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"WHAT is this? Not the Nine O’Clock News? The Onion?” I found myself thinking as I listened to a recent lunch-time radio show.
A well-known free market pundit was ranting about the ‘tsunami’ of projected health regulation in the pipeline, including, he said, restrictions on salt and sugar, and a ban on braaiing (something I, as a journalist who writes a lot about health, have never heard of).
He was incensed that a ‘nanny state’ was bent on removing people’s freedom of choice.
It was when he started talking about the benefits of smoking that I began to suspect I’d got the date wrong and it was April Fool’s Day. “Yes, benefits,” he said.
He mentioned the satisfaction of the smoker, the ability to stay awake while driving long distances, the ability to control weight, stress relief and more. He said he’s a lifetime non-smoker, so perhaps I, as someone who smoked during her twenties and thirties, am better placed than he to judge whether these are real benefits.
I used to know people who were addicted to drugs; it was very clear to me that the feeling I had when I dashed out of a long meeting to light a cigarette was more comparable to a drug addict getting a hit than the satisfaction you get from cuddling a baby, hearing a great piece of music or savouring a piece of high-quality dark chocolate.
Weight control? I know plenty of people who’ve managed to gain weight as smokers. Those who ‘control’ their weight this way often seem to be people who live off coffee, alcohol and ciggies – they end up thin but it’s not the healthy thin of someone who eats lots of fruit and veg and gets their kicks from sport rather than through smoking.
Recently, I was with a neurologist who was looking at an MRI scan of a patient’s brain. Small white lesions were evident. “Did he smoke?” the neurologist asked the patient’s wife. “Yes – but he gave up about 30 years ago.” she replied. “No matter, no matter,” muttered the neurologist. “The damage is done.”
Apparently, “a compound in tobacco provokes white blood cells in the central nervous system to attack healthy cells, leading to severe neurological damage”. (ScienceDaily, June 23 2009)
This research, published in the Journal of Neurochemistry, indicated that the damage was not limited to smokers – it also affected those exposed to second-hand smoke. Another study by British researchers in 2012 suggests that smoking can affect memory, learning and reasoning.
But tobacco is an addiction – surely the man is right in saying we should be free to exercise our choice when it comes to, say, salt and sugar?
Here’s a definition of drug addiction: “a condition characterised by an overwhelming desire to continue taking a drug to which one has become habituated through repeated consumption because it produces a particular effect, usually an alteration of mental status.
"Addiction is usually accompanied by a compulsion to obtain the drug, a tendency to increase the dose, a psychologic or physical dependence, and detrimental consequences for the individual and society.”
Now brain scans show that both salt and sugar trigger the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter which is rewarding and arousing (alteration of mental status). That’s why food manufacturers use both substances with a free hand.
They want to pump up the pleasure their food gives us. But the thing is, over time you develop a tolerance for a certain level of, say, sugar, and you crave more of it to get the ‘kick’, the reward. This is the ‘tendency to increase the dose’ mentioned above.
And we all know the end result of excess use: degenerative disease.
Those addicted to tobacco know full well how hard it is to deal with the ‘compulsion’ – but at least you can ban the substance from your life. You can’t do the same with food. Sugar and salt are everywhere, included at ever-increasing levels in common foods, and that makes it hard to reduce use to a healthy level.
But where government agencies take a hand - well, here’s what happened when the Food Standards Agency in London did just that, setting voluntary targets for processed foods in 2003.
“In the first six years of the British programme, the average person’s intake of salt fell by 15 percent.” (Salt, Sugar, Fat, Michael Moss, WH Allen 2013) But here’s the really interesting consequence: Brits who travelled abroad started coming home with complaints about how salty the food was in other countries.
Their jaded palates had revived, their tolerance had dropped, they were getting a brain reward from lesser levels of salt. And, says a cardiovascular professor, this has saved about 10 000 lives.
Were the Brits robbed of their freedom of choice? I think this programme gave it back to them, in actual fact: anyone who wanted to add salt to a processed food was free to do so, but you were no longer forced to eat salt at a level chosen for you by a food manufacturer.
The proper role of government is to create conditions that make citizens safe and healthy and prosperous.
