Here We Go Again

The doom-mongers of the public health racket have been fast out of the blocks this year, wasting no time reminding us that we really shouldn’t enjoy ourselves without consulting the doctor first. But let’s start with some good news: minimum unit pricing.

Minimum Unit Pricing (MUP)

On the 23^rd December the European Court of Justice (ECJ) released its final opinion on the compatibility of MUP with EU law. To no one’s surprise this confirmed the draft opinion, published in September, that MUP is contrary to EU law if less restrictive tax measures can be introduced. It is worthy of note that the ECJ refers to “less restrictive tax measures” not confining itself to alcohol duty – which is controlled by Westminster, not Holyrood. The Scottish Government will now get a range of new tax raising powers so cannot say they have no powers to deal with alcohol abuse other than minimum pricing.

Putting a brave face on it, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon again noted that it was for the Scottish court to decide on the legality of MUP. It’s as if she regards the ECJ as an advisory body to which she can say “thanks very much for your opinion, duly noted, but we’re going ahead anyway.” She would do well to read the Note at the end of the ECJ’s press release. The Note states that courts and tribunals of Member States can refer disputes that have been brought before them to the ECJ for an interpretation of EU law. Crucially it adds: “The Court of Justice does not decide the dispute itself. It is for the national court or tribunal to dispose of the case in accordance with the Court’s decision, which is similarly binding on other courts or tribunals before which a similar issue is raised (my bolding).”

This is hugely significant. Unless the Scottish Government can provide evidence to the court that proves MUP, and only MUP, can address Scotland’s particular problems with alcohol and health – something they have singularly failed to do so far – then the Scottish minimum pricing legislation is incompatible with EU law and cannot be enacted. In addition, the ECJ’s ruling will apply to current minimum unit pricing proposals in Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

This may well chunter-on to a final ruling in the UK’s Supreme Court in London, but I think this measure is effectively dead in the water.

Revised lower-risk drinking guidelines

We await the official publication of these, but it has been widely reported that lower-risk guidelines for men should be reduced to the same level as for women – 2 to 3 units a day – but with an added proviso that we should all have two alcohol-free days a week. This is odd. The lower limits for women are based upon the fact that women metabolize alcohol differently to men, because pound for pound they have less water and more fatty tissue than men. Because fat retains alcohol and water dilutes it, alcohol remains at higher concentrations for longer periods of time in a woman’s body, exposing her brain and other organs to more alcohol. Women also have lower levels of two enzymes – alcohol dehydrogenase and aldehyde dehydrogenase that break down alcohol in the stomach and liver. As a result women absorb more alcohol into their bloodstreams than men.

Have these simple biological facts changed? No. So it’s hard not to reach the conclusion that chief medical officer Sally Davies just wants to simplify the message regardless of the science because of some highly theoretical risk factors that arise out of very low levels of consumption. A more rational approach to setting lower-risk guidelines is to ask at what point a moderate drinker’s risk of dying from all causes exceeds that of a person who doesn’t drink. We know from the meta-study done by Augusto Di Castelnuovo in 2006 that for men that level is between 3.4 and 6.8 units a day, and for women it is between 1.7 and 5.1 units a day. Sorry Sally, but your revised lower-risk guidelines will lack credibility with the public and serve little purpose except for providing another stick with which to beat the alcohol industry

Calorie labelling on beverage alcohol products to combat obesity?

The Local Government Association has called for calorie labelling on bottles and cans of alcohol, calling on breweries and drinks’ producers to “show leadership in tackling the obesity crisis”. Dr. Sarah Jarvis told Sky News she was “amazed at how little people understand” about the calories in alcohol. I sympathise Sarah, I’m always amazed when people don’t share my obsessions too. Well, I have good news! Diageo is introducing calorie labelling on all its products in 2016 and is presently consulting on the most effective way to communicate this information. Other drinks producers are likely to follow suit.

But here’s a thought: the calories contained in an alcoholic drink are contained in the alcohol. A gram of alcohol has 7 calories (as compared to 4 in a gram of sugar and 9 in a gram of fat); there are 8 grams of alcohol in a UK unit. Therefore there are 56 calories in a unit of alcohol – so a small measure of whisky (1 unit) has 56 calories; a pint of session beer with 4% abv has 2.27 units and therefore 127 calories; a pint of lager with an abv of 5% has 2.84 units and therefore 159 calories – so not massively calorific products. And through the industry voluntary responsibility deal we’ve removed 1.2 billion units of alcohol from circulation. This equates to reducing the calorific intake of drinkers by 67.2 billion calories. Name me another industry that has done more than that to fight obesity! 

