Eating just two slices of ham per day could raise diabetes risk
Rubbish! Another meta-analysis! You can prove anything you want by a meta-analysis. What you include and exclude is the key. And the "finding" here is totally predictable -- being a confirmation of a popular belief
Journal article here:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(24)00179-7/fulltext
Note that the finding was observed "in North America and in the European and Western Pacific regions" only. And note that the only confounders allowed for appear to have been age, sex, and BMIEating a ham sandwich a day could increase the risk of type 2 diabetes by 15 per cent, a study has found.
The team, from the University of Cambridge, found that processed meat and unprocessed red meat significantly increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes in the next decade.
The researchers found that just 50 grams of processed meat per day - equivalent to two slices of ham - increased the risk by 15 per cent. Consuming red meat every day had a similar effect: those who had just 100 grams, the equivalent of a small steak, had a 10 per cent higher risk of diabetes in the next ten years.
The team also tested whether the consumption of poultry had the same effect, but found that this was minimal when controlling for factors such as age, gender and health-related behaviours, including smoking and drinking alcohol.
Professor Nita Forouhi of the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, a senior author on the paper, said: “Our research provides the most comprehensive evidence to date of an association between eating processed meat and unprocessed red meat and a higher future risk of type 2 diabetes.
“It supports recommendations to limit the consumption of processed meat and unprocessed red meat to reduce type 2 diabetes cases.”
The research, published in The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology, used data from 31 different previous studies. Figures came from the InterConnect Project, which meant that researchers could analyse the data of the individual and not the results of the previous research as a whole. Data came from about two million participants across 20 different countries.
Professor Naveed Sattar, from the University of Glasgow, said: “The data suggest cutting red and processed meats from diets may not only protect people from heart disease and stroke but also from type 2 diabetes, a disease on the rise worldwide.
“Furthermore, a considerable part of the latter link may be weight gain but other mechanisms may be possible. Food systems should be adapted accordingly for the benefit of planetary and public health.”
Previous research, published last year, has also found that eating red meat only twice a week significantly increased the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
The research, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found that those who ate at least two portions of meat each day - such as bacon for breakfast then a ham sandwich for lunch - were 62 per cent more likely to get diabetes than those who limited themselves to two servings of red meat a week.
Diabetes occurs when a person’s blood sugar becomes chronically high as the body stops producing or responding to insulin. Most cases are type 2 which can be linked to poor diet and obesity. Cases have doubled over the past two decades and last year 4.3 million people in Britain were living with a formal diagnosis, while about one million adults are living with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes.
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Scarcity by Decree
Despite recent decreases in overall inflation, grocery prices continue to strain American budgets. Even in Denver, where inflation is a full percentage point lower than the national average, food costs remain a significant concern. As we move deeper into election season, the persistent issue of high grocery prices has thrust price gouging into the spotlight of policy debates.
A recent policy speech by Democratic nominee Kamala Harris suggests her administration would aim to combat price gouging on grocery items at the federal level. While this policy offers a tempting quick fix to voters burdened by high food costs, it risks doing harm in the name of doing good. Such price control measures, however well-intentioned, are unlikely to achieve their desired outcome and may even exacerbate the problem.
You don't need an economics degree to understand why price controls backfire—it's basic Econ 101. Today's rising prices aren't just greedy corporations pulling a fast one. It's not corporate greed emptying our wallets at the checkout counter—it's the government's monetary mismanagement inflating our grocery bills. Despite rising profits, even retail giants like Walmart still have profit margins less than 3%. Rising prices are the result of pandemic policies that pumped more money into people's pockets, coupled with tariffs implemented by the Trump administration and maintained under the Biden-Harris administration. When everyone's spending more, but supplies are constrained, prices naturally go up. That's exactly what we've seen play out over the last few years.
Imagine a world with federal price gouging laws. When demand surges, the government might cap price increases at 5% instead of the market-driven 10%. The result? Demand keeps climbing, but suppliers, constrained by artificial price limits, can’t justify increasing supply. This mismatch leads to shortages—remember the hand sanitizer shortages and rationing during the pandemic? That wasn’t just pandemic panic; it was retailers fearing price gouging penalties. Price controls don’t make goods more affordable; they make them scarce. Some voters might accept occasional shortages for the promise of lower prices. However, price gouging laws don’t eliminate higher costs; they merely shift them. While black markets can emerge, a more common scenario unfolds in plain sight: consumers spend more time and resources hunting for scarce goods.
