The pictures here are iconic.
They are of the same woman, in
her 20s and in her 60s, one
knowing that she is already
famous, the other looking like
she is contemplating her death,
which did come soon afterwards.
One picture predicts the other,
for pictures of the young
Susan Sontag, whose writing
I celebrate here, and who wrote
of the meaning and power of
photographs, often showed her
smoking. Like dressing in black,
this was part of her style. The
one time we met, an event in my
life, ended in London’s Sloane
Square with her ‘borrowing’
money from me. She was that kind
of a woman.
My first items this month are
gossips from the Porto congress
that took place late last month.
Then there is a meditation on
what ‘nourishment’ means, and on
psychotropic substances, which
includes some thoughts on
smoking – thus Susan Sontag. The
column ends with what may become
a regular thought for the month.
Conference formats: Debates
Ways to confront controversy
Debates, were the most
stimulating and innovative
feature of the Porto congress.
There were a grand total of ten.
Topics ranged from ‘There are
good reasons for phasing out the
worldwide vitamin A capsule
programme’ (motion carried 25:3,
turned round dramatically from a
‘pre-vote’ of 10:15), to ‘The
use of ready to eat foods should
be scaled up rapidly’ (no vote
take, which was rum), to
‘Ultra-processed foods are
adverse to human health’ (motion
carried 30:0). These sessions,
parallel usually with
half-a-dozen others, each were
attended by 80-100 people. So as
the numbers above indicate, most
did not vote one way or the
other. I guess because the
debate format is an innovation.
The debate in which I
participated, as proposer, was
‘It is best to be small’, with
David Pelletier of Cornell
University as opponent. Who won?
Well, convenors Aryeh Stein and
Juan Rivera required a pre-vote
before the presentations, as a
‘baseline’. Perhaps bemused,
only seven people put up their
hands, all against my motion.
Part of my task was to be
reasonably precise about what
was meant by ‘small’ –
populations significantly
shorter and lighter that now or
as recommended. What I then did
is mainly to rely on the
environmental impact of being
big. Measured in terms of
cattle, a world population that,
because of being small, turned
over 10 per cent energy than now
recommended, would save 150
million cows a year. Measured as
hamburgers, the figure is 15,000
billion a year. Savings on oil,
water and greenhouse gas
emission are also awesome – or
would be. I quoted John Waterlow,
writing in 1998: ‘If everyone
were to achieve the height now
common in industrialised
countries, the height explosion
would be almost as disastrous as
the population explosion,
carrying with it the need not
only for more food, but for more
clothing, more space, more
natural resources of all kinds’.
The case for being big – tall
rather than fat – is in terms of
the biological dimension, which
is what David Pelletier relied
on. Generally, it is firmly
agreed that small babies,
especially if so small as to be
defined as ‘stunted’ or
‘wasted’, are vulnerable – more
likely to die. Also, being tall
evidently protects against heart
disease, though the story with
some cancers is that it is
better to be short. One of my
bottom lines was: ‘What matters
most, heart attacks or human
survival?’ The final vote was
14:15. So David Pelletier won
by one vote (bah!), but in contrast with the
baseline, I achieved a smash
turn-round (hah!). Pity about
the overall numbers, in all the
debates, for this seems to show
that most public health
nutritionists prefer to sit on
fences.
Conferences
Suddenly so many!
Public health nutrition
conferences are now bustin’ out
all over. As you’ll know from
this month’s issue of our
website, the Association, with
the Brazilian national public
health organisation Abrasco, is
mounting the next congress in
Rio de Janeiro at the end of
April 2012. But
Lluis Serra-Majem of SENC,
the Spanish society for
community nutrition, is
persisting in putting on his
third world congress after
Barcelona 2006 and Porto 2010.
This will be held in his own
academic base in the Canary
Islands. Lluis tells me that Las
Palmas 2014 will have a
connection with Dakar in
Senegal, and one day on the
programme will be held on a
boat-trip from the Canaries to
Africa.
Lluis and his SENC colleagues
are happy to accept sponsorships
and other material support from
that sector of the food and
drink industry whose profits
depend on products that are
harmful to public health, and
also to plan conference sessions
jointly with processed food and
drink manufactures like Nestlé,
whose advertisement was on the
back cover of the Porto
conference programme. By
contrast, the Association and
Abrasco, in planning Rio 2012,
will not seek or accept support
from conflicted industry. Is
there space for international
public health nutrition
conferences every two years,
bearing in mind also that the
next International Conference on
Nutrition will be held in
Grenada, Spain , in 2013? This
seems unlikely to me. (Also
please see the editorials in
this and
last month’s issue of World
Nutrition).