SUGAR? NO THANKS, I'M SWEET ENOUGH!

The heading above is my stock response whenever anyone asks do I take sugar in my tea. I am however, a self-confessed chocaholic and I prefer proper fizzy drinks – not the anaemic ones that don’t have any sugar in them. And what is more, I don’t think that is any of Sarah Wollaston MP’s damned business. The Commons Health Select Committee that she chairs has just recommended a 10% ‘sugar tax’ on fizzy drinks, along with a number of other recommendations including product reformulation to reduce sugar content the legal mandating of reduced portion sizes is also on the agenda along with more labelling requirements.

On the BBC News site this story was presented under the heading “MPs Back Sugar Tax” – er…well, seven of the committee of nine did so – that’s just one percent of the total number of MPs in the Commons. We can take some comfort from the fact that two of the committee didn’t back this. Conservative MPs’ Andrea Jenkyns and Andrew Percy both dissented, with Jenkyns calling the proposal “patronising nonsense”. “Here, here” say I!

This whole campaign has been led by ‘Action on Sugar’ – a crackpot group of healthist zealots who see sugar as one of the ‘industries of addiction’ that need curtailing by government. In fact these people believe sugar consumption should be reduced by half – which would take us back to the levels of consumption last seen during the Second World War when sugar was rationed. This really shouldn’t surprise us. Whenever ‘safe levels’ of alcohol consumption are discussed anti-alcohol campaigners use 1952 as their starting point to show how much alcohol consumption has risen. This is because in 1952 rationing had just ended and people were pretty skint – so if that’s your comparator the increase in consumption is made to look pretty steep.

We hear a lot about austerity, but taking us back to war-time levels of consumption because it is “good for us” is a bizarre ambition. If we want to tackle obesity why pick on sugar? A gram of sugar contains just four calories; a gram of alcohol seven calories and a gram of fat nine calories. People need to eat less and exercise more – and that is sensible advice, but it should be up to you if you want to take it.

Sugar isn’t just about sweetening things – it gives food texture and acts as a natural preservative. It shouldn’t need pointing out, but it does, that a sugar tax is regressive and will disproportionately affect consumers with low incomes. In any event sin taxes rarely affect consumption by much and reduce obesity not at all. Mexico’s sugar tax reduced consumption by just six per cent and had no discernible impact on obesity. Denmark also embraced the idea of taxing its citizens into anorexia with a fat tax and a tax on soft drinks. It abandoned both.

So, with all this evidence why does Sarah Wollaston and her ever-so-cute poster boy Jamie Oliver still champion this idea? For Oliver this is just another way of raising his profile although he’s empty-headed enough to believe it will work; for Wollaston I suspect this measure is at least as important symbolically as it is instrumentally. She is desperate for a victory over Big Soda now that the virtual demise of minimum unit pricing makes a victory over Big Alcohol increasingly unlikely.

I really don’t understand what Wollaston is doing in the Conservative Party. Her ideology is state control of large swathes of industry so that ‘public health’ campaigners become the arbiters of the consumption patterns of the nation. What about free markets and choice Sarah? No doubt Big Business will be blamed if the government sticks to its policy of not introducing a sugar tax. After all, that’s what socialists do. I think you should cross the floor and join Jeremy’s party Sarah – I believe he has a nice allotment and bakes his own scones. I don’t know if he puts jam on them though!

Paul Chase

THE LICENSING ACT – 10 YEARS ON

The Licensing Act 2003 went ‘live’ at midnight on the 24^th November 2005. Initially it enjoyed cross-party support and even qualified support from ACPO. The only stumbling block to its progress through Parliament was an amendment in the Lords which came to be known as the ‘Morris Dancing exemption’ – their lordships were concerned that traditional English folk dancing might be caught by the new definition of regulated entertainment – and thus Morris Dancing and the like was solemnly exempted from the regulations; everyone kept a straight face. It was in the time-lapse between the Bill passing into law and it coming into effect that we saw the development of what was arguably the most extraordinary moral panic of modern times.