Imagine your weekly grocery run during a toilet paper shortage. With prices artificially capped, you find empty shelves. You drive across town, perhaps making multiple trips, burning gas and time. Are you really benefiting from that lower sticker price? The extra fuel, wasted hours, and added pollution are real, often overlooked costs. Recent studies show this phenomenon occurs even during temporary, emergency price gouging laws, like those implemented during the pandemic.
Rising grocery prices are undeniably straining American households. However, price control laws are not the solution. They promise relief but deliver shortages, hidden costs, and economic distortions. We should all be wary of policies that sound too good to be true. Often, the most appealing promises can lead to the most disastrous consequences. Instead of embracing quick fixes, we should focus on addressing the root causes of inflation: expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, supply chain disruptions, and trade barriers. By tackling these issues head-on and thinking critically about proposed solutions, we can work towards genuinely affordable groceries without falling prey to well-intentioned but harmful interventions.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15033&omhide=true&trk=title
**********************************************How Joseph Stiglitz Tried to Legitimize Venezuela’s Dictatorship
Stiglitz again!
Nobel laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz is on a mission to smear free market economists as progenitors of “fascism.” After first making this insinuation in his recent book The Road to Freedom, Stiglitz has become even more brazen in charging “neoliberals” with steering the world toward dictatorship. In a new interview, Stiglitz charges:
It is evident today that free and unfettered markets advocated by Hayek and Friedman and so many on the Right have set us on the road to fascism, to a twenty-first-century version of authoritarianism made all the worse by advances in science and technology, an Orwellian authoritarianism where surveillance is the order of the day and truth has been sacrificed to power.
Note that he provides no evidence for his defamatory allegations against Hayek and Friedman, both of whom denounced fascism in their lifetimes. But there’s another problem with Stiglitz’s line of attack: his own lengthy track record of coddling undemocratic regimes and authoritarian dictators.
In 2007, Stiglitz traveled to Caracas, where he gushed over Venezuela’s Marxist leader Hugo Chavez, crediting him with poverty alleviation and economic reform. In reality, the Chavez regime ushered in a collapse of the Venezuelan economy that persists to this day.
Chavez’s handpicked successor, Nicolas Maduro, refuses to leave office after losing reelection in a landslide last month. Maduro concocted his own forged election results to declare himself the victor and is now waging a brutal campaign of military suppression and arrests in a desperate bid to remain in power.
Although Stiglitz has been more cautious about Maduro in recent years, he left no doubt of his appreciation for the Chavez regime. Shortly after meeting with the Venezuelan dictator, Stiglitz became a vocal media advocate for Chavez’s proposed “Bank of the South.” Chavez created this initiative in an effort to induce other Latin American countries to withdraw from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Chavez’s speeches about his scheme sound eerily similar to Stiglitz’s arguments in his new book. They rant and rave about an “economic order dominated by the Neoliberalism” and present the Bank of the South as an “alternative” to free-market capitalism. Blending an overt socialist political agenda with economic development funding, he pledged to seed the project with Venezuela’s vast oil wealth.
Stiglitz previously served as the World Bank’s senior vice president and chief economist. By publicly endorsing Chavez’s competitor to the World Bank, he gave it credibility in the eyes of foreign governments and the international media. At its launch in late 2007, it became clear that Chavez intended to use the “bank” to prop up other regional leftist governments. Chavez recruited his counterparts Lula de Silva of Brazil, Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, and Evo Morales of Bolivia to the effort and rolled it out as a tool to inaugurate socialism across the continent.
In practice, the Stiglitz-backed scheme amounted to naught. Venezuela’s economy soon collapsed under the weight of Chavez’s policies, including its state-run oil sector. After over a decade of delays, the Bank of the South has yet to deliver on any of its promised development loans and appears to have settled into dormancy. Venezuela’s state-controlled media still touts it as an “accomplishment” of Chavez’s economics. Still, in practice, it has amounted to little more than another corrupt shell entity for cronies of the Marxist regime.
As of this writing, Stiglitz has gone silent about the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Venezuela. He never mentions his own role in propagandizing Chavez’s economic schemes to the world or his visits to Caracas to advise Nicolas Maduro’s predecessor and personal mentor. Instead of projecting complicity in authoritarian regimes onto Friedman and Hayek, Stiglitz would be well-served to take a gaze in the mirror.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=15028&omhide=true&trk=rm
************************************************Democrats ramp up the gender politics in pursuit of the White House
“Donald Trump is going to find out the power of women in 2024,” Joe Biden roared earlier this week during his handover address at the Democratic National Convention.
