Beware clowns bearing gifts

Isn’t it nice when people with lots of the folding stuff come over all luvy-duvy and start doing nice little things for you? First Kevin wants to buy you a plasma TV and then decides you need another. Then the Reserve Bank decides you’re paying too much on the mortgage and drops the rate. Now McDonalds arrives on the doorstep bearing gifts.

No, Macca’s isn’t offering to drop by and take the garbage out on Monday night, but they are a bit concerned about how little Johnny is going at school. In fact they’re so worried about the state of maths education, they’ve decided to pay for some tutoring on the side.

McDonald’s announced last week that it would be extending the reach of the free online maths tutor it provides as an employment perk for its teenage staff. Now the three teenagers who don’t already work at Macca’s will get their skills sharpened up. The program will be available to all Australian secondary school students and paid for by McDonald’s. Julia Gillard thinks its great idea. And why wouldn’t she? That’s one less thing she has to pay for out of the Federal Education Budget.

Some less than trusting souls got a bit hot and bothered about McDonald’s pulling a swifty here. They suggested that this was all about them getting advertising on the cheap. If that really was the plan then Macca’s needs to seriously reconsider its marketing strategy, because it’s neither cheap nor likely to be particularly effective as an adverting vehicle. The only credit they get is a one liner on the math’s tutor’s home page saying Macca’s paid the bill. And for that, they’ve paid millions. What a bargain!

No, this is about making us (and more importantly, our government) feel good about people who dispense junk food to children. And it’s part of a very definite trend in food marketing. Cadbury wants to assure us the cocoa in their chocolate was not picked by child labour. Nestle likes to help kids learn cricket. Pepsico and Kellogg’s have pumped $400m into the UK Government’s Change4Life program aimed at getting kids exercising. And the Australian Food and Grocery Council, (the lobby group for them all) wants us to believe its members won’t advertise junk food to children (except as part of a healthy lifestyle – whatever that means).

Now that’s a lot of green to be chucking around in the hope you’d get the warm and fuzzies about Big Sugar. But this is a long game and these folks have played close attention to what befell Big Tobacco. When the government could no longer pretend that ciggy’s didn’t kill you, out came the laws and the taxes and the negative ads. And it became an awful lot harder (but not impossible) to make an honest living selling durries.

Big Tobacco didn’t have a leg to stand on. But Big Sugar plans to have a bit more leverage when the inevitable occurs. One day the research on the truly deadly nature of sugar will seep into the public conscience and being a member of the Big Sugar club will be about as popular as the proverbial banker at the barbie (you remember those St George ads don’t you?). When that day comes, Big Sugar wants to have some ‘discussion points’. Things like, how exactly are you going to fund that math’s program you’ve become so dependent on? And what about junior sport? Who’s going to pay for that? And, and ... stay tuned for more ‘gifts from Big Sugar’.

I think we should be carefully counting the fillings in the mouth of this gift horse. Let’s stop playing games (sponsored by Milo) and start doing something about the 60kg of sugar the average Australian consumes each year.

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Do we really need Organic Rat Poison?

What do these foods have in common:

Nutella Chocolate Spread

Fettucine Pasta

Skim Milk

Frozen Peas

Peanut M&M’s

Give up? They all have the same GI. GI stands for glycaemic index and, simply put, it is a measure of the degree to which any given food produces a spike in blood sugar (and therefore insulin).

It’s kind of like the different types of fuel you can feed a fire. If you put pine planks on the fire, they will burn very hot and very quickly but they will be used up in minutes. If, however, you put hardwood sleepers in, they will burn slowly for hours. Low-GI foods are hardwood sleepers to our body and high-GI foods are pine planks.

Lately people have been putting it about that we should all eat low GI foods. The theory is that if you aim to keep blood-glucose levels and therefore insulin levels low and constant, your appetite will be largely suppressed and large quantities of insulin will not be being released and used to create body fat.

GI diets effectively treat all of us like we are suffering from insulin dependent diabetes. If you need an injection of insulin to lower your blood sugar then it is pretty important to avoid foods which will cause sudden spikes in blood sugar. But if you don’t then there is precious little evidence that GI makes any difference whatsoever to your health.

All of the foods in the list not only have the same GI, it is a low-GI (46). So if you were on a Low-GI diet you could merrily chomp on any of those foods with a completely clear conscience. Does a diet of M&Ms, Nutella and pasta make sense to you? Do you think you’d lose weight or be healthier? No, neither do I.

The latest innovation on the GI marketing bandwagon is low-GI sugar. It’s apparently produced by increasing the particle size of the molasses used to create brown sugar and retaining more of the phenols and other vitamins and minerals in the original sugar cane. This produces a lower GI than normal white sugar (50 as opposed to 65). Great but it’s still sugar and it’s still half fructose, one of the most dangerous sugars known to man. In fact if you really wanted a low GI sugar you should go for pure fructose. Its GI is only 19.  And don't need to guess too hard to know what I think of that.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with GI as a piece of information about food. It’s just not very helpful if you are trying to eat well, because it is so easily manipulated as a marketing device.

Lowering the GI of sugar is a cynical marketing exercise that’s right up there with lowering the carbon emissions of the cows that make the glass and a half of milk in every bar of Cadbury’s chocolate. What’s next low carbon land mines, odourless cigarettes or perhaps even organic rat poison?

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Cadbury tackles burping cows

Cadbury is worried about the carbon footprint of its chocolate.  I think there are plenty of things to worry about with chocolate but I must admit that the carbon footprint would have been close to the bottom of the list.

