Is there a new "smoking" on the horizon

[Mr Man]

In the not too distant past smoking was not seen as a major health risk. The negative effects were downplayed and hidden. It was socially acceptable. But all this has changed. The horrendous health risks are widely known. Governments very actively discourage and it is frowned upon by society. But what will be the next "smoking".

Is there anything that is very widely accepted and common place that in the not too distant future will be seen in the same way as smoking is seen now? That the adverse effect and cost to our society will be realized?

Could it be alcohol?

Could it be.....dun,dun,duuunnn...Corn starch?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18393391
http://www.livestrong.com/article/27669 ... orn-syrup/
http://www.sovcal.com/sovblog/high-fruc ... weet-deal/

Could it be....?

[Cittasanto]

Could it be alcohol?

Could it be.....dun,dun,duuunnn...Corn starch?

I think Alcohol could come at some point, as prohibition does go around every so often, but it has proved too popular to last long.
but I think it could be petrol and cars that run on it seeing as the bio-diesel and battery cars are coming more into fashion.
But Plutonium could makeway for thoreum at some point in the future too??

not exactly personal health but each strong contenders for the next vilification in the population.

[shaunc]

My money would be on fast-food.

[GraemeR]

I think Alcohol could come at some point, as prohibition does go around every so often, but it has proved too popular to last long.
but I think it could be petrol and cars that run on it seeing as the bio-diesel and battery cars are coming more into fashion.
But Plutonium could makeway for thoreum at some point in the future too??

not exactly personal health but each strong contenders for the next vilification in the population.

It is banned in some Islamic countries. It wasn't very effective in America in the last century.

As it has been use for so long and by such a large number of people and used traditionally at social events, they could find it hard to ban.

Of course governments make LOTS of tax revenue from it ..... would that be a bigger consideration?

With metta,

Graham

[Kim O'Hara]

My money would be on fast-food.

Or obesity per se?
It's already being demonised by the government and the health sector here in Australia, for essentially the same reasons that smoking was, i.e. individuals inflict the ill-health on themselves but then the whole community ends up paying their health costs.
'Demonised' may be a bit loaded so I should say that I am generally in favour of both policies.


Kim

[Cittasanto]

Of course governments make LOTS of tax revenue from it ..... would that be a bigger consideration?

Governments make a lot of money from tobacco also.

[Mr Man]

My money would be on fast-food.

Or obesity per se?

Is corn syrup the thing that is causing the obesity problem?

From the BBC article:

"Fructose is easily converted to fat in the body, and scientists have found that it also suppresses the action of a vital hormone called leptin.

"Leptin goes from your fat cells to your brain and tells your brain you've had enough, you don't need to eat that second piece of cheesecake," says Dr Robert Lustig, an endocrinologist.

He says when the liver is overloaded with sugars, leptin simply stops working, and as a result the body doesn't know when it's full.

"It makes your brain think you're starving and now what you have is a vicious cycle of consumption, disease and addiction. Which explains what has happened the world over," he says.

[James the Giant]

But what will be the next "smoking".

Is there anything that is very widely accepted and common place that in the not too distant future will be seen in the same way as smoking is seen now? That the adverse effect and cost to our society will be realized?

Cellphones. And the multitude of tiny transmitters found everywhere these days.
In my office building there are 11 floors. Each floor has about 100 people in it. Each of those people has a cellphone, wireless keyboard and mouse, wireless LAN for their computer, and most of them have a bluetooth headset. Oh and most cellphones have bluetooth and wifi too. That's 7700 transmission sources in just one little 11 story building, and that doesn't even include the larger receivers and transmitters on the ceilings and the proper big ones mounted on the top of the building. Seven thousand!
The evidence is scanty now, but surely that must all be having some effect. Hopefully not eh.

[Roland]

Interesting thread. I would say the next "smoking" would definitely be "hydraulic fracturing"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing

I live in a state that uses this process to extract natural gas. There is a huge list of chemicals used in the process. It also apparently causes methane seepage into ground water which will pollute tap water in households near the wells. People in the areas can literally light their tap water on fire. Also, numerous other strange health effects are caused in people who live around these wells. There is a documentary called "Gasland" that exposes these problems. As a reaction to this, a gas industry funded documentary was released called "Truthland" trying to disprove "Gasland". In response, the creator of "Gasland" released a response documentary to "Truthland" called "The Sky Is PInk", disproving further the industry's claims and denial of the harm they are apparently causing.