Public health nutritionists
Social responsibility of science
So far, nutrition conferences
have built-in biases. One is
caused by their penetration by
conflicted industry. Another is
that the great majority of those
who participate in conferences
are citizens of, or work in,
high-income countries. During a
Porto session on ‘malnutrition
in all its forms’, I began my
intervention by requesting of a
room with about 80 people
present, that everybody there
who had been born and brought in
a rural area in Africa and Asia,
raise their hands. Four showed.
One problem, I said, with
interventions designed to
address malnutrition, is that
almost by definition, they are
top-down, epitomised by the
phrase used by ready to use
therapeutic food (RUTF) champion
Mark Manary – ‘we wanna fix the
problem’.
Finally I said what many people
at Porto and previous
conferences have wanted to say.
Why do these meetings take place
apparently oblivious to what’s
actually happening in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and many
sub-Saharan countries? Now is
the time for the profession of
public health nutrition to find
its collective conscience, as
did nuclear scientists after the
first atom bombs were dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Population nutritional health
and well-being will really be
possible in many countries only
after they are no longer
invaded, arms sales are banned,
and their external debt is
cancelled. And? Well, I got a
lot of applause from a number of
people in the room.
Recreational drugs. Psychotropic
substances
What is nourishment?
Gentle reader, you may be
thinking – perhaps not for the
first time – that my columns are
in part a preposterous game in
which I introduce a topic that
cannot possibly have anything to
do with public health nutrition,
and then seek to persuade myself
and hopefully also you of its
relevance. Last month exotic
singers and dancers from Paris
and Rio de Janeiro, this month a
literary diva from New
York. What next, Santa Claus?
What has Susan Sontag’s smoking
got to do with nutrition?
Patience! As a clue, it depends
what is meant by ‘nutrition’ and
‘nourishment’.
Cigarette smoking is unusual, in
being an addictive toxic habit
whose pleasures are far, far
outweighed by its risks. It is
much too dangerous, plainly more
so than any other recreational
drug. Its reputation has been
blackened, like so many
tar-smeared lungs, by the
outrageous hanky-panky of the
Big Tobacco companies, as wicked
in their ways as the US and UK
governments’ policies concerning
Iraq and Afghanistan.
In my 20s and 30s I flirted with
and flitted from Sobranie to
Gitanes to Marlboro (as I also
did with and from Cointreau to
Pastis to Jack Daniels)
depending on where I was and
with whom, and how I tried to
define myself. Between the 1920s
and the 1960s, convenient
accessories were the name of the
style game. In my smoking days I
thought that cigarettes aided
concentration; but now I think
that for a smoker, it is lack of
cigarettes that impedes
concentration. As you see, at
the time of writing I am still
around, after flushing my last
half-smoked pack down the pan in
a mid-town New York City hotel
nearly 30 years ago. Here’s
continuing to hope that the
carcinogenic properties of
tobacco fade away.
My friend and fellow columnist
Fabio Gomes puts sweetened cola
and other soft drinks in the
same category as tobacco. This
is I think a bit strong. Soft
drinkers don’t make other people
fat by breathing on them, and
cancer of the airways is worse
than obesity. But I see what he
means. Cola and such-like
sweetened soft drinks are also
products about which nothing
good can be said. They are fun,
say their manufacturers. Really?
Without incessant glamorisation
by advertising, would people
consume Coke™ or Pepsi™? Surely
far less. Indeed, without
advertising, some of which is of
the most insidious and
indefensible types, would young
children consume sugared
breakfast ‘cereals’? Perhaps,
for ‘free’ sugars do have
addictive qualities. But a lot
less, that’s for sure.
The place of booze
Alcohol seems different to me.
Exclusion of alcohol from
consideration of diet in
societies where alcoholic drinks
are sanctioned and also part of
their history and culture, just
seems silly to me. Yes, alcohol
also has addictive qualities,
and other down-sides.
Alcoholism, with all its
consequences, is indeed a major
public health problem.