The labelling of the new licensing regime by the Daily Mail as the “twenty-four hour drinking Act” was instrumental in persuading politicians, bishops, police chiefs, newspaper editors, a variety of self-appointed, socially-accredited experts and other assorted ‘right-thinking people’ that this would lead to a binge-drinking epidemic, a crime wave, and in particular an increase in rape and other assaults. And that our hospitals would be flooded with so many casualties that the new Act would “bankrupt the NHS”. Ever since this claim, a crisis isn’t a proper crisis unless it threatens to do that.

In reality we have seen crime and disorder fall, and as a sub-set of that we have seen alcohol-related crime and disorder fall. The other falls – in the overall level of drinking and in problem drinking and teeny drinking have been well documented. I don’t suggest that these improvements have happened because of the new licensing regime, but certainly they don’t support the proposition that the sky would fall in and society as we know it would crumble as a result of licensing reform. Some would argue that we haven’t seen the creation of a continental café-bar culture either – but this was never more than a piece of New Labour spin.

In fact neither the worst fears nor the best hopes attached to this reform were realised. The lesson for politicians is that the expectation that a reform to the way in which we regulate how the retail distribution system handles a product would automatically read-across to a cultural change in terms of how consumers would use that product, was unrealistic. Regulation is only a part of the mix; drinking cultures are much more complex than was supposed.

All of that having been said, I do think that the Licensing Act 2003 has been a qualified success, despite the legislative repentance that followed as a result of the initial moral panic. It was sensible to separate the licensing of persons from the licensing of premises. It was right to enable licensing hours to be responsive to local needs and consumer demand. Getting rid of nationally prescribed ‘permitted hours’ was a welcome departure from the paternalism of the past. Although the trade was initially suspicious of moving licensing from courts to councils – and in the process discovering that they loved magistrates after all – it was broadly a positive move. If there is to be a further reform of the licensing system I would like to see licensing continue to be administered by council licensing authorities, but for contested applications to be heard in the courts with a proper judicial procedure, in the event that objections cannot be mediated away.

The Licensing Act 2003 did enable some welcome changes to the drinking culture, particularly in city centres. Under the Licensing Act 1964 the city centre night-time-economy had become a youth leisure ghetto. If you could only sell alcohol after 11 p.m. if it was ancillary to the combination of music, dancing and the availability of food, in practice this meant nightclubs and late-night bars with a loud disco. The demographic this appealed to was obvious. What is equally obvious is that we all behave better when we are in the company of people older or younger than ourselves. When the new licensing regime swept away these outdated restrictions it enabled the creation of a much more diverse night-time-economy that attracted a much wider demographic. The political and media perception of the city-centre drinking culture is still rooted in mass volume, vertical drinking establishments, but this is not the way the late-night drinking culture has evolved.

The Licensing Act 2003 did ignite a debate about alcohol and society. The nexus of that debate has now moved beyond crime and disorder and into the realm of health impacts. What is lacking in this whole debate is honest statistics. We don’t even have a nationally agreed definition of alcohol-related crime; the number of alcohol-related hospital admissions and the impact of alcohol on A&E departments have been grotesquely exaggerated by a new public health movement that sees alcohol as an “industry of addiction”. The debate about alcohol and society is more polarised than ever before. That is perhaps the worst unintended consequence of the Licensing Act 2003.

Paul Chase

 NANNY-WATCH

Barely a day goes by without some new ‘threat’ to our health being announced by epidemiologists or others health campaigners. For these people – I call them ‘healthists’ - the meaning of life appears to be the elimination of anything enjoyable in order to achieve maximum longevity. Key to this is the elimination of ‘risk-factors’ from our diet and our lifestyles. The key technique used to frighten us all into abstinence is to concentrate on cancer risks. Here an old trick is used: take a very small baseline risk and then measure the increase to that risk that arises if you engage in ‘unhealthy’ eating or drinking. The effect of this is to give prominence and publicity to very large percentage increases in very small baseline risks.

Here are some examples of this crack-pottery that have come to light in the past two weeks:

Firstly, inevitably, alcohol. The ‘lower risk’ drinking guidelines are now being examined by the Department of Health with a view to reducing them. The reason given by the DoH is that there is “no safe level of consumption in respect of the epidemiological risk of developing cancers”, and “the cancer risks of drinking is a game-changer.” It is of course accepted that excessive consumption of alcohol is causally related to a number of cancers, but the risk is dose-related.

