When the medical lobby first campaigned against tobacco, certain perceptive observers questioned whether they might start getting carried away with their own success and turn into the Fun Police. Oh no, the white-coated wowsers swore, it was only about tobacco. They weren’t going to start browbeating about alcohol, or red meat, or sugar.
They lied, of course.
Because that is exactly what has happened. The scolds were only encouraging by their success in finger-wagging the public into a dramatic (and, it must be said, exceptionally beneficial) turnaround. A large part of it is because, for an activist, a problem solved is an existential crisis. What’s an activist to do, when they solve the issue they were active about? Go home and put their feet up? Not bloody likely. Not with all that sweet, sweet funding rolling in.
Instead, they find a new cause to agitate about. Even if they have to make one up.
Public health folk love to make us scared and in their condescension to the lumpen masses prefer hyperbole to fact.
For four years now the World Health Organisation in cahoots with one of its agencies, the International Agency for Cancer Research, has listed processed meats — sausages, salami, bacon, ham, the humble frankfurter et cetera etc., Group One carcinogens. Smoking cigarettes are on the same line of betting, but the grouping is fraught in terms of risk and the WHO happily admits this…But the way this information is framed and expressed to the public, the inference is created that chowing down on a hot dog equals your guts falling out of all the wrong holes just prior to taking your spot up the back with the choir invisible.
Just because the public health lobby was right about tobacco, it does not follow that they must be right about everything else. That hasn’t stopped them strutting and fretting in the borrowed plumage of their victory over the tobacco industry.
To hell with science and evidence.
The dumbed down term “probably” causes cancer [is] an easy way out of explaining that the classification is based on limited evidence from epidemiological studies. What this means is a positive association has been observed between exposure to red meat and cancer, but other explanations could not be ruled out.
It doesn’t also follow that they are necessarily wrong, either. All that matters is the evidence. Unfortunately for the anti-meat brigade, the link between red meat and cancer is tenuous, to put it mildly. But, just throw in the scare-word “probably”, and anything can be made out to seem as deadly as puffing away on a stick of dynamite.
In fact, the term “probably” might just as well be swept entirely off the table if a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine released late last month is anything to go by.
Those findings broadly reported that the research showed, “no certainty that the consumption of red or processed meats causes cancer, diabetes or heart disease.”
More specifically, the study that “among 12 randomised control trials involving about 54,000 individuals, did not find a statistically significant or an important association in the risk of heart disease, cancer or diabetes for those that consumed less red or processed meat”.
In other words, eat that steak. Fry that bacon. And stop letting white-coated scolds frighten you into not having a good time.
The public health industry has become political in its conduct and worse, behaves like the ugliest kind of politician, the one that refuses to accept that they were wrong […] If eating meat is wrong, I don’t want to be right.
theaustralian.com.au/commentary/if-eating-meat-is-wrong-i-dont-want-to-be-right/news-story
Give the finger to the nannies and the wowsers. Order your Whale Meat pack today.