face masks were useless for the general population in a pandemic, then it said they were essential.
It is less than a year since the WHO published a ‘sugar factsheet’ in which it urged the food and beverage industry to “replace sugars with non-sugar sweeteners”. It now says that those sweeteners are useless for weight management and could be dangerous.
Around the world, governments are pressuring food companies into substituting artificial sweeteners for sugar in their products. The U.K.’s sugar tax was specifically designed to encourage soda manufacturers to remove sugar and replace it with sweeteners. Childhood obesity has since reached record highs. Now we know why.
Or do we? The WHO has been wrong so many times that there is no reason to assume it has got it right this time. Almost every health claim in the report that accompanied the announcement is made with “low certainty” or “very low certainty”. Its recommendation to steer clear of sweeteners is “based on evidence of low certainty overall”. In a sense, this isn’t the WHO’s fault. Nutritional epidemiology is mostly junk science which offers a range of contradictory findings that are wide open to interpretation.
Worth reading in full.
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Dear Member
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“Criminal gangs make £8.2 million a day keeping asylum seekers in hotels”
Reframed.
Putin is going to be in power for nearly 30 years and Stalin was in power for nearly 30 years, so Putin has become Stalin.
Thanks Telegraph for that insightful and profound piece of analysis. We’d be lost without you.
The late Queen Elizabeth must have been double-plus Stalin.
It seems they were just pointing out the Tiny Tatar’s desperate attempt to imitate his hero Stalin.
It’s a symptom of unchecked capitalism, which promotes personal wealth through property purchase over compassion. i.e. a system that breeds greed. I don’t know what the actual number is, but, amongst the people I know, about one in four have at least one property that is being used to generate income. The private rental market has created a price-fixing monopoly that has artificially inflated house prices and rent, and suffocated the aspirations of an entire generation. We don’t talk about this though – or if we do, we angrily refute the point – because, well, many people have bought a second property for exactly that reason. And who wants to think of themselves as selfish? Each property ‘pension’, ‘nest egg’, whatever you want to call it, is one less home for someone else. But who cares about that right? As long as I’m alright Jack.
Central banks messed around with interest rates, lowering them to near zero. People couldn’t earn interest anymore. Interest would have been their income. The dot com bubble and the 2008 financial crisis frightened people out of the stock market. Dividends would have been their income. Property looked like the safest option.
In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, interest rates were far from zero but banks were offering exceptionally large mortgages. This allowed people to overbid for properties that they were desperate to buy which forced the housing prices up. Properties were not worth the prices being paid for them.
As with furlough, this “credit” was marketed almost like it was free money and not the debt that it is.
Anyone buying or selling property at the time knew properties were not worth what they were selling for as did anyone who watched Property Ladder, Location, Location, Location or Grand Designs.
Maybe the safest option for those that have already acquired a certain amount of wealth, yes. Safe and moral are two different things however. Using personal wealth to increase personal wealth, by directly further impoverishing the less wealthy, isn’t something I’ll be considering.
Yes but then they’d be the ones who would be impoverished if they self-abnegated in order to prevent others from being impoverished. If you give away your wealth to someone, do they immediately have to give it away to someone else in a game of hot potato, in case they are accused of being safe but immoral?
Oh those evil rentiers.
I know, let’s make it illegal to privately own and rent out a property. Only the state may own properties for rent. That will, no doubt, make it far cheaper and easier for those who can’t afford buying to rent somewhere to live. The state will enforce the minimal standard of rental property on itself, of course and ensure there’s a supply.
If you inherit a house and don’t intend to live in it, you have to sell it to the state. Properties left empty will be requisitioned by the state.
We already charge capital gains tax on ‘second homes’, perhaps it should be at a flat rate of 90%? That should deter the evil property speculators.
Sheesh.
My vague memory here is that back in the 1980’s and 1990s we used to talk about 2.5 or 3 x our income for a mortgage. I think some adjustment in mortgage lending rates meant that calculation was thrown out of the window and people could borrow way beyond their means. After that, property went sky high. But at the same time, the population has expanded and far more people live alone. It’s a whole cluster of things here FL – not just greedy capitalists.
I’m not personally a fan of owning a second property, mainly because I don’t like the idea of it or the maintenance.
“I think some adjustment in mortgage lending rates meant that calculation was thrown out of the window and people could borrow way beyond their means.”
Sensible lending multiples were abounded and the mortgage industry adopted a new system:
Liar Loans.
Basically the buyer could declare a salary / wage of whatever they needed, the lenders accepted the figure and Bob’s your uncle. This caused much house inflation until the bubble burst and we saw the likes of Northern Rock go boobies up. Northern Rock led the way in offering mortgages at 120 – 130 % of loan to value (LTV), they really let rip. Other lenders followed suit but with not quite the same care free abandon.
I was in the industry throughout this madness. Gordon Brown presiding.
Every home that someone pays rent on is owned by someone (or something) else. Councils rarely directly own properties but use arms-length housing associations. If property ownership for profit is a Bad Thing then it just leaves the state to provide homes for all these people – and I have grave doubts about the competence of government at any level to manage this efficiently.
“We’re complacent about the grave threat Putin presents”
The real threat is a lot closer to home!
Rochdale, Bradford etc
Too right Dinger.
“Macron says Western ground operations in Ukraine ‘is possible”
Ahrrr bless, he’s trying to look strong, too late, f@#k off twat!
“Stunning claims of whistleblower need to go viral”
White fibrous substances!
Thank all the gods and a critical mind , I didn’t succumb to the bullying bullshyte!
Despite the headline I believe John O’Looney was the first funeral director to drop the bombshell about the calamari clots.
“Scotland’s new walk-in hate crime reporting centres”
Is there a walk in.. burglary, rape, murder, vandalism crime centre?
I seem to remember those from long ago, I think they called them ‘police stations’
I Could be wrong!
HART flags the Cape Byron Declaration to read and sign.
https://hartuk.substack.com/p/the-cape-byron-lighthouse-declaration
“Can old-fashioned tariffs slam on brakes of Chinese electric cars?”
You don’t need tariffs, if anyone even considers buying a ‘Chinese electric car’ they must be brain dead! They used to call it jap crap, now its China crap!
Import them,stock them, selling them is a different matter!
Dr Mercola to make all his content freely available again, after having to restrict it for a few years due to the amount of hacking his site is subject to.
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2024/03/18/mercola-articles-free-again.aspx
“Don’t use word ‘widows’, Lloyds chiefs tell staff at… Scottish Widows”
Lloyds claims the word is ‘unnecessarily vivid’ and may ‘trigger unwarranted personal memories of trauma and upsetting situations’.
It suggests using the term ‘separated’ instead.
When are they going to ban the word ‘death’ as being too ‘triggering’?
“Trudeau Government’s newly proposed online-speech law that could be used to punish hate crimes before they’ve been committed.”
I’ve seen that one, it stared Tom Cruise I believe!
I’m not advertising, but…. https://www.gbnews.com/news/gb-news-ofcom-presenters-complaint .
“Woke U.S. bosses tell cast to reshoot sex scenes in Jilly Cooper Rivals”
No one needs sex scenes or nudity in books or films— it’s just another type of porn = VOYEURISM. The Satanic corruption of humanity.
I disagree with you about banning porn, but I agree with your point here, broadly speaking. Those scenes very rarely tell us anything we didn’t already know, advance the plot etc. I tend to look away from the screen when they appear.