If Kamala Harris becomes the 47th US president after the election in November, he won’t be wrong. But he could have been a bit more specific.
It might have been a nasty quip but Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance’s now notorious claim that “childless cat ladies” were running the country wasn’t far wrong, setting pet preferences to one side. The Democrats are in power and their strongest backers undeniably are women who have never married. If this large and growing group didn’t vote, the US electoral map would be a sea of Republican red.
Single women have become a powerful voting cohort, increasingly targeted by Democrats as they embrace sexual politics to maintain control of the White House. It is conventional wisdom in the US that men lean Republican and women lean Democrat – but not all women.
While clear majorities of men and married women favour the Republican Party, according to a survey of Americans by Pew Research, 72 per cent of never-married women back the Democrats.
And that’s before Harris – who’s being sold as a feisty “girl boss” one step away from breaking what Hillary Clinton in her convention speech called the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” – replaced the ancient Biden.
By the way, that ceiling would be news to most Americans, around 95 per cent of whom have told Gallup since 1999 they would readily elect a well-qualified woman, black or white, as president (up from below 60 per cent in the late 1950s). But sustaining or even fuelling the perception of massive and increasing sexism and racism has become essential to modern Democrat party politics.
Indeed, Vance’s 2021 comment was catnip, so to speak, for Democrat strategists seeking to manufacture outrage among women.
The Democratic National Convention was exhibit A. Practically every one of the 60-plus speakers at the party’s nominating convention on day one dwelled on the Democrats’ plans to “protect reproductive rights” – what some may consider a niche issue set against a generational, inflation-induced plunge in living standards, rampant illegal immigration, corporate cronyism and the prospect of World War III.
Democrat-aligned Planned Parenthood was spruiking offering DNC attendees free vasectomies and abortions, courtesy of a mobile health clinic parked nearby for the first two days of the convention.
The party has only one concrete policy: legislating abortion rights along the lines of Roe V Wade, the overturned Supreme Court decision that has become the motivating event of the party’s 2024 campaign.
Still, unmarried women aren’t the only group propping up the Democrats. The provision of gender-neutral bathrooms, and even a gender-neutral prayer room, should provide a clue to the other. Gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans have an ever greater preference for the Democratic Party: 83 per cent to 17 per cent, according to Pew.
From a strictly economic point of view, the Democratic Party platform would appeal to young single women, offering them greater choice: more taxpayer funded childcare; free healthcare, including of course the right to abortions; and welfare to support the rearing of children should they decide to have any.
“Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands,” American journalist David Samuels recently wrote in a lengthy piece, The March of Kamala’s Brides: Miserable Young Women are the Democrats’ Foot-soldiers. Brides of the State, he calls them.
Whether such policies have made women happier is less clear. “A startling 56 per cent of liberal American women aged 18-29 have been diagnosed with a mental-health condition (the percentage for conservative women is 21 per cent),” Samuels writes.
Mental health problems have skyrocketed among young women, a trend typically blamed on social media, which doesn’t appear to have had the same impact on young men.
Understanding why the so-called LGBT community favours Democrats over Republicans is harder to explain. Often high income and childless, gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans shoulder a disproportionate tax burden and receive little in return, which might make them less inclined to support parties in favour of increased taxation to fund a cradle-to-grave social welfare system.
But politics is increasingly about values rather than policy, the vibe rather than facts. And Democrats talk the talk when it comes to LGBT and women’s rights, creating the perception they are under permanent assault by Republicans.
Democrat leaders are fond of invoking a unified America in their rhetoric, but in practice their strategy increasingly has been to divide by sex and race for political advantage.
The share of black Americans who say relations between whites and blacks are “very” or “somewhat” good has fallen steadily from 66 per cent in 2013 to 33 per cent last year, according to Pew Research.
And the #MeToo movement has clobbered gender relations too, as half of the population are unfairly cast as predators rather than a hugely diverse group of individuals.
More recently, Democrats and parties of the left throughout the West have even pushing for the creation of new groups, evidenced by recent obsession with the “trans community”, a group that has exploded from essentially zero to about 5 per cent of the US population according to another 2022 survey by Pew.
Political discourse has become so dominant and powerful, perhaps it can create groups as much as cater to them – and not necessarily for their benefit.
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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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