Thursday 17 May 2012

News Digest May 17, 2012




Coffee
It’s healthy, it’s healthy not, it’s healthy, it’s healthy not, it’s healthy…according to this umpteenth study on the issue:   

  


---------------------


Efforts by anti-smoking campaigners to reinstate a smoking ban in small cafes and bars failed on Wednesday when judges in The Hague ruled the law does allow exceptions.


                                                      --------------------------


http://imagec18.247realmedia.com/RealMedia/ads/Creatives/default/empty.gif

So let’s fix that with yet more government control and taxation!  Hate to tell you we told you so. 


                                                      ----------------------------

All plain cigarette packaging as adopted in Australia and under consultation in the UK will accomplish is to make tobacco more affordable since with nothing else to stand out except their name in identical fonts, the only way the tobacco companies would be able to compete with each other is through prices.  Case in point:



                                                     ----------------------------



Experts are surprised that the number of asthma sufferers continues to rise while the number of smokers falls.  Perhaps they should start looking elsewhere for the solution to the problem as some researchers have found that being subjected to smoke prevents allergies by making the immune system stronger. 



 ---------------------------


It is frequently claimed that consumers of ‘unhealthy’ products place an excessive burden on public services and that this justifies additional taxation.  This is not true according to a report from The Adam Smith Institute: 



                                                        ---------------------------


‘’ To be sure, obesity is a public health problem that should be addressed with scientific discipline. Instead, as the current campaign illustrates, activists are politicizing obesity -- using it as a vehicle to try to remake the American way of life.’’



                                                        ---------------------


Evidence based public health policy?  Yeah right! 

Government-Funded Medical Research Is Hazardous to Your Health


                                                        ----------------------




‘’ In a bombshell revelation of the depth of the food police state that now exists in LA County, California, NaturalNews has learned that the LA County health department has unleashed door-to-door raw milk confiscation teams to threaten and intimidate raw dairy customers into surrendering raw milk products they legally purchased and own.’’




4 comments:

Ann W. said...

From the Toronto Sun:
Charney has just published a book called “Epidemic of Medical Errors and Hospital-Acquired Infections” and says up to 63,000 Canadians die each year from medical mistakes - the equivalent of three jumbo jets crashing each week.

“These are crazy numbers because people are just not paying attention,” Charney said.

“They’re killing people, they’re wounding people, the morbidity rates... the mortality rates are very high.”
http://www.torontosun.com/2012/05/16/medical-mistakes-will-rise-with-health-cuts-author-says

Ben said...

"NIHstudy finds that coffee drinkers have lower risk of death"

Immortality within reach? Good news!
Silly me, I always thought that death was the unavoidable end of life.
Excuse me while a pour me another cup ...

Ben said...

"Coffee saves lives? Take this with an ounce of cream

Who ever thought that a morning cup of coffee, which so many Americans rely upon in order to jump-start their day, could also forestall a meeting with the Grim Reaper? Well, according to the results of a new prospective study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, coffee drinking is associated with lower total and cause-specific mortality.

As part of the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study, researchers from the National Cancer Institute analyzed data on over 400,000 adults between the ages of 50 and 71 years old who were free of cancer, heart disease, and stroke at the study’s onset. Participants' coffee consumption was assessed once at baseline, and they were then followed for up to 14 years. After an adjustment for smoking and other potential confounders, the results showed that men and women who drank an average of four to five cups of coffee daily had the lowest risk of death. And the effect held across a wide variety of causes of death, including heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, injuries and accidents, diabetes, and infections. Drinking coffee was not, however, associated with a lower risk of dying from cancer.

“It seems as though, every few months, we read about another study linking coffee to some sort of health effect,” observes ACSH’s Alyssa Pelish. “Sometimes it’s a beneficial effect, sometimes it’s adverse — but the effects of coffee are a favorite object of scrutiny in these often slightly silly observational studies.”

It’s true, too, that such studies are often fraught with methodological problems, and the latest one is no exception. “The researchers only measured coffee consumption once during this entire study,” says ACSH’s Dr. Ruth Kava. “How can you reliably calculate coffee-associated mortality if you’ve only measured it a single time over 14 years?”"
http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.3630/news_detail.asp

C.A.G.E. said...

Amazing what passes off as science isn't it? And they have the nerve to wonder why we no longer trust them?