Bullsh*t Baffles Brains – Viva!life 69

Beware, says tony Wardle, the meat industry and its lobbyists are going to bombard you with fake news and alternative facts

Featured in Viva!Life 69/Winter 2018

They’re under attack and losing ground – the meat and dairy industries, that is. And I can tell you precisely what they intend to do about it because the template to preserve profits in the face of negative science has already been prepared and fully tested by the tobacco industry.

It’s based on the three army Bs – Bullsh*t Baffles Brains. The first concerns about smoking and lung cancer appeared in 1912 – and then everyone went back to sleep. In 1950, the first scientific report claiming a link was published in the British Medical Journal and a doctors’ epidemiological study was set up to confirm or deny it.

This reported in 1954 and there was no escaping it – smoking caused lung cancer. The tobacco industry remained calm and produced A Frank Statement to Cigarette Smokers which was emblazoned on thousands of billboards everywhere.

It said that research showed there were many causes of lung cancer but there was no agreement amongst scientists as to the actual cause and nothing to show that smoking was responsible. Without any science, the industry turned genuine science on its head.

They couldn’t prove their claim but that didn’t matter as the main aim was to sow doubt in the minds of smokers. Over the intervening years, government did little, partly because of the huge sums it was receiving in tax revenues.

It took until 1971 for the first, minuscule warnings to appear on the sides of cigarette packets – ‘smoking can damage your health’. Twenty years later it was moved to the front and strengthened with the words, ‘can seriously damage your health’.

After a further twelve years, in 2003, we finally got to the truth with the stark warning, ‘Smoking Kills’. It had taken 50 years and millions of deaths. During those five decades of government inaction, the tobacco industry was hard at it, funding dozens of lobbying groups and a myriad of ‘think tanks’, according to Bath University, including some household names such as the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs.

All would chip in to defend big tobacco – lung cancer could be caused by genes, chemicals, dry cleaning, booze, hairspray or almost anything. And anyway, it’s our god given right to get lung cancer if we so wish.

There was also no shortage of scientists prepared to bend a knee to the tobacco industry and take the rewards on offer. They then duly did what was required of them – rubbished sound science, produced rubbish science, spread doubt and urged people not to have their freedoms infringed.

Mainstream media were happy to headline anything that challenged the scientific consensus and comforted their smoking readers – ‘Cigarettes not bad for you after all’. Few journalists bothered to analyse the shoddy research but then, why would they when massive advertising revenues were at stake.

In the same way and for the same reasons, today’s ‘health’ correspondents are just as happy to publicise dodgy claims such as ‘saturated fat is not bad for you’ – and there are many other parallels.

The meat industry has announced it is to spend £2 million targeting young consumers in a bid to promote beef, lamb and pork in the hope of saving a dying market. What’s got them so agitated are recent reports from two of the world’s most respected health bodies.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) had 22 scientists working across 10 countries reviewing 20 massive pieces of research. Their conclusion was “Processed meat causes cancer and red meat probably does too”.

It put processed meat in its group 1 list, which includes tobacco and asbestos and placed red meat in its group 2A list, just below. ‘Probably,’ in scientific terms, is pretty profound. It’s like an aeronautical engineer telling you, as you set off on your hols: “This aircraft will probably crash”.

You listen! The World Cancer Research Fund (WCRF) was equally as forthright: “…eating processed meats or having a diet high in red meat is a cause of bowel cancer”. Predictably, the meat industry dismissed the research and trotted out its band of five ‘experts’ from the Meat Advisory Panel (MAP) to rubbish it.

They, of course, offer ‘independent and objective information about red meat’, although being funded by the meat industry is not my idea of independence. Top pick is Professor Robert Pickard, Emeritus Professor of Neurobiology, Cardiff University, and he’s in no doubt: “Red and processed meats do not give you cancer”.

He goes on to say that the WHO and WCRF research is about association and not cause and effect and the real cause could be genes, cars, plastics… Sound familiar? Prof Pickard was previously director general of the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF), which pretends to be independent but is an industry body.

Its Healthy Eating week in 2017 was funded by the dairy, beef and lamb division of the Agriculture & Horticulture Development Board (AHDB). I had a run-in with the BNF when it issued a press release claiming that we all have two kilogram of bacteria in our gut designed specifically to digest meat and not eating it would lead to serious health problems for vegetarians and vegans.

I challenged this claptrap and the BNF made no attempt to defend the claim and put the blame on the Meat & Livestock Commission (now part of AHDB), saying they had sent out the press

release before the BNF could check it. The Commission denied it but the real point is that a body whose main purpose was to promote meat could issue press releases on behalf of the supposedly independent, upstanding and honourable BNF.

The second panel member is consultant surgeon Mr. Roger Leicester, who says: “There is no known evidence to suggest that red meat, by itself, causes cancer”, claiming that epidemiological studies are unreliable.

He also goes for genes, herbicides, pesticides, age, etc as the cause. Third on the panel is former Scottish Conservative candidate, freelance dietician and media pundit, Dr Carrie Ruxton. She claims: “There’s no evidence that fresh red meat is a direct cause of cancer” and adds: “The advantages of eating lean red meat far outweigh the disadvantages.”

You might think that as she is paid by the meat industry, she has a conflict of interest. It’s not a new dilemma for her as she has also questioned the links between sugar and obesity. She claimed her review of studies showed no such link.

Her employer that time was – wait for it – the Sugar Bureau! Ruxton now sits on the board of the Scottish Government’s public health food regulator, Food Standards Scotland (FSS), and faced criticism last year after admitting receiving money from chocolate manufacturer Ferrero – who own Ferrero Rocher, Nutella and Kinder chocolate.

Industry-funded research is a sham because it is up to 88 times more likely to favour the product that industry produces. Joanna Blythman, food journalist and author, said: “It is simply unacceptable that someone who has… attempted to downplay the very real damage that sugar does to public health, should be accepted as a board member at FSS.”.

Fourth up is Dr Gill Jenkins, a GP who sings in harmony with the others: “There is no link between meat and cancer.” And then, like a cracked record from the 1980’s, goes off on one – we’re designed to eat meat, we’re missing out on vital nutrients, we’ll be short of iron and protein if we don’t!

Why haven’t any of these so-called experts bothered to look at the health outcomes of vegans, who get less of all the degenerative disease and tend to live longer than meat eaters?

Interestingly, the fifth member of the panel – Dr Emma Derbyshire – knows this to be the case. She runs a consultancy called Nutritional Insight and is very proud of the paper she has published on flexitarianism (had more than 20,000 reads, you know!). Flexitarians, of course, eat some meat and my assumption is that she hoped to hold back the vegan tide by proving that flexitarians could be as healthy as vegans.

Didn’t quite work out that way. This is some of what her research revealed. Vegan diets are associated with a reduced risk of prostate cancer. Vegans have a significantly lower risk for all cancers. Vegans have the lowest risk of colorectal cancer, meat eaters the highest.

Diabetes is the lowest in vegans and highest in meat eaters. Dr Derbyshire clearly knows that her meat-promoting colleagues are talking dangerous nonsense and yet she is still happy to be counted as one of them, endorsing views she knows to be untrue and that promote meat at the risk of human health.

Why would she do that…? I wonder if we’ll have to wait 50 years and millions of deaths before a government health warning is finally applied to meat products – Meat Kills.