Chapter Fifteen: School Dinners
Chapter Sixteen: You Are Not What You Eat
Chapter Seventeen: Food Allergies
Chapter Eighteen: Detoxification
Chapter Nineteen: Food Labelling
Chapter Twenty: Vitamins, Minerals and Other Supplements
Chapter Twenty-one: Genetically Modified Organisms
Chapter Twenty-two: Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies – BSE and vCJD
PART THREE: HEALTHY LIVING
Chapter Twenty-three: Sun and the Skin: A Violation of Truth
Chapter Twenty-four: Complementary Medicine: Integrated Waffle?
Chapter Twenty-five: Alternative Medicines and Herbal Remedies
Chapter Twenty-six: Exercise
Chapter Twenty-seven: The Smokescreen of Passive Smoking
Chapter Twenty-eight: The Air We Breathe
Chapter Twenty-nine: The MMR Story
PART FOUR: MYTH INTERPRETATION
Chapter Thirty: The Harm That Pressure Groups Can Cause
Chapter Thirty-one: The Misuse of Numbers
Chapter Thirty-two: Epidemiology
Further Reading
Copyright
BY STANLEY FELDMAN AND VINCENT MARKS
‘We ought to recourse to experimentation and not suffer ourselves to be deluded by unfounded theory or specious argument.’
ABBÉ FELICE FONTANA, 1775
This book is an attempt to set the record straight, to counter ‘unfounded theory and specious argument’. We are being scared witless by a mixture of half-truths, tendentious beliefs and unsubstantiated opinions that are presented in the media as incontrovertible, scientifically proven facts. Many of these ideas have originated from overzealous pressure groups, from presentations by special-interest lobbies or from self-styled gurus. The more improbable the story, the more attention it receives from a press hungry for sensational news. These stories are seldom analysed or their contents challenged by the scientific community. As a result, many of these ideas have become accepted as self-evident truths, by the public and by responsible official bodies who lack the knowledge or the political will to challenge them.
This creates an aura of uncertainty that makes us susceptible to the claims of those who tell us that they can make us healthy, prevent disease, ensure our children are all geniuses and make us live longer. Rather than risk the possibility of coming to harm, we accept even the most improbable suggestion that they propose. As though gripped by a semireligious conversion, we condemn this or that food as being ‘junk’; we pay over the odds for food termed ‘organic’, although we know it possess no extra power; we spend millions of pounds on magic potions, treatments and herbal medicines that have been demonstrated to be useless; we eat silly diets in the ill-founded belief that they will make us happier or live longer. We are scared off GM foods, although they have been eaten without any ill effects by a third of the world for over seven years. Even though the gurus of this modern cult turn out, time and again, to be no more than witch doctors in modern dress, they still scare us to the point where we become irrational and accept their brew of pseudoscience and magic.
The idea for the book was borne out of our frustration at the credence given to the avalanche of hyped, improbable or inaccurate scare stories that defy reason and fuel what Mick Hume has described as an irrational ‘epidemic of epidemics’.
The frustration and anger at the scientific community’s inability to counter this insidious drip feed of scare stories came to a head at a meeting of the Millennium Club in 2004. At this meeting a group of senior academic doctors and scientists interested in healthcare problems suggested that it was time to set the record straight. The idea for this book was to persuade a group of truly independent experts to examine the scientific evidence behind some of the current scare stories and to present it in a manner that would be easily understood by the general public. The aim was to explain what is known and what is probably true about a subject and to separate this from speculation and opinion. This resulted in the First Edition of this book. The book was so popular that we have been encouraged to update it, and to add many new chapters. In this edition we have concentrated on those myths and fantasies that concern food, diet and lifestyle.
To this end we have sought contributions from experts who are scientists, academic doctors and independent journalists who have proven expertise in the subject on which they have been invited to write. Once again, we have asked them to present the facts behind these issues so that readers can determine for themselves where the truth lies.
Each contribution represents the interpretation put on the facts by its author and does not necessarily reflect the collective opinion of the editors or all the contributors.
If we have succeeded in persuading the reader to think again about the ‘unfounded theories and specious arguments’ with which we are bombarded, it will have served part of its purpose of being an interesting, informative and enjoyable read.
BY MICK HUME
At the start of the twenty-first century, we in the West enjoy higher standards of living, health and diet than at any moment in history. But you would be hard pressed to know it, from the miserabilist tone of much public discussion of the human condition.
At another time, the fact that people in a society lived far longer, healthier lives than their ancestors might reasonably have been thought a cause for some celebration. Today, however, we often appear unhealthily obsessed with looking on the dark side of life and worrying about our health. Even where no major health problem appears evident in the present, there is a veritable epidemic of experts on hand to assure us that we are only storing up problems for the future, warning of the threat of supposed ‘time bombs’, be it the ‘ageing time bomb’, the ‘obesity time bomb’, the ‘mobile-phone time bomb’ or whatever. As yet, these alleged health time bombs have failed to explode as predicted – remember the epidemic of heterosexual AIDS that was supposed to kill countless thousands in the UK, or the epidemic of vCJD (‘human mad-cow disease’) that was meant to leave behind up to half a million dead? Yet it seems there is always another ‘time bomb’ of one sort or another allegedly waiting in the wings to get us. In the same way, in recent years the government chief health officer has appeared to be suffering a bad case of ‘epidemicitis’, at various times describing the country as being in the grip of an epidemic of everything from flu to smoking.
Look at the list of current health panics and concerns that are addressed in this book. They cover a range of issues so wide that it might seem as if no part of the human physique or psyche has been left untouched by a huge wave of fresh diseases and disorders. Everything from our cholesterol levels to our intake of such everyday items as salt is now not only put under the laboratory microscope, but is highlighted in the daily news headlines as a potential health risk.
The list of health risks with which we have to contend grows longer almost by the day. It is well captured in the following A-to-Z (well, A-to-X, anyway) list of everything that, at least according to certain epidemiologists, is supposed be capable of causing cancer today:
Acetaldehyde,