Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December, 2010

The Great Health Data Deficit: Are Environmental causes for Disease a Mirage?

Ever since I was a child the message has been eat your greens (we got caned at primary school if we didn’t), you need to exercise, carrots will make you see in the dark, an apple a day keeps the doctor away. It continues today with the “5 a day”, all the healthy food pyramids, anti-junk foods, and so on. Yes the environment can be dangerous, it can kill us. There are some indisputable examples, a bullet in the head for example, or getting hit by a car is an environmental impact that almost always results in injury and death. There are others on which we more or less agree, like smoking is harmful (evidence is very strong, although it has never actually been proven, who knows, it could be the regular movement of hand to mouth that causes all the damage, we need to do the proper controlled trial…) For the rest we have always sort of somehow known that eating badly can cause disease – it seemed so obvious, and all the little research studies just confirmed what we knew and lead to the