Salt may increase risk of stomach cancer by 40%, study suggests
Groan! Another witless attack on salt below. The journal article is here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10120-024-01502-9
I have written previously on the salt phobia here:http://jonjayray.com/short/salt.html
And here:http://jonjayray.com/short/salt2.html
And here:http://jonjayray.com/saltsum.html
And for what it is worth, I have always been a keen salt user but I had a gastroscopy recently which showed my stomach to be completely normal, which is pretty good for an 80-year-old guy.OK. On to the latest bit of nonsense. Once again it was an extreme-groups analysis in which they had to throw away half of their data to find something to talk about. So it seems probable that there was in fact NO significant linear relationship between illness and salt consupption.
And it's almost amusing that they found the association only with REPORTS of salt usage not with an estimate of actual salt usage. Bleah!
The one undisputable finding of salt research is that LOW salt can kill you. There is even a name for that: Hyponatremia
A new study might make you think twice before reaching for the salt shaker at your next meal.
Nutritionists from the Center for Public Health at the University of Vienna discovered that people from the UK who added salt to most of their meals were 41 percent more likely to develop stomach cancer than those who used the topping sparingly.
Previous studies in China, Japan and Korea have linked a salty diet to stomach cancer - but this is one of the first to show the link in Westerners.
Though the Austrian study was merely observational, older studies have suggested that excess salt might erode the protective coating on the stomach, causing damage to the tissue there and leading to cancerous mutations.
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You can't win: diet soft-drinks are just as likely to lead to heart problems as sugary ones
The hazard ratios were all very low, indicating that there was only a tiny chance of any of the drinks being responsible for anything. The lowest "risk" was for people who mainly drank pure fruit juice. My favourite drink is cold water, followed by iced coffe, followed by pure orange juice so I kinda liked this article. The journal article is here:
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCEP.123.012145
Drinking artificially sweetened beverages, such as sodas and juices, has been linked to a slew of dangerous health conditions, the United Kingdom-based study has concluded this week.Published in the journal Circulation: Arrhythmia and Electrophysiology, the research follows the drinking habits of roughly 202,000 adults aged 37 to 73 in the United Kingdom, examining the results of a 24-hour diet questionnaire.
Specifically, the findings of the study suggest a strong correlation between adults drinking no to low-sugar beverages and their risk of developing atrial fibrillation.
According to the Heart Foundation, atrial fibrillation is the most common recurring arrhythmia found in clinical practice, prevalent in two to four per cent of the population in developed nations such as Australia.
Individuals who reported consuming more than two litres of artificially sweetened drinks in the 24-hour time period were found to have a 20 per cent higher chance of developing the condition (that’s roughly six standard cans).
Atrial fibrillation (AF) is a serious cardiovascular disease defined by having a heartbeat that is too slow, too fast or irregular. Additionally, patients diagnosed with AF report symptoms such as lightheadedness, chest pain, extreme fatigue, and shortness of breath. Most notably, atrial fibrillation has been found to be the leading cause of stroke in the United States.
Additionally, the findings indicated that the individuals who reported consuming beverages with added sugars had an increased risk of the disease by up to ten per cent. On the flip side, consuming unsweetened juices, such as natural orange juice, was associated with a reduced risk of up to eight per cent.
“Our study’s findings cannot definitively conclude that one beverage poses more health risk than another due to the complexity of our diets and because some people may drink more than one type of beverage,” says lead study author Dr Ningjian Wang, a professor at the Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital and Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine.
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Why the End of the Boy Scouts Matters
The Boy Scouts are no more. The organization, once well known for helping shape boys into good men, allowed girls to join in 2017. Now the group is going a step further, announcing its new name as of February will be Scouting America.
What a loss for Americans—both men and women.
In recent days, we’ve seen examples of good American men. Fraternity brothers at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill protected the American flag from pro-Palestinian protesters.
And Mario Torres, a 45-year-old custodian at Columbia University, said he tried to “protect the building”’ and ended up in a physical altercation with a protester. “He had a Columbia hoodie on, and I managed to rip that hoodie off of him and expose his face,” Torres told The Free Press.
Unfortunately, though, our modern culture largely doesn’t value manly virtues—or men.
It would be one thing to see the further gender neutralizing of the Boy Scouts of America if the boys and men of America were thriving. But they are not.
Fewer men than women attend college. Among men deemed prime working age, those ages 25 to 54, 11.4% were not in the workforce as of 2022, according to the San Francisco Fed. That’s up from 5.8% in 1976.
“In 2020, only 25% of men ages 17-24 … qualified for military service; the majority were disqualified for being overweight, having issues with drug abuse, for mental health and medical/physical reasons, or for a combination of those factors,” writes Brenda Hafera, a senior policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Simon Center for American Studies.
The data doesn’t suggest that men are happy with the status quo. In the United States, around four times as many men die by suicide as women do. Men are two to three times as likely to die of a drug overdose than women. They’re also more likely to binge drink or be hospitalized in relation to alcohol use. Among men ages 18 to 45, a horrifying 44% have thought of suicide in the past two weeks, according to a 2023 Equimundo survey
“Many of the young men who came to see me were struggling,” writes Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., in his book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” recalling his time working as law professor. “Some lacked confidence, some lacked direction; others could not seem to get motivated.”
