18/04/2008
Pills that make you ill?
Another health scare made front page news this week. A Danish study pooling 67 randomised trials with 232,550 participants concluding that taking "beta-carotene, vitamin A, and vitamin E significantly increased mortality". And taking vitamin C had "no significant benefit".
The mass media attention is fuelled by our mistrust of 'nasty chemicals' which we forget are in natural foods as well as - in pure form - in test tubes.
The BBC website reports that "After various factors were taken into account and a further 20 studies excluded, the researchers linked vitamin A supplements to a 16% increased risk of dying, beta-carotene to a 7% increased risk and vitamin E to a 4% increased risk." Scary stuff? Maybe, considering how many vitamins are both naturally present in and added to foods, including bread and cereals. How many realise synthetic vitamin A is added to cod liver oil pills, usually taken as a traditional 'natural' remedy?
One blogger at least believes it is all lies, damn lies and statistics. Letters from a Tory reports that the studies used on average a dose of around 8 times the recommended amount for vitamin A, and other averages were also well above recommended amounts.
Does that make pills that deliver 100% of RDA 100% safe? I still somehow doubt it, so I'll mostly be sticking to as much fruit and veg as possible, including my own list of so-called 'superfoods' which, whatever the exact merits of the claims made for them, just happen to be delicious:
- Broccoli: rich in vitamins A and C and anti-cancer ingredients, reduces cholesterol and has anti-viral benefits*
- Garlic: regulates blood pressure, anti-viral and good for the heart
- Mushrooms: anti-viral
- Spinach: high in beta-carotene, good for the eyes, bones and more*
- Cooked tomatoes: anti-cancer properties, anti-inflammatory*
- Watercress: anti-cancer properties
- Turmeric: anti-inflammatory and anti-viral, resists Alzheimers
- Ginger: anti-oxidant, anti-coagulant, promotes healing
- Oily fish: anti-viral and good for the heart
- Raw olive oil: anti-inflammatory and cholesterol lowering
- Apples: cholesterol lowering, eliminate toxins*
- Blueberries: over-hyped but taste good!*
- Cranberries: good for the kidney
- Grapefruit: anti-coagulant, and more
- Kiwifruit: high in vitamin C, anti-oxidant, eye protecting*
- Pineapple: anti-inflammatory
- Pomegranate: good for the heart?
- Strawberries: lower blood pressure, anti-ageing and good for the heart
- Walnuts: anti-inflammatory and cholesterol lowering*
- Green tea: anti-oxidant and makes you feel good
- Dark chocolate: lowers blood pressure and makes you feel good
- Red wine: lowers cholesterol and makes you feel good
18:10 Posted in Campaigns | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
13/04/2008
Feeding the multitude
The Telegraph today bewails the fact that customers of Indian curry houses in the UK - which imports more rice than any other EU country - can look forward to smaller portions, higher prices, less meat and more vegetable dishes. In other restaurants: "We've heard that people are taking away the little embellishments - fish and chips might now be missing the coleslaw...Where before you might be offered a 4oz and 8oz steak, now you can only have the 4oz."
These dire depredations aside, it seems likely that most of us fortunate enough to live in Europe and the US will take the consequences of the developing global food crisis in our stride - but what about the rest of the world?
Western motorists are bridling at fuel price rises (petrol up almost 40% in the US in the last year). In the UK, the cost of basic foods, like bread, butter and meat is up by 12%, with overall food prices up 4.6% for the year to February.
But in places like Nigeria, where people spend about 73% of their income on food (as opposed to around 10% in the developed countries) things are more serious - much more serious. Like one half of the world's 6bn population, many Nigerians are dependent on rice, which has gone up by 75% in just two months. The average cost of rice has doubled in under a year - and the increases are expected to continue for at least another two to three years.
How will people survive when their staple foodstuff is unaffordable? No wonder there have been riots and protests in places as diverse as Italy, Bangladesh, Egypt and the Philipines. In Haiti the government has just fallen because it did nothing after a week of protests.
World Bank Group President, Robert B. Zoellick, headlined the crisis this week:
In Bangladesh, a 2 kilogram bag of rice...now consumes about half of the daily income of a poor family...The price of a loaf of bread...has more than doubled. Poor people in Yemen are now spending more than a quarter of their incomes just on bread before they pay for other essential foods for their children, let alone basic health care or shelter.
Zoellick went on to predict that a total of 33 nations are in danger of unrest caused by rising food prices. "the international community must fill the at least $500 million food gap identified by the UN's World Food Programme". In the Philipines, decades of under-investment in agriculture makes the country heavily dependent on rice imports. Traders are accused of hoarding grain to exploit the resultant price rises. They won't be buying from India any more, since that country has this week re-imposed a ban on all rice exports except high value basmati. China reports that although rice production is increasing, its increasingly affluent population is switching to less efficiently produced meat and dairy foods.
So it was puzzling (to say the least) to hear the head of the United Nations World Food Programme Josette Sheeran (who says that "we are entering a new era of hunger") admit on R4 this week no-one really knows the cause of the food crisis - let alone its solution. Globalisation has spun a complex and so far indicipherable web of inter-dependencies.
Global warming has contributed in at least two ways, with increased flooding and drought causing harvests to repeatedly fail in Australia and elsewhere. World reserves of rice and wheat are now at record lows.
The mistaken drive for subsidised biofuel is also taking land out of food production.
Biofuel production feeds oil company profits and makes food grain less affordable. Britain now requires petrol and diesel to contain 2.5% biofuel, rising to 5.75 per cent by 2010 and 10 per cent by 2020. Spiralling natural gas and oil prices also mean that fertiliser costs more. In Vietnam dependency on high levels of fertiliser is increasing and prices have doubled. Because of fuel price rises, the cost of farming the land and of delivering crops to consumers is also driving up food prices.
For free marketeers at least, the answer is simple. They put their faith in the markets' ability to bring about a 'correction'. And anyway, in Europe and the US obesity is at record levels, so people can afford to lose a few kilos. But are we prepared to sit back while the world's most vulnerable pay the price of this necessary 'correction'?
18:15 Posted in Campaigns | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
13/03/2008
The better part of valour?
What chance of the Archbishop of Canterbury's support as pressure mounts on the Home Office to save 19-year-old gay Iranian Mehdi Kazemi from execution? At first the Home Office refused to re-consider his deportation, scheduled once the teenager is returned from hiding in Holland later this week.
Like around 4,000 gay Iranians executed by the Ayotollahs since they came to power in 1979, Kazemi faces death by hanging if he is returned to his country. There is no logic to the Home Office line that gay Iranians are safe as long as they are 'discreet' and that having once refused to grant him asylum, his case cannot be re-heard unless new facts emerge.
Kazemi claimed asylum in 2005 after his lover was executed in Tehran. After his asylum application was refused he fled to Holland where a court has decided he must be returned to Britain. He is currently on 'suicide watch'.
An appeal has been launched through the European Court of Human rights and more than 60 leading peers, including the Bishop of Liverpool, have signed a letter to the Home Office in his support.
In a moving statement to the Home Office he writes:
"The Iranian authorities have found out that I am a homosexual and they are looking for me. I can not stop my attraction towards men. This is something that I will have to live with the rest of my life. I was born like with feeling and can not change this fact... If I return to Iran I will be arrested and executed like Parham."
Will the Archbishop of Canterbury join them? Still bruised by his worthwhile contribution to the debate about Sharia, an urgent intervention by him would seem to be more than timely.
After this post was written the Home Office announced that Mehdi Kazemi has been granted a temporary reprieve from deportation.
13:40 Posted in Campaigns | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this