Apparently the ‘glass and a half of full cream milk’ is responsible for 60 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions produced by the construction of a family block of Dairy Milk Chocolate.  But don’t worry, Cadbury plan to feed the cows more clover so they burp less and give them less fibre so they ... (well, you get the picture).  All of this feed manipulation will result in a carbon emission reduction of 50 percent by 2020.  I do hope Kevin is paying attention.

Cadbury have also decided that they should look out for the lactose intolerant among us with a very clear warning.  From now on Dairy Milk Chocolate will come with a warning label: “CONTAINS MILK”.  I’m so glad they bothered.

But that’s not the end of the image management.  Cocoa has a bit of a bad rap because lately people have noticed that most of it gets picked by children paid little or nothing for their efforts.  So Cadbury plan get themselves a Fairtrade logo by the end of August 2009, but only for chocolate on sale in the UK.  Australian consumers clearly aren’t fussy about such things.  So the cocoa used in Australian Cadbury products will continue to exploit third world children.

You may be wondering about the motivation for this flurry of positive spin (at least in the UK).  Cadbury have created a billion dollar empire off the back of a product that is 55.5 percent sugar and 29.5 percent fat. 

More than half of their product is as addictive as cocaine and has been unequivocally proven to cause obesity, type II diabetes and heart disease.  I’m struggling to think of a food that could be more dangerous for human consumption.  And so far they’ve gotten away with convincing us all it’s a harmless treat. 

Are we really expected to believe they’ve gone all tree-huggy and grown a conscience?  No, the far more likely explanation is that all this work is aimed at making us feel a bit better about chocolate.  The hope being that, when folks like Dr Walker call for a chocolate tax, right thinking people will quietly point him and his ilk to Cadbury’s impeccable green credentials and responsible labelling. 

Dr Walker is a British GP who wants governments to become our nanny and stop us eating chocolate.  It’s a silly proposal and it got voted down by the British Medical Association (by only two votes), but it’s indicative of a distinctly anti-chocolate mood that is gathering pace in old blighty.

We don’t need warnings about milk on our milk chocolate, but we do need warnings like these:

CONTAINS FRUCTOSE: WILL MAKE YOU OBESE AND GIVE YOU TYPE II DIABETES.

CONTAINS FAT: WILL HELP THE FRUCTOSE MAKE YOU OBESE.

CONTAINS COCOA: PICKED BY CHILDREN FOR LITTLE OR NO PAY.

Let’s stop worrying about flatulent cows and start worrying about exploited children in Africa and fat children here. 

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Treatment or cure?

Pre-emptive strikes are all the fashion these days. Got a pesky middle-eastern dictator hiding weapons of mass destruction? A first strike should sort him out. Got a bit of a global financial crisis on the horizon? Head it off by giving everyone a new plasma TV.

But first strikes don’t always work out so well (just ask George Bush). Early last year a medical pre-emptive strike was abandoned because it was killing too many people.  The US National Institutes of Health stopped part of an ongoing clinical trial on diabetes because it was clear that the patients receiving the treatment had a 22 percent higher risk of death than the people who weren’t.

The study involved aggressively treating high blood sugar with medication. Type II diabetes is caused by persistently high blood sugar. The standard treatment for high blood sugar (and therefore diabetes) is a prescription of ‘eat less fat and exercise more’. When that doesn’t work (as it almost never does) the prescription is changed to a combination of drugs.

There are a few different types of medication but the ones most commonly used in Australia work by stimulating the body to produce more insulin. Insulin is the hormone we naturally produce to clear sugar from the blood. But when there is too much fat in the arteries, the body becomes less sensitive to insulin and the sugar doesn’t get cleared. If blood sugar stays high for a long time, damage starts to occur in places where we have lots of small blood vessels, such as our kidneys, our eyes and eventually our hands and feet.

The drugs squeeze that little bit more insulin out of our pancreas to help clear the blood sugar. As you might expect, putting the pancreas on overdrive eventually results in it conking out completely. Then the only option is to start injecting insulin every day. By then, the drugs have converted a Type II diabetic (who produces insufficient insulin) into a Type I Diabetic (who produces none).

Unfortunately a side effect of the drugs is weight gain. Giving people more insulin (or having them produce it themselves) simply channels sugar out of the bloodstream and converts it into body fat.

The preferred long term measure of blood sugar is the haemoglobin A1c test. People without diabetes will have an A1c between four and six percent. The current treatment goal for people with diabetes is to manage the use of drugs so as to keep A1c less than seven percent.  The abandoned trial was an attempt to see if it would be possible to use even higher doses of drugs and push people back into the normal range. And it appears not to have been a very good idea at all. The side effect became a bit nastier than simply putting on a few kilos. Twenty two percent more of the patients died.

Giving more insulin to an insulin resistant person is like curing arterial blockage by increasing blood pressure. A smarter strategy is to remove the blockage. Unfortunately for diabetics the ‘blockage’ is high blood fats, something which can’t just be sliced out with the surgeon’s scalpel.

Diabetes now afflicts 13 percent of the US adult population with double that number estimated to be pre-diabetic (insulin resistant), a total of 40 percent. Australia is not there yet but we are tramping that path as fast as our fat little feet can carry us. When 40 percent of our adult population requires treatment with a lifelong course of drugs, we’d better start thinking about some serious tax increases to keep the health system afloat. Paying back the economic stimulus package will be the least of our worries.

The standard pharmacological treatment for diabetes doesn’t cure anything. It merely offers an invidious trade-off between avoidance of kidney damage, blindness and gangrene today and weight gain and permanent pancreatic damage tomorrow.

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