But alcohol is also mildly
psychotropic – and I say ‘but’,
because it seems to me, as to
many others, that substances
with the power to induce altered
or enriched or heightened mental
or emotional states are, for
this reason, a kind of
nourishment. Many ‘creative
types’, such as novelists,
poets, painters, and actors (and
maybe nutrition scientists, who
knows?) knock back a lot of
booze. Is their work better as a
result? That is to say, are they
intellectually and emotionally
nourished by alcohol? Often no,
I reckon, and eventually,
usually no. But sometimes – and
I think this cannot seriously be
denied – yes, they are. Indeed,
sometimes the special quality
that makes the difference
between good art and great art
is fuelled by ethanol, or else –
and I am coming to these – other
mind-altering substances.
Aha! Here, you see, is the
connection. Cigarettes are not
nourishment. But let’s allow the
thought that whisky is, or let’s
be rather more cautious and say
it can be. (As may be wild, wild
women, but only in a broader
sense, for they are not inhaled;
nor, in a usual sense, despite
The Song of Solomon, do
their lovers eat or drink them).
Blowing our minds
Why are mind-altering
substances, of the types we
ingest, usually not counted as
nourishment? (1) Perhaps this is
for three reasons. One is that
as conventionally taught,
nutrition is concerned only with
physical impacts (2). Two is
that nutrients are usually seen
as substances that supply energy
as well as having other
qualities (3). Three, as
suggested by
Colin Tudge (4), is
Puritanism: anything that makes
us feel good must be bad, and
therefore banned from the
textbooks and curricula, or else
classified as ‘drugs’ or
‘toxins’.
Alcohol is not the best choice
of nourishment for the mind,
heart and spirit. Better
choices, as Colin Tudge also
suggests, are hashish or mescal,
used respectively as part of the
culture of Islam and of various
Native American nations (5).
Both are illegal in most
countries, of course.
What about danger? In our
mission to preserve and improve
public health, long length of
life should not be our only aim
(6). What is most precious is
less easy to measure. Certainly,
we need to maintain
responsibility as family
members, particularly if we are
parents or providers.
Nevertheless perhaps, as Aldous
Huxley proposes (5), fulfilling
our human potential requires the
use of psychotropic substances.
The mystics who inspired a
number of religions, including
Christianity, were frequently if
not habitually ‘out of their
skulls’. Indeed, we contain our
very own endogenous mind-bending
substances. Try fasting for
forty days and forty nights, in
or out of the wild, and you will
see what I am saying.
References and footnotes
- Although they are, in
Alice in Wonderland.
Remember the injunctions
‘Eat Me’ and ‘Drink Me’? Was
Charles Lutwedge Dodgson On
Something, when he drafted
his masterpiece? Opium was
commonly smoked, eaten or
drunk at that time. You’ll
remember that Karl Marx said
that religion is the opium
(not the booze) of the
people. Much great art has
been achieved under the
influence of opium in its
various forms, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge’s Kubla Khan,
frequently voted one of the
top ten poems of all time,
being just one well-known
example.
- But actually, it isn’t.
Conventional nutrition
scientists have been
comfortable with the
proposition that iron
deficiency impedes
children’s behaviour and
performance at school, for
quite a long time now. The
implications of this
admission are tremendous.
- But this doesn’t work
either, because in that case
alcohol (ethanol) has to be
defined as a nutrient, and
vitamins and trace elements,
which are always classed as
nutrients, supply no energy.
- Tudge C. Functional
food, pharmacological
impoverishment, and why ‘In
biology nothing makes sense
except in the light of
evolution’. Given in 1999 at
the Royal Society as a
Caroline Walker lecture, now
accessible on:
www.colintudge.com.
Colin has been brooding on
the topic of ‘toxins’ and
nutrients for a long time –
see also Tudge C. You are
what you eat. New
Scientist, 3 April 1986.
He is also interested in the
effect of fermentation as
enhancing the nourishment of
foods and drinks. This item
here is strongly influenced
by Colin’s thinking, though
he may not agree with all I
suggest.
- As see Huxley A. The
Doors of Perception. New
York: Harper, 1954. The
rock’n’roll band The Doors
named themselves after this
book and its messages, and
their singer Jim Morrison’s
line ‘Break on through to
the other side’ was a
reference to Huxley, and to
William Blake, from whom
Huxley took the title of his
book. Jim Morrison is a
particularly bad
advertisement for alcohol,
which Huxley did not
recommend: booze made him
chaotic and bloated, and
contributed to his death in
Paris aged 27.
