Fiscal Policies for Diet and Prevention of Noncommunicable Diseases

Sooooo

The lovely folk at the WHO is posting about how to tax or subsidize their way to good health for the population.

http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/250131/1/9789241511247-eng.pdf?ua=1

I was reading about it at Velvet Glove and noticed something interesting.

Page 12 of the report

The fundamentals to the effect of fiscal policies on diet and the basics of price elasticities include: a) demand for SSBs is generally elastic, with price elasticities around -0.9 to -1.3

Framed as a reason to believe their fundamentals around taxation reducing food intake

Page 20 of the report

In most cases, however, the demand for foods and beverages is typically inelastic

Which they frame as a reason for large taxes

Wut

So fat

Yeah, posts

Good intentions, but life and all that.

Plans for the next few posts.

Breakdown of bacon being a tasty tasty killer.

New Zealand Eating and Activity guidelines.

The play by play lol-fest of people harassing epidemiology, and their fight back.

Safe drinking limits

What constitutes an amount of alcohol that is matched with long term health?

Well, frankly, who knows? especially when we rely on a never ending run of poor quality epidemiology.

I found this while reading another blog on alcohol and health, with the ever popular public health way of "well, we have to make a recommendation, so lets just pick this"

I also found this article the other week on the world leading Nutrition journal, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

The entertainment is in the conclusion

Higher usual alcohol consumption is associated with lower CAD mortality risk, independent of germline and early life environment and adulthood experience shared among twins, supporting a possible causal role of alcohol consumption in lowering CAD death risk.

10% reduction in cardiovascular disease for higher alcohol consumption compared to a lower consuming twin.  Now, more epidemiology, but the twins helps take some of the genetics out of it (always potential for epigenetic differences), but when do you think we will see anyhting above 0 consumption seen as potentially beneficial?

Crickets?

Do I hear chirping?

Productivity

Well, I was meant to start this and make lots of lovely posts, improve my knowledge and improve the ability of telling a story about data, and information, but got side tracked into that thing called life, family, work and international travel.  Hopefully back on deck for a tad longer now.

Artificial sweeteners and fatness

Another week, another observational trial showing the evils of artificial sweeteners.

The press releases and general lay public information from this trial are awful.  I know universities communication teams love controversial topics as they increase the hit count.  But this is garbage.

Observational trials are insensitive to pick up these effects, but they create a nice easy story.  You know, the "requires further investigation" type claims at the end of the paper.  Sure.  It also requires further investigation with examinations that are not just dataset milking piles of junk.

More to the point, this finding is nothing new.  Its most likely due to the fact that people know they are fat, therefore consume diet beverages - then treat it as permissive - I've been good and now i get to eat whatever.  Much like the gym goers who think because they did 20 minutes of cycling they deserve a triple fat mocha latte with a cookie.   Or like the previous research on telling people the product is low fat resulted in increased consumption.

Now, last year in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, there was an interesting meta-analysis published looking into this.  It was unique, in that it performed a meta-analysis on observational cohorts and also experimental trials.'

This paper can be found here.

It found that observationally, artificial sweetener consumption was associated with no real differences other than a significantly higher BMI (or significantly associated with a slightly higher BMI - as the authors say).

The meta-analysis of the experimental trials showed decreased bodyweight, decreased BMI, decreased fat mass and decreased waist hip ratio.

Why the difference?  Because observational trials are inadequate to decipher most of which they are asked to do.  But also, data mining of observational data sets (cough, Willett et al) will find enormous quantities of spurious associations that have nothing to do with anything.   Nothing like performing 5000 statistical tests on the same dataset to throw up some pointless garbage.

Just because fat people drink diet beverages doesn't mean that diet beverages caused the fatness.

Also, quit hyping your latest and greatest observational claptrap just because you want to advertise your University or Department.  Have some ethics.

Paper comment: Whey protein supplementation does not affect exercise training-induced changes in body composition and indices of metabolic syndrome in middle-aged overweight and obese adults.

I was going to post something else, but thought I would throw this up instead.

So, from the title you can see "Whey protein does not affect exercise training-induced changes in body composition"

Silly supplement companies, selling their whey protein for NO EFFECT.

Large study.  Lots more subjects than normally find in protein trials.  Middle aged, inactive people.  They should get some benefit from actually doing something, so whey sucks at doses ranging from 0, 20, 40 or 60g per day.

Man, they took all this protein and achieved nothing.

But, try and find the information that you would be interested in, and they hide it.  When it first came out I had to wait for the 'supplemental' information that was not available when it first came out.

The body composition changes.

 

So... nine months of exercise, with or without protein, and the fat inactive middle aged adults didn't really change body weight, lean body mass or fat mass.  Well, they lost a (significant) tiny bit of fat mass and gained an equally small amount of muscle.   NINE MONTHS!
But hey, they gained a minuscule bit of strength, which is within the range seen from learning how to perform an exercise.

These lovely folk got to use somebody elses money (Supported by the U.S. Whey Protein Research Consortium and NIH T32AG025671 and UL1RR025761), mess around with subjects for nine months, and even their training program is so modest that the people went away with little to no difference. Plus they get published in one of the leading nutrition journals.

Hard life for some.