Fizzy drinks are the new tobacco for young people... that's why I believe that Coca-Cola should be banned from sponsoring the Olympics
The evidence for this claim is very poor. The Results section for the academic study they cite is below:
Results During an average of 18.5 years of follow-up, 3447 (22.3%) participants with incident CVD and 7638 (49.3%) deaths were documented. After multivariable adjustment, when comparing the categories of lowest intake of beverages with the highest intake, the pooled hazard ratios for all cause mortality were 1.20 (95% confidence interval 1.04 to 1.37) for sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs), 0.96 (0.86 to 1.07) for artificially sweetened beverages (ASBs), 0.98 (0.90 to 1.06) for fruit juice, 0.74 (0.63 to 0.86) for coffee, 0.79 (0.71 to 0.89) for tea, 0.77 (0.70 to 0.85) for plain water, 0.88 (0.80 to 0.96) for low fat milk, and 1.20 (0.99 to 1.44) for full fat milk. Similar associations were observed between the individual beverages and CVD incidence and mortality. In particular, SSB intake was associated with a higher risk of incident CVD (hazard ratio 1.25, 95% confidence interval 1.03 to 1.51) and CVD mortality (1.29, 1.02 to 1.63), whereas significant inverse associations were observed between intake of coffee and low fat milk and CVD incidence. Additionally, compared with those who did not change their consumption of coffee in the period after a diabetes diagnosis, a lower all cause mortality was observed in those who increased their consumption of coffee. A similar pattern of association with all cause mortality was also observed for tea, and low fat milk. Replacing SSBs with ABSs was significantly associated with lower all cause mortality and CVD mortality, and replacing SSBs, ASBs, fruit juice, or full fat milk with coffee, tea, or plain water was consistently associated with lower all cause mortality.
For start, it was a study of DIABETICS so may not generalize beyond that. And it can be seen that all the HRs were very low and were achieved only by discarding the middle ranges of their data. And there appears to have been no control for the big confounder in such studies: income. Nothing firm can be conluded from this study but the safest conclusion seems to be that Coke causes you no harm
Link for thestudy:
https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj-2022-073406
Because Coke is so popular, the superior people WANT it to be bad for you, but the evidence is not very co-operativeIf you were watching the Paris Olympics and saw a winning athlete cross the finish line, light a cigarette and boast about the health-boosting benefits of their favourite tobacco brand, you'd be as surprised as you were disgusted.
Yet it's startlingly true that tobacco companies were major Olympic sponsors right up until 1988, when cigarette brands were finally banned from advertising at the Games.
For the previous 60 years, tobacco-funded Olympic medal-winners had lined up to extol the virtues of smoking and push the now bizarre claim that it enabled athletes to lead healthy lives — among them, the iconic Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals for sprinting, relay and long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, but who died from lung cancer aged 66 in 1980, after decades of heavy smoking.
The biggest earner of tobacco funding, though, was the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which took millions of pounds every four years from cigarette-brand sponsorship, from 1920 until it was banned.
But you may be shocked to learn that today the IOC still takes similarly vast sums from another major industry — one that, I believe, when it comes to damaging the health of young people may now have overtaken cigarettes.
That industry is soft drinks — and that money comes from the global beverage giant Coca-Cola, which has sponsored the Olympics Games since 1928.
Sources estimate that Coca-Cola nowadays pays the Olympics around £70 million a year in sponsorship. In exchange, Coca-Cola can use the Olympic Games' five rings on all its products.
As an investigation in the French newspaper Le Monde said in May, this huge money deal enables Coca-Cola to 'promote the world's most talked-about sporting event, all over the world, while generating priceless advertising opportunities for itself'.
Indeed, Le Monde said of Coca-Cola's tie-up with the Olympics: 'The partnership has become so close that it's hard to say who runs the Games.'
Across the Olympics, wherever you look, Coca-Cola branding is ubiquitous. Even before the Games began, the drinks giant had sponsored the Olympic torch relay, so that a Coca-Cola van constantly flanked the torch's two-month tour.
It is time that all this Coca-Cola sponsorship stopped. For good. Because, beyond tobacco, as a doctor who advocates for public health, I fear the health-destroying power of fizzy drinks more than anything else. Soft drinks damage people's bodies, and the bodies of children in particular.
And what's more frightening is that these products are so friendly-looking, so familiar and so pervasive that we've become accustomed to them and have forgotten the damage they wreak.
The harms of soft drinks are extremely well documented over hundreds of scientific papers.
As a 2022 report by the University of North Carolina's Global Food Research Programme warned, they are 'a key driver of modern surges in nutrition-related diseases worldwide, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease — the leading causes of disability and death in the world'.