- The ‘population
explosion’ has three
aspects. First, there are
more and more people, and we
know this is a bad thing.
Second and third, people are
getting bigger and living
longer, and we usually think
this is a good thing,
obesity and dementia aside.
Perhaps we should think
again, and prefer and plan
for a small human race that
has a much better time
during their life, and on
average dies around the age
of say 60. Just a thought…
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Philanthropy
The nature of charity
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Perhaps the most
overrated virtue in
our list of shoddy
virtues is that of
giving. Giving
builds up the ego of
the giver; makes him
superior and
higher and larger
than the receiver.
Nearly always,
giving is selfish
pleasure, and in
many cases is a
downright
destructive and evil
thing. One has only
to remember some of
the wolfish
financiers who spend
two thirds of their
lives clawing a
fortune out of the
guts of society and
the latter third
pushing it back.
It is not enough
to suppose that
their philanthropy
is a kind of
frightened
restitution, or that
their nature changes
when they have
enough. Such a
nature never has
enough and natures
do not change that
readily. I think
that the impulse is
the same in both
cases. For giving
can bring the same
sense of superiority
as getting does, and
philanthropy may be
another kind of
spiritual avarice.
John Steinbeck
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In August this year, 40 US
billionaires pledged to give at
least half of their wealth to
charity(1). ‘By giving, we
inspire others to give of
themselves’ said Michael
Bloomberg, who is also New York
City mayor. The international
media coverage encouraged
viewers and readers to feel
pleased and grateful. How nice
that rich people are kind!
Hm. Half a $US billion (or in
the case of Mayor Bloomberg
according to Forbes in 2009 $US
17 billion) is still a fair
screw, for any entourage and
family. Most ‘ordinary’ people
have little to spare – and these
days, rather less than before
‘market’ deregulation enabled
and created a new generation of
robber barons, most notably in
Russia, where public, social and
family services have been raped.
Might well-publicised acts of
massive individual benevolence
be a factor in the decisions of
governments to lower taxes, or
to reduce the supply of public
money to public institutions?
Might very rich people achieve
positions of elected political
power? Might unelected others
also use their ‘benevolence’ as
a means of meddling in public
affairs? Might such phenomena
muddle public policies and
confuse public servants?(2).
Well, nothing is perfect, and
variety is a spice, and worse
things happen, but as my late
son Ben (who once worked for
Goldman Sachs) used to say in
response to rhetorical questions
of this type, do bears shit in
the woods?
To sound even more ungrateful,
shouldn’t we be asking questions
about the laws and regulations
(or lack of these) that enable
the most ruthless, aggressive
and lucky of what are usually
the initially most privileged
members of the human species to
become filthy rich?
Many thanks to David McCoy of
University College, London, for
the above quote, from the Nobel
Prizewinning author of The
Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row,
and East of Eden, who
also wrote the script for
Viva Zapata! John Steinbeck
is saying that we should not
idolise rich people who give
away some of their money,
motivated or not in part by tax
breaks. He also is doubting the
virtue of charity itself, as a
creator of dependency and a
perpetuator and perpetrator of
inequity. Knowing that there are
people who are worse off than us
makes us feel good, and giving
them money or materials (or ‘of
ourselves’) may make us feel
better, but what they are in
most need of, is justice. That’s
the charge.
Reference
- Clark A. 40 US
billionaires pledge to give
away half their fortunes to
charity. The Guardian,
4 August 2010.
- Edwards M. Small
Change. Why Business Won’t
Save the World. New
York: McGraw Hill, 2010. See
also at
www.demos.org
Request and acknowledgement
You are invited please to
respond, comment, disagree, as
you wish. Please use the
response facility below. You are
free to make use of the material
in this column, provided you
acknowledge the Association, and
me please, and cite the
Association’s website.
Please cite as: Cannon G.
Ways to confront controversy,
and other items. [Column]
Website of the World Public
Health Nutrition Association,
October 2010. Obtainable at
www.wphna.org.
The opinions expressed in all
contributions to the website of
the World Public Health
Nutrition Association (the
Association) including its
journal
World Nutrition, are
those of their authors. They
should not be taken to be the
view or policy of the
Association, or of any of its
affiliated or associated bodies,
unless this is explicitly
stated.
This column is reviewed by
Barrie Margetts and Fabio Gomes. My thanks also and
always to Google, Wikipedia, and
the astonishing Guardian
On-Line.
geoffreycannon@aol.com
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