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Dutch Research Nonsense

If there was ever a finer example of research study nonsense, I can’t remember when.  Supposedly Dutch researchers have come up with the first ‘hard evidence’ that drinks containing sugar contribute to childhood obesity.

Yes, I know.  If you believe the comments on that post, or talk with worried moms the world over, you’ll know it’s just a fact that sugar is bad for children.  If you follow the links on the post through, and actually read the referenced studies, you get a different story.

This study only included youngsters who were already drinking sugary drinks, because it was considered unethical to possibly give them sugary drinks otherwise!

The children in The Netherlands were given specially manufactured artificially flavored non-carbonated drinks containing sucralose and acesulfame potassium, two ingredients not normally found in commonly available sugar free drinks.  They then supervised the drinking of the beverages, and tested for traces of these chemicals in the urine of the children.  At the conclusion of this study, they determined these children gained less weight than their peers who drank a similar beverage made with real sugar.

I’ll bet those drinks tasted vile!

So what have we learned here?  It seems to me, we’ve learned large quantities of these two chemicals delay weight gain in the 5-12 year age range.

Is there really anything else to be gained from this study?  Apparently we’re supposed to conclude drinking diet soft drinks as an alternative to those made with sugar is healthier for children.

Did anyone read any conclusions about the long term health of the children?  What about longer term weight gain?  A similar study in the US noted weight loss was limited to the first year, and after that returned.  Was there any other way the health of those children were improved with all those chemicals?  What about the children who drank water instead of specially manufactured artificially flavored drinks?  Don’t we know when people diet to lose weight, they almost always gain it back and then some?

Drinks containing sugar have been around for a long time, especially if you consider fruit juice too.  Both sugar free drinks and childhood obesity on the other hand are relatively new, especially in Europe.  Is it a coincidence the widespread consumption of sugar free drinks in the US corresponds with the obesity epidemic there?  What about other changes in the diets of children.  Could a significant increase in the amount of processed food have something to do with it?

Isn’t it a little strange there’s money for a study to show sugar free drinks are good for you, but no money to show the dangers of sugar substitutes?  What about that Italian study from a few years ago that showed aspartame causes cancer?

We need to spend more time worrying about the processed food children are eating, including sugar substitutes, and less time on sugar.  We need some real science!

Is this any different from the ‘science’ that showed us all those energy saving light bulbs were good for us?

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Field Liberation Movement Calls for Support

Now nearly a year and a half ago, I posted on the Belgian Field Liberation Movement, and their Field Liberation Day in Wetteren.  This was a demonstration against a genetically modified potato field planting trial.  After much public debate, and many long winded speeches by politicians, they finally decided last May to sue eleven of the ‘Field Liberators’ in civil court for damages.

Last month a Belgian court, acting on a filing from Greenpeace, declared the original permit authorizing the field trial invalid, and thus the field trial itself illegal.  Way to go Greenpeace!

The civil trial is now scheduled for 15 January 2013.

You can help!  You can donate to help offset possible sanctions or civil liabilities, as well as pay their legal or other expenses.  You can buy their t-shirts or beer!  You can also attend the hearing in January to show your support.

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PC Olive Oil

I was at a local market last Sunday and bought some politically correct olive oil.

We have this bit of very seriously contaminated land in Amsterdam, the ‘Westergasfabriek’.  It was formally a natural gas processing plant, and they’ve all but given up on trying to clean the ground.  They’ve decided it’s just too contaminated, and since much of the contamination is underwater (well below sea level), trying to clean it up will only spread it.  What do you do when you have a piece of land like that in the middle of the city?  You build a park on it and call it a recreation area!  That’s what we now have, and one Sunday a month they have an open air market there.  It’s been growing in recent months, and now it’s quite large.  It’s always this strange mix of mostly hand crafts, mixed in with cheap plastic crap from China that sort of looks like a hand crafts.

Recently there’s been quite a lot of growth in stands offering food, quite a lot of it hand made or direct from the farmers, and it’s quite possible to get a nice lunch there now.  Or, if you do what I do, you can get a free lunch by working your way through all the free samples the different stands offer.

Anyway, I found myself trying to quietly grab a dried out piece of bread dunked in olive oil at the Groene Griek (the green Greek) stand, and I was caught.  Behind the bread and olive oil there was an eager sales woman, ready to talk with the people taking samples.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch!

“It comes from a Greek farmer you know!”, she said pointing to it.  “We put the picture of the farmer on the front of each bottle.  You know farmers in Greece are having a hard time right now, and it’s important to help them.  You know there’s a euro crisis, and they’re having a hard time selling their products for a fair price. When you buy their olive oil, we try to give them a fair price”.

“You see this one is Maria.   It’s an organic family farm, and at first they didn’t know who to put on the label.  They decided on the older woman.  She’s 72 years old.”

“If someone like you doesn’t buy oil like this in a market in this way, it won’t get sold as Greek Olive Oil.  There’s no direct market for Greek olive oil, and instead it gets mixed together with olive oil from other European countries, labelled as Spanish or Italian, and sold in supermarkets”.

“The big bottle is a recycled wine bottle you know.  It saves a lot of energy to recycle a wine bottle over melting the glass and remolding it.  It can just be washed and reused”.

I had to admit after tasting it, it was some of the best olive oil I’ve had in a long time.  They had some other kinds, but I decided on a wine bottle of Maria.  It was reasonably priced, and even though I didn’t plan on buying anything that day, I’m glad I bought this.  I wonder if that sales person realized how effectively she was pushing all of my buttons that day…  She probably did.

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Stoddart Family Farm

This is probably only interesting for those of you out there living in southern Ontario, but I was emailing recently with Harry Stoddart of the Stoddart Family Farm about some seeds.  Our email exchange together with his website, gave me a really good impression of the kind of person he is and the sort of farm he has.  I thought I would mention him here, embed his promotional video, and encourage those of you who live nearby to get in touch.

If you’re vegetarian like me, you might not find his meat interesting, but it’s still very nice to know there are people out there like him raising meat humanely in environmentally friendly ways.

In particular his mentioning animals who eat grass just don’t get sick, goes along with a discussion I had a few months ago with a local farmer who also raises his animals on grass.  He referred to his cows as their own pharmacist.  He said, he could watch them eat, and when they weren’t feeling well, they would eat the plants in the pasture their bodies needed, in the right amounts.  He said he could just sit on the fence, watch them, and could tell all kinds of things about them by what they were eating at any given moment.