“They were afraid to fail, to venture out and take a risk, but felt at the same time dissatisfied with their lives as they knew them,” Hawley continues. “One after another said … I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with my life. And yet they felt they were failing at whatever that was.”
Perhaps the politically correct expungement of male-only spaces is part of the reason why men are struggling so.
In recent decades, even as women-only spaces have remained popular (and accepted), male organizations have drifted into inclusivity. Richard V. Reeves, who heads the American Institute for Boys and Men, notes that that the Boys Clubs of America became co-ed in 1990. Reeves adds: “In 1978, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) banned all gender discrimination, and now focuses on the wellbeing of children, young people and the wider community with no specific orientation towards boys or men.” A total of 25 women’s colleges exist, but for men, only three single-sex colleges remain.
Why are we so against these men-only spaces?
As a woman, I’ve long valued female-only spaces. Attending a conservative Catholic college, I lived in a women-only dorm. Men darkened the doors only to fix things and even then, like lepers of old alerting townspeople with a bell, they had to bellow “man in the dorm” at regular intervals to make clear their intrusion.
It was fantastic: The dorm truly became a refuge, a place where I and other women were free to commiserate, study, and have fun together in a way many of our romance-addled brains could not quite manage when our crushes were potentially present.
Post-college, I’ve appreciated girls’ nights and girls’ trips with friends. I’ve been grateful for those moments of unique solidarity I’ve sometimes found with female colleagues, some of them fellow journalists.
Why should men be denied these joys, these delightful moments of shared understanding and interests?
Furthermore, there’s real evidence that the Boy Scouts, in its male-only incarnation, did help boys become good men. In 2012, Baylor University researchers compared Eagle Scouts—the highest level of Boy Scouts—to non-scouts and found that Eagle Scouts were:
34% more likely to have donated to a nonreligious charity in the past month.
53% more likely to have donated to a religious charity.
62% more likely to have volunteered for a nonreligious organization.
56% more likely to have worked with a neighbor to address a problem or improve the community.
55% more likely to have held a leadership position in their workplace.
In addition to these findings, which showed how Eagle Scouts truly contribute to their communities, Baylor researchers also found evidence that Eagle Scouts enjoyed better social relationships than their peers. Compared to non-scouts, Eagle Scouts were 38% more likely to be close with siblings, 37% more likely to be close with friends, and 87% more likely to belong to four or more groups.
That’s important—because too many men these days lack crucial social support.
Among men, 15% had no close friends in 2021, up from 3% who said so in 1990. That’s significantly higher than the percentage of women who say they have no close friends (10%), according to The Survey Center on American Life, a project of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Over half of men are unhappy with the size of their friend circle.
About a quarter of younger men (ages 18 to 45) said they saw no friends or family during the past week, and 22% said they had no one locally they are close to or could depend on, according to a 2023 Equimundo survey. Almost half of these younger men said they found their online lives more fulfilling than their actual lives, while about 60% said they viewed porn once or more a week.
So, sure, let’s kill one organization that had successfully helped men socialize with each other.
Of course, the Boy Scouts of America isn’t a perfect organization. The revelations about the organization’s sexual abuse crisis have been horrifying. Far too many boys weren’t protected from predators. A lawsuit was settled for $850 million in 2022 after tens of thousands of men said they had been abused as Boy Scouts.
And although the Boy Scouts laudably resisted much of the woke culture longer than many, they too waved the white flag. In 2011, Kathleen Arnn, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, compared the 2009 Boy Scout Handbook with the original from 1910.
“[D]ecades of aggressive political correctness have had their effect, and the Scouts have lost some of the confident American boyishness that loves heroes and makes for heroes,” wrote Arnn.
The original Boy Scott Handbook told boys: “A good Scout must be chivalrous” and “[H]e should be as manly as the knights or pioneers of old. He should be unselfish. He should show courage. He must do his duty.”
The handbook also profiled American heroes, including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Johnny Appleseed, and even Betsy Ross.
But by 2009, the “chapter on Chivalry has been completely removed,” wrote Arnn, adding: “American heroes, so numerous and colorful in the original handbook, are almost absent. Washington and Lincoln are each mentioned one time.”
Perhaps someone can resurrect a new version of the old Boy Scouts, complete with the old handbook. Or start an entirely new organization, one that cultivates manly virtues in a boys-only space.
But what’s clear is we need to do more to support our boys and men. No (sane) feminist benefits when men fail; this isn’t a zero-sum game. Both men and women lead happier lives when men are living up to their potential, holding down jobs, and being great husbands and dads.
Our current society isn’t working for men. It’s time to change it—and bring back, for both boys and men, male-only spaces where they can connect and, hopefully, flourish.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/11/a-womans-plea-bring-back-the-boy-scouts/
*******************************************Leftists want to force their faith on Christians
A religious civil war is raging but only one side understands that it is a battle over theology.