Ironically, the same PR firm that was hired by the tobacco industry in 1953 to tell the world that smoking is harmless and does not cause lung cancer, etc, is the exact same PR firm that a lobbying organization for the gas and oil industry hired to try to plant doubt in the minds of the public of the dangers of hydraulic fracturing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_%26_Knowlton

Also, what about GMOs? There has been few human studies on the health effects of genetically modified foods, of which are said to have problems, but every study done on animals have shown multiple harmful effects. The studies that show they are safe are done by Monsanto, so they are biased (I don't trust anything that company does or says). And the only reason long term studies have not been done is because the FDA says that GM foods and non-GM foods are "substantially equivalent" which is a meaningless term, and by the way, the FDA has had many former employees Monsanto employed within the FDA.... I could go on and on...

[Roland]

Cellphones. And the multitude of tiny transmitters found everywhere these days.
In my office building there are 11 floors. Each floor has about 100 people in it. Each of those people has a cellphone, wireless keyboard and mouse, wireless LAN for their computer, and most of them have a bluetooth headset. Oh and most cellphones have bluetooth and wifi too. That's 7700 transmission sources in just one little 11 story building, and that doesn't even include the larger receivers and transmitters on the ceilings and the proper big ones mounted on the top of the building. Seven thousand!
The evidence is scanty now, but surely that must all be having some effect. Hopefully not eh.

There's a good documentary on the effects of electromagnetic fields/radio frequencies/cell phone frequencies/wifi on human health. I particularly found interesting that there are 16 or 17 studies on suppressed melatonin production in the pineal gland due to electromagnetic radiation (which apparently can cause cancers, especially breast cancer). And apparently, there are people who sensitive to certain frequencies and have to be careful to stay further away from cell phone towers. In this documentary, one guy would internally bleed. He found out it was because he lived with in eye sight of a cell phone tower. He had to insulate his house with metal sheeting and metal fortified glass.

They make a good point that we now basically have no control group to test the effects of cell phone towers and other frequencies because they are literally everywhere in the world now. Even if you do not have any wireless devices anywhere near you, cell phone reception practically covers the entire planet. So unless you are in a protected building or something, the frequencies are everywhere.

The cell phone companies know this, of course, but it would not be profitable for them to be fully honest.

The documentary is called "Resonance". It is on YouTube and Vimeo

http://vimeo.com/54189727

[manas]

GM food (Genetically Modified) could end up being more dangerous than alcohol, tobacco and drugs put together. We can give up drugs individually or as a society, but once the gene pool of a plant or animal (used by humans as food) has been polluted by GM, afaik, there is no way to undo it.

We might think GM is safe for now, but in experiments on animals (you won't hear of this much in the mainstream media), it caused sterility in just seven generations, among other health problems.

I do hope we can manage not to utterly trash this biosphere, and ourselves along with it

Metta

[Kim O'Hara]

Interesting thread. I would say the next "smoking" would definitely be "hydraulic fracturing"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing

I live in a state that uses this process to extract natural gas. There is a huge list of chemicals used in the process. It also apparently causes methane seepage into ground water which will pollute tap water in households near the wells. People in the areas can literally light their tap water on fire. Also, numerous other strange health effects are caused in people who live around these wells. There is a documentary called "Gasland" that exposes these problems. As a reaction to this, a gas industry funded documentary was released called "Truthland" trying to disprove "Gasland". In response, the creator of "Gasland" released a response documentary to "Truthland" called "The Sky Is PInk", disproving further the industry's claims and denial of the harm they are apparently causing.

Ironically, the same PR firm that was hired by the tobacco industry in 1953 to tell the world that smoking is harmless and does not cause lung cancer, etc, is the exact same PR firm that a lobbying organization for the gas and oil industry hired to try to plant doubt in the minds of the public of the dangers of hydraulic fracturing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_%26_Knowlton

"Gasland" is one of the scariest movies I have seen, and fracking is a slow-mo environmental disaster. It's coming to Australia, too, but some of us are pushing back against it with some success.
But there is no mystery or irony about the disinformation campaign. The same small group of people have sold their services to (successively) the tobacco companies, the DDT makers, the CFC makers, and a couple more. They are now leading climate change denialism. Sound bizarre? It is, but it's true. Read Merchants of Doubt - see http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt.