So, taking oral cancers as an example, what is the overall risk caused by drinking alcohol? According to Cancer Research UK there were some 7,300 oral cancers diagnosed in the UK in 2012. Of these tobacco smoking was identified as the cause in 65% of cases. Alcohol consumption accounted for 30% of these – some 2,190 cases. 30 million adults in the UK drink at least once a week. Of those 30 million, 2,190 of them develop an alcohol-related oral cancer; that’s 0.007% of regular drinkers! And remember, these figures include very heavy drinkers as well as moderate and light drinkers – so should we panic and abstain? Well, about 30% of alcohol-related oral cancer sufferers do die from this condition. So, around 657 deaths out of 30 million drinkers – 0.021%.

Every such death is a tragedy, but the actuarial risk is minute. The proposition that anything that raises the epidemiological risk of a cancer ‘isn’t safe’ is therefore somewhat problematic. In everyday life people make trade-offs. They don’t ask “is this product or behaviour safe?” they ask “is it safe enough?” We do this all the time and not just in relation to food and drink. We don’t ask is driving a motor vehicle safe; we ask is it safe enough. In other words, do the benefits of driving justify me in taking the risks? When we are told that tobacco smoking results in the premature death of half of all smokers that may well deter people from starting, or persuade existing smokers to quit. But if you were told that 0.021% of regular drinkers die from an oral cancer, would that put you off? It is this kind of epidemiological paranoia that leads healthists to call for abstinence and any lowering of the lower risk drinking guidelines is but a staging post on that journey.

In addition to the cancer risks of alcohol we’re had some real healthist gems in the past fortnight:

·         The official advice of the European Food Safety Authority is as follows: when you make a piece of toast only toast it golden brown, don’t burn it or you will ingest acrylamides which are carcinogenic. Acrylamides are contained in crisps, savoury snacks, soft and crispy breads, biscuits, cakes, crackers, cereals and coffee. Or anything nice.

·         Fry your foods in butter or lard because frying them in vegetable oil raises your risk of cancer.

·         Less than one sausage a day increases your cancer risk. And be sure not to cook your Sunday roasties too dark and crispy because they contain acrylamides too!

·         Eating a steak once a week rectal cancers by more than two fifths.

·         Less than one sausage a day raises your risk factor for cancer.

But my favourite was cheese addiction. Cheese contains casein – a protein which becomes super concentrated in the cheese making process and forms morphine-like compounds. These then bind with the opioid receptors in your brain making cheese as addictive as morphine. Pizza restaurant chains are nothing more than drug dealers who rely on addiction for repeat business! Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and president of the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine, describes cheese as “dairy crack”.

And then we come to energy drinks.  Doctors warn that just one energy drink a day raises the risk for heart disease even amongst young healthy adults. This is a veiled attack on caffeine, which is of course contained in coffee. I was wondering when coffee drinking was going to be attacked by healthists. Anything that is successful raises their ire. My tip is that the epidemiological risks of caffeine consumption will be the next ‘big thing’ to occupy their small minds.

Paul Chase

The Age of Unreason

“Government Must Act Now to Save Our Children” read a recent headline in the Times. The reference was, of course, to the demand that government introduce a sugar tax of between 10 and 20 per cent on fizzy drinks. I’ve written about this issue before, but it does seem to me that it now has all the hallmarks of a classic moral panic. It’s almost as if health campaigners have given up on minimum pricing for alcohol, and this is the next ‘big thing’ for them to obsess over. But actually it’s just top of a very long list of things that they think need taxing or banning – and the list gets longer and more absurd by the day.

It’s not that taxing sugary drinks wouldn’t reduce consumption, it would. Use taxation to raise the price of anything and consumption of it will fall, more or less, depending on the price-elasticity-of demand for the product concerned. The point is that the effect will be utterly trivial in terms of its impact on obesity. There are many, many products that contain added sugar, and a recent article in the Sunday Telegraph looks at how many ready meals sold in our major supermarkets contain much more added sugar than fizzy drinks. Should we tax or regulate to reduce sugar in them all? Health campaigners would say yes – the taxation and mass reformulation of products is exactly what they support; it’s all part of their mad plan for world domination – otherwise known as regulating capitalism out of existence!

