Don't mention the fat...
Tony Wardle takes a look at Government health policy and finds it needs a healthy shake out
Maybe it’s always been this way and the more a word is used, the less meaning it has. ‘Choice’ is the latest little gem but applied to health as a plank of Government policy which it now is, it becomes utterly meaningless. Presumably, if you need your gall bladder removed or a quadruple heart bypass, you get on the web and check out the hospital with the best success rate in the country and then you check out every surgeon in that hospital to see how each performs - assuming such records exist. Even if they do, they won’t tell you whether the surgeon you’ve chosen takes on only easy cases of affluent middle class people to ensure great results. Conversely, the surgeon at the bottom of the league might handle all the most complex cases and as a consequence lose a lot of patients despite being the best surgeon in the business.
Choice in health care is a meaningless chimera and what people really want is a good local hospital they can trust and rely on. However, there are other areas of health where freedom of choice does work, provided it’s accompanied by freedom of information but sadly, this one simple little prerequisite is as elusive as a leprechaun.
Let’s go back to when the Government decided to issue advice to those at high risk of death from heart disease. Swap butter for marg, cut out red meat in favour of white meat, trim away any visible fat and walk around the block every day. It was advice clearly designed to interfere as little as possible with the bad habits that had induced the problem in the first place.
Better than nothing, you might say. Maybe, but had the advice told the full story it would have been far more effective. ‘Okay, this tinkering with your diet will reduce your cholesterol levels by about five per cent only and still leave you at significant risk. Change to a plant-based diet and your chances of dying will drop dramatically and you might even repair some of the damage that’s been done to your arteries’. Of course that didn’t happen and still doesn’t and so the number of people developing heart disease goes on increasing.
Then came probably the greatest health shame ever to stain any government in history - BSE (mad cow disease) and vCJD, the human version of it. Ministers contorted themselves, the science and what little knowledge they had in order to keep us eating beef. You would have thought it was a kind of protein penicillin - a cure for all known ills - so determined were they to ensure the Sunday joints kept on roasting. Perfectly safe, they said, it’s an infection that won’t infect anyone.
What they should have said, of course, was that those scientists with a knowledge of this rare affliction believed that eating beef was probably unsafe while others, with little knowledge, thought it perfectly okay. Of course, those who suggested caution were vilified and hounded out of the public eye.
The approach to cancer is similar to the marketing of the national lottery: ‘It could be you!’ Cancer, with the exception of smoking-related varieties, is presented as a game of chance - no one knows who will develop it or why. Fifteen years ago, the World Health Organisation gave the first provisional list of cancers caused by meat and saturated animal fat - a list which has subsequently expanded. Nowhere will you read this in official Government advice nor the fact that by switching to a plant-based diet you can cut your risk of developing a whole range of cancers.
Diabetes is another killer where Government ministers dabble their toes at the margins but never plunge in. It’s rate of development across the world is terrifying and in the UK, it is set to double by 2010. Nowhere will you find a sentence in official advice that a plant-based diet reduces the risk by up to 45 per cent and is the best way of controlling the disease once it does develop.
Almost on a par with this for negligence is their treatment of childhood obesity, summed by their crass support for Cadbury’s cynical sports equipment marketing campaign. The more calorie-laden chocolate kids ate the more pieces of sports equipment they could apply for. Apparently, they would need to scoff their way through a small mountain of fat and sugar simply to qualify for a basketball. What it reveals is a determination to associate weight gain solely with inactivity. Sure, that plays a part but modern kids are frequently eating 1,000 calories a day more than they need and running from Lands End to John O’Groats won’t burn that off! Even when they do mention diet, the word ‘saturated’ in relation to fat is never uttered. This is the big one, the one that does the damage the one that comes mostly from animals.
You can see the pattern quite clearly - don’t do or say anything that might impinge on the sale of meat and dairy products, no matter how damaging they are. Oh well, perhaps one day the VVF will have the same free access to lobby ministers that tobacco people have and vivisectionists and manufacturers of damaging junk food. But I wouldn’t count on it.