Furthermore, fizzy drinks have no real nutritional benefit. In fact, they contribute to under-nutrition when consumed in place of foods containing essential nutrients. A major review by Yale University of 88 studies showed that consumption of soft drinks meant lower intakes of milk, calcium and other nutrients.
In a large multinational European study published in the BMJ last year, higher levels of consumption of sugar-sweetened and artificially sweetened soft drinks was associated with increased risk of death from all causes. And in the shorter term, there's tooth decay — a national catastrophe in the UK that causes unbelievable suffering.
The link with soda was demonstrated last year when researchers at the universities of Cambridge and Glasgow reported how the sugar tax on soft drinks, introduced in 2018, has helped prevent more than 5,600 hospital admissions for children having to have their teeth pulled out under general anaesthetic.
Part of the problem is a chronic shortage of dentists, but this study underlined how closely sugary drinks also play a key role.
Nor is it just sodas with sugar: low or no-sugar 'diet' versions often contain the enamel-rotting likes of phosphoric, citric and tartaric acids. There is concerning evidence that these acids don't just rot teeth: the phosphoric acid may also dissolve your bones from the inside.
Beyond the sugar tax, these harmful products remain basically unregulated. My seven-year-old can use the money from the Tooth Fairy to go into any corner shop and buy a fizzy drink without it carrying any health warning either for her or her parents.
The idea that the Olympics would partner with brands that market such products is appalling. The Games are effectively the strongest health brand in the world — and sponsorship by the likes of Coca-Cola cements in the minds of children and adults that soft drinks are deeply associated with healthiness, athleticism and building strong bodies.
Indeed, Australian researchers reported in the journal Public Health Nutrition in 2011 that parents perceive food products as healthier when endorsed by a professional athlete, making them more likely to buy them for their children.
(It's not just Coca-Cola: while it's the most active soft drink sponsor in global sports worldwide, other drinks companies have contracts with sporting events, such as PepsiCo's sponsorship of the National Football League in the U.S.)
Big-brand soda sponsorship of sport also effectively undermines the wealth of scientific evidence of the dangers of soft drinks. Consumers look at the Olympic branding and ask themselves: 'Well, how bad can these products be if they're linked with the most elite physical competition in the world?'
The reach of this kind of marketing is titanic. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics had a broadcast audience of more than three billion worldwide, with online videos of the event being watched more than 28 billion times. Such marketing power demolishes anything a doctor can tell their patients.
These brands don't even position themselves as 'health-neutral'. Coca-Cola and the rest trade on the idea that their products can provide 'sports nutrition' — supplying energy for people to do sports and live super-active fun lives.
These companies even fund medical studies. A team from Oxford and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine mapped the universe of Coca-Cola's research funding, which involves almost 1,500 different researchers (probably not all direct grant recipients), corresponding to 461 publications funded by the brand. Many of these promoted the idea that exercise and activities could help offset the excess calories from products such as Coca-Cola.
But we know from the research evidence that this isn't what happens. We know that physical inactivity is not actually a significant part of the obesity epidemic: it's down to calorie over-consumption from soft drinks and other junk foods.
Yet, as it stands, Coca-Cola will continue to peddle this 'health' message for the next two Olympics at least, as they have locked the Games' organisers into a contract that lasts until 2032.
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Paris shame shows West’s true contempt for Christianity
Greg Sheridan
The scenes at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony were a perfect example of what Pope John Paul II called “the culture of death”. Among a grotesque, ugly, sick event was the transvestite parody of Jesus and the Last Supper, and what Christians believe was the first holy communion, the first Eucharist.
The whole event was ugly, negative, hostile to every good tradition in France and Western civilisation. The organisers subsequently apologised and demonstrated their embarrassment, though probably only political embarrassment, by eradicating every image they can. The denial that the scene represented the Last Supper is absurd, given that it was overwhelmingly seen as representing the Last Supper. The ceremony was not only an attack on Christianity, but on human dignity and the wellsprings of meaning.
It’s worth noting the fraudulent radicalism and “courage” of would-be subversive transgressors. They never demean and insult Islam this way because they are cowards. Islamist extremists would kill them for treating Islam the way they treat Christianity.
Let me not be misunderstood. I don’t want anyone to demean or attack Islam the way the Paris opening ceremony demeaned and attacked Christianity.
Islam, like every religious tradition, should be treated with respect. People’s most sacred religious beliefs should always be approached decently. Nor should anyone react with violence. But they should react culturally and politically.
Another question: If you want to celebrate transvestites, why is it necessary to spit at Christianity?