Kim

[Mr Man]

Interesting thread. I would say the next "smoking" would definitely be "hydraulic fracturing"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_fracturing

I live in a state that uses this process to extract natural gas. There is a huge list of chemicals used in the process. It also apparently causes methane seepage into ground water which will pollute tap water in households near the wells. People in the areas can literally light their tap water on fire. Also, numerous other strange health effects are caused in people who live around these wells. There is a documentary called "Gasland" that exposes these problems. As a reaction to this, a gas industry funded documentary was released called "Truthland" trying to disprove "Gasland". In response, the creator of "Gasland" released a response documentary to "Truthland" called "The Sky Is PInk", disproving further the industry's claims and denial of the harm they are apparently causing.

Ironically, the same PR firm that was hired by the tobacco industry in 1953 to tell the world that smoking is harmless and does not cause lung cancer, etc, is the exact same PR firm that a lobbying organization for the gas and oil industry hired to try to plant doubt in the minds of the public of the dangers of hydraulic fracturing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_%26_Knowlton

"Gasland" is one of the scariest movies I have seen, and fracking is a slow-mo environmental disaster. It's coming to Australia, too, but some of us are pushing back against it with some success.
But there is no mystery or irony about the disinformation campaign. The same small group of people have sold their services to (successively) the tobacco companies, the DDT makers, the CFC makers, and a couple more. They are now leading climate change denialism. Sound bizarre? It is, but it's true. Read Merchants of Doubt - see http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt.


Kim

Fracking was blamed for two minor earthquakes in the UK but the Govt. has given permission for fracking to continue.

[SarathW]

Nicotine patches!

[GraemeR]

Governments make a lot of money from tobacco also.

Which is why they restrict where it can used, rather than ban it.

With metta

Graham

[danieLion]

It is necessary to bear a few general points in mind. First we are citizens of a society in which, utterly uniquely for the first time in history, most people now live out their natural lifespan to die from diseases strongly determined by ageing. Thus the putative gains from 'prevention' (if real) are likely to be quite small. Next, the human organism could not survive if its physiological functions such as blood pressure (implicated in stroke) or level of cholesterol (implicated in heart disease) varied widely in response to changes in the amount and type of food consumed. These functions rather are protected by a 'milieu intérieur', a multiplicity of different feedback mechanisms that combine to ensure a 'steady state'. Hence truly substantial changes in the pattern of food consumption are required to change them and thus influence the types of diseases in which they have been implicated.

Next, man, as the end product of hundreds of millions of years of evolution, is highly successful as a species by virtue of this phenomenal adaptability. Humans can and do live and prosper in a bewildering variety of different habitats, from the plains of India to the Arctic wastes. No other species has the same facility, so it might seem improbable that for some reason right at the end of the twentieth century subtle changes in the pattern of food consumption should cause lethal diseases.

Finally, the evidence for the Social Theory is overwhelmingly statistical, based on the inference that the lives we lead and the food we eat cause disease in the same way that smoking causes lung cancer. Sir Austin Bradford Hill's insistence that such statistical inferences by themselves have no meaning unless they are internally coherent, that is to say, when the several different types of evidence for an association between an environmental factor and disease (such as tobacco and lung cancer) are examined, they all point to the same conclusion. Put another way, no matter how plausible the link between dietary fat and heart disease might seem, just one substantial inconsistency in the statistical evidence undermines it....

The Social Theory was by the 1980's was very influential. It's protagonists were powerful men and women who had spent enormous sums of state and charitable funds to prove their theories so their admission of error would not just be humiliating but could destroy their reputations. They did not even seem to acknowledge they might have been mistaken, but believed so passionately in the veracity of their theories that any minor blemish--such as negative results of the heart disease trials--could be brushed aside.

This collective self-delusion is not common and suggests the protagonists, in constructing their facade of knowledge, must in some way have been different from the mainstream of medicine. They were--being motivated by a shared set of ideological beliefs that might tactfully be described as idealist utopianism. They had a much grander, nobler vision than ordinary doctors in the surgery who spent their time treating the sick. They aspired to nothing less than the prevention of illness on a massive scale. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make the world a better place, but utopianism has its dangers. It presupposes a greater knowledge base than medicine possesses while, at the same time, it refuses to recognise the possibility of uncertainty--that some things might be unknown.

The utopians entranced by 'big' ideas tend to be dismissive of small details that get in the way. The are forever producing plans and setting targets for how people should change their dietary habits or how wealth should be redistributed but have no model of human action, no understanding of how people do change.

-James Le Fanu. The Rise And Fall of Modern Medicine, pp. 286, 333-34 (2000, Carroll & Graf)

[danieLion]

[Roland]

[daverupa]

Always the same smoking by night, aflame by day, for us anthills...