The impression given by health activists, and much of the media, that sugar consumption is out of control is simply wrong. Reports from DEFRA and from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey show that sugar consumption is lower than it was 40 years ago; but when a moral panic sets in it’s a case of “never let the facts get in the way of a good story”.

Before we ask government to intervene in free markets we should first of all establish whether there has been a market failure that justifies such intervention. One of the most intriguing statistics I’ve read on the subject of sugar and non-alcoholic drinks came from JD Wetherspoon’s Tim Martin. Writing in Propel he disclosed that in the previous week ‘Spoons had sold 580,000 Pepsi products on draught and that 197,000 of them were Diet Pepsi and therefore sugar-free. That’s just over a third. In addition, Martin wrote, ‘Spoons sold a million cups of tea and coffee that were served without sugar. So when we talk about all non-alcoholic drinks and not just fizzy drinks, it is clear that customers were already, overwhelmingly, choosing the sugar-free options. This may not be a scientific survey, but it’s a highly indicative snapshot of the choices people are now making, so where’s the evidence of market failure? And what a brilliant baseline of free choice on which a successful public education campaign could build.

But back to alcohol. According to the press, Public Health England has said there is no safe level of alcohol consumption in terms of the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. Now, whilst there is a specific form of dementia called Wernicke-Korsakov syndrome that arises when you pickle your brain in copious quantities of alcohol over a prolonged period of time, the evidence for a causal link between low and moderate alcohol consumption and Alzheimer’s is very weak indeed. But Public Health England say just because there is no evidence that alcohol is implicated doesn’t mean it isn’t; so, apply the precautionary principle and say until there is evidence that it is safe let’s assume it is unsafe and advise abstinence.  What reason! What impeccable logic!

All of these public health campaigns are really predicated on a fear of death. But according to Professor Westendorp – a leading expert in human ageing and longevity – life expectancy is going up in the West faster than we can adjust to it. Every week we get an extra weekend of life-expectancy; every day we gain six hours: “The first person to live to 135 has already been born” he states (The Times, October 22^nd 2015). Dementia, the bogeyman of the present, is also in significant decline according to Professor Westendorp. A large-scale population study in the UK reported a 30 per cent drop in the risk of getting dementia over the past 20 years. And heart disease and strokes are also on the decline. In the first half of the 20^th century, half of the population died of cardiovascular disease; that has now dropped to a third and heart disease continues to fall.

The doom-mongers of the public health racket never give up though. As reported by Chris Snowdon on his blog site Velvet Glove, Iron Fist, a recent report by Dr. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is concerned about the health aspects of cheese. There is a reason why pizza is such a successful food product. It contains an addictive substance.  Dr. Barnard believes cheese to be as addictive as morphine because it contains “casein-derived, morphine-like compounds” which become super-concentrated during the cheese-making process.  And so cheese might as well be called “dairy crack” he declares.

And, hot off the press, a World Health Organisation report has just been published that classifies processed meat as carcinogenic – alongside arsenic and asbestos. Less than one sausage a day increases your risk of developing cancer by almost a fifth.

I am utterly speechless!

Paul Chase

SAFE LEVELS OF ALCOHOL CONSUMPTION

It has been reported in the press recently that the Department of Health is considering revising down the ‘lower-risk’ or ‘sensible drinking’ guidelines, on the basis of new evidence linking even very low levels of alcohol consumption to an increase in the risk of developing cancers – particularly breast cancer. The logic of the healthist argument is that there is no level of regular alcohol consumption, no matter how low, that doesn’t raise the epidemiological risk factor for a variety of cancers, and therefore there is no ‘safe level’ of alcohol consumption. It follows from this that the ‘lower-risk’ drinking guidelines should be reduced, as they have been recently in Canada and Australia. I believe that there is actually good evidence, from a health point of view, that we could safely raise the lower-risk guidelines. That’s right – raise them!

Let’s take a step back: firstly, if the overarching purpose of lower-risk drinking guidelines is to reduce levels of drinking and thereby levels of premature death by reducing the risks of developing fatal diseases, then surely what we should look at is the relationship between various levels of alcohol consumption and the risk of premature death from all causes, not just premature death from one cause – cancers. Here’s where we uncover some inconvenient truths for the health lobby. Research has established that people who drink moderate amounts of alcohol on a regular basis are less likely to die prematurely than people who never drink. And to be more specific, they are less likely to die prematurely from cancers or heart disease.