The Paris Olympics foulness illustrates the cultural self-hatred and contempt Western artistic elites have for their own civilisation. It’s a human death wish and civilisational suicide. The Paris grotesquerie was condemned by Christian leaders, many other faith leaders, and civic leaders internationally.
Bishop Robert Barron, of the prodigiously successful Word on Fire internet ministry, commented: “France, whose culture – and I mean the honouring of the individual, of human rights, of freedom – is grounded very much in Christianity, felt the right thing to do is to mock the Christian faith …
“What’s interesting here is this deeply secularist, postmodern society knows who its enemy is. They’re naming it. And we should believe them … Christians should always resist evil and I think we have indeed become too weak in the face of our cultural antagonists. Jesus’s command to turn the other cheek is by no means equivalent to passivity.”
By coincidence, I’ve spent the past few days attending the Napa Institute in California, one of the most absorbing annual gatherings of Catholics in the US, though there were a good many non-Catholic speakers, among them the famous Presbyterian author, Carl Trueman. Napa’s mission statement reads: “The Napa Institute empowers Catholic leaders to renew the church and transform the culture … (It) is a Catholic lay apostolate serving lay and ordained Catholics focused on liturgics, faith formation and fraternity.”
I found it a moving, diverse, richly rewarding event. Though all 700 participants were believers, there was an astonishing variety of folks, including priests and nuns of many types, from nuns whose sole vocation was prayer to others focused on school education, groups helping the homeless, others providing low-cost Catholic education to impoverished families, liturgical movements, Catholic scholars and liberal arts college representatives, people promoting the huge growth in classical school education, filmmakers determined to inject Christianity back into popular culture, pro-life groups, and many others.
I’ve been inquiring lately about what lessons the success of early post-apostolic Christians, after Jesus’s mission and after the last of the Apostles, might hold for today’s Christians.
I was inspired by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s measured conclusion that contemporary Western society has become truly neo-pagan.
Outside Napa, I explored this with the renowned biographer of JP II, George Weigel, one of the most important Christian thinkers today. He told me: “The blasphemous mockery of the Last Supper at the Olympic opening ceremony didn’t even rise to the level of neo-paganism; it was merely perverse and deranged … It’s certainly true that biblical religion is subject to vilification.”
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SPLC ‘Labeled Us Anti-Ourselves’: Gays Against Groomers Founder Responds to ‘Hate Group’ Smear
Jamiee Michell, a lesbian who founded the organization Gays Against Groomers, finds it ironic and “hilarious” that the Southern Poverty Law Center brands her openly LGBTQ group an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.”
“It classifies us as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, which is the most ironic and hilarious thing ever because everybody in our organization is gay and we even have a few trans people,” Michell tells The Daily Signal in an interview at the Republican National Convention earlier this month.
She says the SPLC, Anti-Defamation League, and other liberal organizations “labeled us anti-ourselves just for speaking out, wanting to protect children.”
The SPLC—which brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan—accuses Gays Against Groomers of amplifying “dehumanizing anti-trans rhetoric” and of perpetuating “anti-LGBTQ+ stereotypes by falsely claiming that LGBTQ+ supporters of trans rights are dangerous to society.”
The Anti-Defamation League, which critics fault for a left-wing bias, also brands Gays Against Groomers “anti-LGBTQ extremist.” ADL claims the group “peddles dangerous and misleading narratives about the LGBTQ+ community, focusing on false allegations of ‘grooming’ by drag performers, ‘indoctrination’ by LGBTQ+ educators and ‘child mutilation’ by gender-affirming care providers.”
These attacks on Gays Against Groomers echo the Southern Poverty Law Center’s suggestion that parents who complain about books with pornographic images in school libraries are “book banners” and reminiscent of the “uptown Klans” that opposed desegregation in the 1950s.
Many defenders of explicit books and children’s drag shows suggest there is nothing inherently sexual about images of naked teens or middle-aged men who are scantily clad and gyrate in front of young children.
“We fight the sexualization, indoctrination, and medicalization of children happening under the guise of LGBTQIA+, plus, plus, plus,” Michell tells The Daily Signal. “Nobody will ever say what the plus stands for. I think they’re trying to incorporate the ‘P’ for ‘pedophilia.'”
Michell also highlights the experimental nature of “gender-affirming care,” a euphemistic term for medical interventions aimed at forcing a male to appear female or vice versa. These interventions stunt natural development, may sterilize patients, and have been linked to cases of liver cancer in teens.
“Gender-affirming care” aims to address psychological distress—the feeling of identifying with a gender opposite one’s sex—through bodily alterations, rather than therapy.