Regulations that do not ban but do restrict substances that cause damage to health – and, I might add, enormous strains on the public purse – while leaving business free to do business within certain minimal constraints is hardly a ‘nanny state’ that limits ‘freedom of choice’.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
A well-known free market pundit was ranting about the ‘tsunami’ of projected health regulation in the pipeline, including, he said, restrictions on salt and sugar, and a ban on braaiing (something I, as a journalist who writes a lot about health, have never heard of).
He was incensed that a ‘nanny state’ was bent on removing people’s freedom of choice.
It was when he started talking about the benefits of smoking that I began to suspect I’d got the date wrong and it was April Fool’s Day. “Yes, benefits,” he said.
He mentioned the satisfaction of the smoker, the ability to stay awake while driving long distances, the ability to control weight, stress relief and more. He said he’s a lifetime non-smoker, so perhaps I, as someone who smoked during her twenties and thirties, am better placed than he to judge whether these are real benefits.
I used to know people who were addicted to drugs; it was very clear to me that the feeling I had when I dashed out of a long meeting to light a cigarette was more comparable to a drug addict getting a hit than the satisfaction you get from cuddling a baby, hearing a great piece of music or savouring a piece of high-quality dark chocolate.
Weight control? I know plenty of people who’ve managed to gain weight as smokers. Those who ‘control’ their weight this way often seem to be people who live off coffee, alcohol and ciggies – they end up thin but it’s not the healthy thin of someone who eats lots of fruit and veg and gets their kicks from sport rather than through smoking.
Recently, I was with a neurologist who was looking at an MRI scan of a patient’s brain. Small white lesions were evident. “Did he smoke?” the neurologist asked the patient’s wife. “Yes – but he gave up about 30 years ago.” she replied. “No matter, no matter,” muttered the neurologist. “The damage is done.”
Apparently, “a compound in tobacco provokes white blood cells in the central nervous system to attack healthy cells, leading to severe neurological damage”. (ScienceDaily, June 23 2009)
This research, published in the Journal of Neurochemistry, indicated that the damage was not limited to smokers – it also affected those exposed to second-hand smoke. Another study by British researchers in 2012 suggests that smoking can affect memory, learning and reasoning.
But tobacco is an addiction – surely the man is right in saying we should be free to exercise our choice when it comes to, say, salt and sugar?
Here’s a definition of drug addiction: “a condition characterised by an overwhelming desire to continue taking a drug to which one has become habituated through repeated consumption because it produces a particular effect, usually an alteration of mental status.
"Addiction is usually accompanied by a compulsion to obtain the drug, a tendency to increase the dose, a psychologic or physical dependence, and detrimental consequences for the individual and society.”
Now brain scans show that both salt and sugar trigger the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter which is rewarding and arousing (alteration of mental status). That’s why food manufacturers use both substances with a free hand.
They want to pump up the pleasure their food gives us. But the thing is, over time you develop a tolerance for a certain level of, say, sugar, and you crave more of it to get the ‘kick’, the reward. This is the ‘tendency to increase the dose’ mentioned above.
And we all know the end result of excess use: degenerative disease.
Those addicted to tobacco know full well how hard it is to deal with the ‘compulsion’ – but at least you can ban the substance from your life. You can’t do the same with food. Sugar and salt are everywhere, included at ever-increasing levels in common foods, and that makes it hard to reduce use to a healthy level.
But where government agencies take a hand - well, here’s what happened when the Food Standards Agency in London did just that, setting voluntary targets for processed foods in 2003.
“In the first six years of the British programme, the average person’s intake of salt fell by 15 percent.” (Salt, Sugar, Fat, Michael Moss, WH Allen 2013) But here’s the really interesting consequence: Brits who travelled abroad started coming home with complaints about how salty the food was in other countries.
Their jaded palates had revived, their tolerance had dropped, they were getting a brain reward from lesser levels of salt. And, says a cardiovascular professor, this has saved about 10 000 lives.
Were the Brits robbed of their freedom of choice? I think this programme gave it back to them, in actual fact: anyone who wanted to add salt to a processed food was free to do so, but you were no longer forced to eat salt at a level chosen for you by a food manufacturer.
The proper role of government is to create conditions that make citizens safe and healthy and prosperous.
Regulations that do not ban but do restrict substances that cause damage to health – and, I might add, enormous strains on the public purse – while leaving business free to do business within certain minimal constraints is hardly a ‘nanny state’ that limits ‘freedom of choice’.
- Fin24
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own.