At stake is whether the ascendant state morality will drive deeper into the ancient institutions of faith and force believers to submit to its temporal commandments.
Nationally, the Australian Law Reform Commission’s final report on religious exemptions from anti-discrimination law is just another sortie in a long campaign over what the state will allow you to believe and how far it is prepared to go to force apostates to heel.
Queensland’s proposed anti-discrimination bill also seeks to narrow the rights of the faithful. Alex Deagon, from Queensland University of Technology, argues it will “significantly undermine the ability of religious organisations to employ persons in accordance with their faith”.
The ALRC admits one of its recommendations may limit “the freedom to manifest religion or belief in community with others, and the associated parental liberty to ensure the religious and moral education of one’s children in conformity with one’s own convictions”. This, it says, is balanced by the overall effect, which “would be to maximise the realisation of human rights”.
The ALRC wants section 38 of the Sex Discrimination Act, which allows religious schools to hire those whose lives and ideas accord “with the doctrines, tenets, beliefs or teachings of a particular religion or creed”, to be abolished.
When you lose the freedom to manifest your faith, abide by your beliefs and the liberty to ensure your children are educated in your creed, what is left? The commission is erasing the right of a religious school to organise around its own ethos.
This is an extreme form of laicism, driven by a fierce “progressive” crusade against Christianity. In a multifaith society that means all believers are on this battlefield, as the institutions of government are mobilised against them. Like many things dubbed progressive, it is the latest incarnation of the despotic tendencies of the Bureautoracy (n): the ubiquitous, unelected technocratic blob bent on imposing its notion of utopia on the mob. Its relentlessly mutating dogma has spread like Paterson’s curse through all the institutions.
In a profound irony we are witnessing the final metamorphosis of Christianity as zealots torch the last idol: belief in a power that transcends the state.
The child has turned on a parent it does not recognise because the source code of this secular faith is the notion of universal human rights. That idea was born with the belief that each individual is valued by God, an avowedly Christian concept and part of a set of revolutionary beliefs that the early faithful simply called “The Way”.
Warnings religion’s role in Australia is ‘under attack’
Universal equality is captured in Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Another epoch-changing idea rings from the first sentences of John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the word (logos). And the word was with God. And the word was God.”
The New Testament was written in Greek and logos means both word and reason. So, in the Christian tradition, God is reason itself. Christianity is the singular encounter between Greek philosophy and Jewish mysticism, the marriage of reason and faith. The theology that evolved was a thoroughly different way of thinking. Let’s call it wisdom.
This wisdom elevated the poor, the meek, the righteous, the merciful and peacemakers. Faith in God demands you “treat others as you would like them to treat you”, and not to act with reason is contrary to the nature of God.
Christianity is born in the East, informed by the West and takes on its historically decisive character in Europe. Europe is defined by its faith and its faith is defined by reason. Faith and reason set Europe on the road to liberal democracy.
Through all its failures, and its many crimes, reason pushes the West forward and demands that it learn and evolve. And the excesses of both church and state always had to contend with its Christian conscience.
The savage colonisation of the Americas was fiercely denounced by Dominican friar Bartolome de Las Casas, the evil of slavery collapsed when it confronted the faith of William Wilberforce. Despite often spectacularly failing to abide by its ideals, Christianity demanded the West slowly bend towards realising the radical demand of the central tenet of its faith. The new commandment to “love one another” excludes no one.
As historian Tom Holland demonstrates in his epic work Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, “To live in a Western country is to live in a society that is utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions.”
It is, of course, a heritage that the zealots of the New Way deny. To them their belief system is self-evident because it just is. It is neutral. It is agnostic. That is a delusion. The New Way exhibits some of the best and all the worst features of a proselytising religion. It looks to uplift, to guide, to build a better, more just world. It is also deeply intolerant of dissent and has established the institutions of inquisition to police heresy, in state and federal human rights commissions.
It’s hard to criticise anti-discrimination laws but the growth of objective penalties for subjective crimes should trouble those who care about liberal democracy. Such penalties are how American journalist Robert Wargas defines totalitarianism.
What standards will be applied? The notion of transgender identity, for example, is a rapidly moving target. Even the Australian Human Rights Commission’s website admits the “terminology is strongly contested”.
So, this latest assault by the state on the faithful is a battle of competing theologies, as the disciples of Caesar seek to mount his image in every temple. And the insurgents know nothing of faith because, as anyone who has any dealings with religious schools knows, most have no desire to discriminate and are far more tolerant of difference than “progressives”.
What religious institutions don’t want is to be forced to submit to state diktats that deliberately undermine the ethos of their institution. Here let’s recall that the Labor Party pledge demands its members not be a part of any other organisation that is inimical to its ideals. Why shouldn’t religious schools enjoy the same right?
The arc of history has bent out of shape. Those who claim the heritage of reason have discounted the role of faith in their enlightenment. They discriminate and call it equality. They unreasonably seek to force the faithful to heel.
This is not wise.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
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)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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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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