In the graph below we see the risk of all-cause mortality for ‘never drinkers’ represented by the horizontal straight line. If we look at the J-curves for men and women, represented by the solid black line and dotted black line respectively, we can see that risk of premature death from all causes declines at very low levels of consumption (less than one standard drink a day) and then starts to rise. But it only exceeds the risk for people who never drink when it exceeds four standard drinks a day for men and approximately 3 standard drinks a day for women. An American ‘standard drink’ equates to 1.7 units of alcohol.

The current UK lower-risk guidelines were plucked out of the air; they are not based on science. But we can now define a rational basis upon which to calculate such guidelines. It’s about relative risk: if people who drink moderate amounts of alcohol regularly have a lower level of all-cause mortality as compared with those who never drink, then the question we need to ask, when framing the lower-risk drinking guidelines, is: how many units of alcohol consumed per day would raise the risk of premature death from all causes above the risk level of those who never drink?

We do have an answer to this – represented in the J-curve graph. Research in the United States has shown that for men, two to four ‘standard drinks’ per day, and for women, one to three standard drinks per day, keeps the risk factor of premature death from all causes below that of ‘never drinkers’. In the United States a ‘standard drink’ is the equivalent of 12 fluid ounces of beer with an ABV of 5%. This translates into 1.7 British units of alcohol. So, two to four standard drinks a day represents between 3.4 and 6.8 units of alcohol consumption for men, and one to three standard drinks gives us a range of 1.7 to 5.1 units a day of alcohol consumption for women. The current UK guidelines are 3 to 4 units a day for men, and 2 to 3 units a day for women – hence my suggestion that the current guidelines err on the side of caution and could safely be raised.

But there is another question we need to ask about what the healthists have to say concerning safe levels and risk factors. If we are going to define alcohol as ‘unsafe’ because at any level of consumption it raises the risk of developing cancers, then what happens if we apply that principle to other drink and food products?

Let’s take tap water as an example. In the UK we put chlorine in our public water supply. Chlorine is a disinfectant that kills micro-organisms and thereby renders water safe to drink. The chlorination of public water supplies represented a massive step forward in public health and virtually eliminated cholera, typhoid and other water-borne diseases in advanced countries. But we know from research done in the 1970s and the 1990s that chlorine, when added to water, forms Trihalomethanes (THMs), one of which is chloroform. THMs increase the production of free radicals in the body and are highly carcinogenic (cancer causing). Specifically, they raise the risk factor for bladder, colon and breast cancers. THMs may also have an effect on pregnancy and the level of miscarriages and on the development of allergic reactions to certain foods.

There are numerous studies that establish this link between chlorinated water consumption and cancer. Here is just one example: a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in the United States found that “long term drinking of chlorinated water appears to increase a person’s risk of developing bladder cancer by as much as 80 percent.” I’m not trying to start a health scare here folks, because the absolute risk of developing bladder cancer is very low, so an 80 percent increase in a very low risk is still a very low risk. I’m merely pointing out that basing public health policy on epidemiological risk factors alone, does not provide the basis for evidence-based policy-making. Used selectively, as in the example of alcohol consumption and cancer risk factors, it is merely scaremongering and doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously. Department of Health, please take note.

But if we apply the principle that any elevation of cancer or other health risk factors renders food (as opposed to alcoholic drinks) unsafe, then we get to an even more untenable position. Consumption of red meat; of meat products such as bacon, sausages and burgers; consumption of convenience foods for microwave cooking, such as spag bol, because they contain added sugar and salt, and for the same reason consumption of fizzy drinks – all these foods raise disease risk factors. So what we are left with is fruit and veg – and nothing to drink! The healthist utopia is the creation of a teetotal, vegetarian society. And this is where you can begin to see that ‘public health’ as a movement is not about public health, but about state regulation of lifestyle. It is an ideology that seeks to use epidemiological research to pressure government to regulate the food and drinks’ industries in order to enforce mass product reformulation.

There are of course genuine concerns about the health effects of heavy alcohol consumption and about excessive consumption of foods rich in sugar, salt and saturated fats. But as long as we have free information and there is no market failure in terms of the provision of affordable healthy alternatives, there is no justification for government stepping in with large-scale regulation.

Paul Chase