Michell particularly notes the fact that some “gender-affirming care” involves “amputating the healthy body parts of young girls.”
“I can’t imagine having to be stuck with the decision I made as a 9-, 10-, 11-, 12-year-old [girl]—like, it’s absolutely insane,” she adds. “It’s been common sense and common knowledge for all of human history that no child can make permanent, lifelong decisions up until like 5 minutes ago.”
Michell describes herself as a former “tomboy” and says she would be quite susceptible to claims that she might be transgender were she growing up today.
“I would have absolutely been preyed upon by this cult, this cultish agenda,” she says. “If my parents bought into that, they would have medically transitioned me, without a doubt.”
Many gay or lesbian people might be convinced that they are “really” transgender because they don’t follow masculine or feminine stereotypes, Michell says. She calls gender ideology a form of “conversion therapy,” referring to efforts to induce a person with same-sex attraction to reject a homosexual lifestyle.
“It is a form of conversion therapy, except it’s way worse—it’s like a thousand times worse,” Michell says. “Regular, old-fashioned conversion therapy is just trying to change your mind, right? This conversion therapy leaves kids with missing body parts and sterilized, so it’s much worse.”
While the legacy media and most LGBTQ groups suggest that everyone who identifies as LGBTQ supports porn in schools, “gender-affirming care” for minors, and “Drag Queen Story Hours,” Michell says: “Every single gay person I know—and even trans people—we’ve all been staunchly against this.”
“It was very important to me to create a group to fight back against it from inside the community, to differentiate, draw a big red line between us and them, show that not all gay people, not all trans people want to hurt children,” she says.
She pushes back against the idea that pornographic materials in school are important to “normalize” LGBTQ individuals.
“I’d say that we already feel normalized,” she says. “We are so welcome in society, we’ve overdosed on tolerance. You see every major corporation panders to us, bends the knee to us, every major politician on the Left.”
“No, children don’t need to learn how to become inclusive by reading pornographic material,” Michell adds. “No, they don’t need to see a man dressed scantily, nearly nude, with fake breasts, to learn about tolerance and acceptance.”
“Our community has been hijacked, they’re using us to push this pornographic filth in our name,” she says.
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Sudden Bid To Wrestle Control Of Supreme Court Could Totally Backfire
Hoover Institute senior fellow Victor Davis Hanson said Monday on Fox News that Democrats’ push to reform the U.S. Supreme Court could backfire on them heading into November.
Hanson appeared on “The Ingraham Angle” to discuss President Joe Biden’s new proposal calling for a radical overhaul of the Supreme Court, including term limits for justices and a “binding code of conduct.” As Democratic lawmakers have pressured Biden on reforms, Fox host Laura Ingraham asked the senior fellow why the Democrats wouldn’t call for the reforms “10 years ago.”
“Well, we know why, for over 80 years FDR had a black mark on his record and that was trying to pack the court in 1937. Everybody agreed with that and now they’re even worse. You know, they see the court as a popular assembly and when they don’t have a majority on it. They want to get rid of it,” Hanson said.
“So judge Canon rules against them, Jack Smith, reassign her. Chuck Schumer doesn’t like what the court might say about abortion, then he threatens the justices by name and says you are not going to know what hit you,” Hanson continued. “They swarmed the justice’s home with impunity. They leak memos against a statute about a forthcoming abortion. Any means are necessary for their humanitarian end of mandated equality.”
Hanson continued to call out the Democratic Party’s push to have “one branch of government” and their belief that they can have “control,” but warned it could “hurt them” if Republicans are “wise” and play into it with finely tuned messaging.
“So it’s typical, but they want to have just one branch of government and that’s a popular elected majority that they think they can control. But it’s not going to work, it’s a joke. It’s going to hurt them, too, if the Republicans are wise and point this out to the electorate,” Hanson said.
Biden released his list of proposals on Monday, and claimed the Supreme Court is “mired in a crisis of ethics” in an op-ed for The Washington Post.
Within the list, Biden called for “no immunity for crimes a former president committed in office,” term limits for the Supreme Court justices, as well as a code of conduct for the judges that would require them to “disclose gifts, refrain from public political activity, and recuse themselves from cases in which they or their spouses have financial or other conflicts of interest.”
The new push from the president comes after multiple rulings made by the U.S. Supreme Court, some of which have not benefited the Biden administration.
Vice President Kamala Harris additionally vocalized her support of Biden’s reforms, stating “there is a clear crisis of confidence facing the Supreme Court as its fairness has been called into question after numerous ethics scandals and decision after decision overturning long-standing precedent.”
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
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