PETER HITCHENS: Nutrition 'experts' are stuffing us full of low-cal baloney
This is Peter Hitchens’s Mail on Sunday column
Whenever I see a ‘low-fat muffin’ in a coffee shop, I have to control an urge to pick it up, jump on it and shout rude words. I am myself an expert in getting fat, and know that this evil blob of sugar and starch is a rapid route to a bigger waistband.
Fat doesn’t make you fat. Butter is good for you. So is cream. Skimmed milk is a futile punitive measure, not a foodstuff, a way of making ourselves needlessly miserable which has taken over the world on the basis of an illusion.
This is because almost everything most people think about food, and almost everything shops tell them, is completely wrong. In an unending struggle to get this across, the National Obesity Forum last week made a renewed attack on these mistaken attitudes.
Sugar, not fat, is the menace to our lives. And this has been known since 1972 when a brave scientist, John Yudkin, wrote a book – Pure, White And Deadly – showing it was so.
He and his unfashionable message were buried in abuse. It may be that some in the sugar industry might have been involved. These days he would have been called a ‘fat-threat denier’, or something of the kind. He died in 1995, too soon to see his ideas rescued and taken seriously again.
Even now, people are getting needlessly fat and dying of horrible diseases because the anti-fat (and pro-sugar) lobby still hasn’t been completely routed. It will be, but these things take time. I mention this not just because it’s true, but because it’s an example of how thoughtless worship of scientists gets us repeatedly into trouble. Doubters like me are told not to dare criticise the sacred men in white coats.
But scientists disagree among themselves and are often wrong. In fact, science progresses by exploding dud theories of the past. And laymen are perfectly entitled to apply facts and logic to what these people say. The obvious argument against the skimmed-milk fanatics is that decades of this policy have left us with more fat people than ever. But we should not have had to wait so long.
There is powerful evidence against many other things now accepted as true, and often very weak evidence for them. I’d name ‘antidepressant’ pills, ‘dyslexia’, ‘ADHD’ and ‘man-made climate change’.
Those who criticise these things are angrily hushed, with righteous cries of ‘How dare you!’, and if they won’t shut up, they are punished – as was John Yudkin. Yet I believe in all these cases the critics will be proved right, as Professor Yudkin was. The miserable thing is that so much damage will be done while we wait for the truth to get the upper hand.
Be less trusting of all fashionable ideas, is my advice.
Gullibility and conformism never advanced civilisation by a single step.
Jailed... for a very odd non-crime
In the same way that we have to allow free speech to those we despise, we must be most careful to ensure justice for those who are different from us, and with whom we can’t easily sympathise.
So a nasty shiver ran up and down my spine when I saw that Lorna Moore, a convert to Islam who married a Muslim, has been locked up for a very odd offence.
In fact, I know of no other offence like it in English law. This young mother has been imprisoned for not informing on her husband. I’ve yet to see any conclusive proof that she actually knew he was planning to join a terror group. Somehow or other, a return ticket to Majorca was taken as evidence that she was planning to run away to Syria with a husband she loathes.
And my English heart revolts at the idea of a wife being forced by law to inform on her husband. This is sinister, totalitarian stuff, alien to everything we stand for.
Those who drafted the 2000 Terrorism Act should be ashamed of enacting it. Can they have meant to lock up this person, so undangerous that she was allowed to be out on bail for three months between conviction and sentence?
Will it be children next, snatched into custody for not sneaking to the police about their parents’ conversations? This reminds me of the nauseating cult of Pavlik Morozov, whom Soviet children were taught to revere because he reported his father to the secret police.
There used to be a statue of this little monster (who was promptly and understandably murdered by his grandfather) in the middle of Moscow.
But while even Vladimir Putin doesn’t encourage such things nowadays, we in Britain are moving towards the all-powerful state, on the excuse of combating terror.
As it happens, Lorna Moore had every reason to do her husband harm if she had wanted to. She went into the witness box (a dangerous thing for a guilty person to do) to say convincingly that she hates her husband, who was given to shoving her head down the lavatory.
To make the matter even more odd, the husband involved hasn’t actually been convicted of doing the thing his wife didn’t tell the police about.
Indeed, he has sent an email to British media saying he isn’t actually in Syria, but in Turkey. Are the rest of us truly free when people can be locked up for such things? I don’t feel so.
One more lie in the drugs 'war'
The trumpeted ‘ban on legal highs’ is a fiction, like the rest of our drug laws. The new Act imposes no penalties at all for possessing these dangerous poisons – except for people who are already in jail.
This is an amazing giveaway of the Government’s real drugs policy, which is to look the other way while pretending to be ‘tough’.
In fact, simple possession of cannabis, heroin or cocaine is now hardly punished at all, even though it is illegal.
Claims that this ‘frees up’ the police to pursue ‘evil dealers’ are not backed up by the figures. Prosecutions for these offences stay about the same each year.
It makes no sense. The thing that makes the dealers, importers and growers evil is the damage that the drugs actually do to their users and their families.
The final, crucial link in this wicked chain is the purchase of the drug by the user. Yet this is the one thing we don’t punish.
Users are let off, or treated as if they are the victims of an irresistible disease.
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One of the reasons why too few people criticise the feebleness of the modern police is that they know they will then be bombarded with spiteful and abusive letters and tweets from workers in this arrogant and unresponsive nationalised industry.
If the police responded to calls for help from the public as quickly, persistently and numerously as they react to justified criticism, they’d be a lot more use.
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