More sugar crusade nonsense

Ever since the demonization of salt and fat went into a 180 degree turn, sugar has been the favoured dietary nemesis, despite a lot of evidence that sugar is generally harmless.  We eat so much sugar that we would all be dead if it really were harmful.  But the idea that there is no such thing as "healthy" food just seems to be beyond a lot of brains to accept.

The campaigners below however have found a study which showed sugar as harmful in rats.  Sadly however, the study was never completed or published.  The authors below draw most adverse inferences from that -- blaming "big sugar".

But if big sugar was reponsisible for cancelling the study, they had good reason to do so.  The study was a example of the now discredited strategy of feeding rats huge amounts of something and seeing what happened.  As soon as the paymasters saw that that was what the researchers were doing, they had every right to withdaw funding.  You can show that almost anything -- including water -- can be harmful if you feed some subject huge amounts of it.  The quantities used these days have to bear some relationship to normal consumption.

And none of that is new.  It has long been a basic principle of toxicology that the toxicity is in the dose.  It is no loss that a study which ignored that faded from view


More than four decades ago, a study in rats funded by the sugar industry found evidence linking the sweetener to heart disease and bladder cancer, the paper trail investigation reports.

The results of that study were never made public.

Instead, the sugar industry pulled the plug on the study and buried the evidence, said senior researcher Stanton Glantz. He is a professor of medicine and director of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education.

Glantz likened this to suppressed Big Tobacco internal research linking smoking with heart disease and cancer.

"This was an experiment that produced evidence that contradicted the scientific position of the sugar industry," Glantz said. "It certainly would have contributed to increasing our understanding of the cardiovascular risk associated with eating a lot of sugar, and they didn't want that."

In response to the investigation, The Sugar Association issued a statement calling it "a collection of speculations and assumptions about events that happened nearly five decades ago, conducted by a group of researchers and funded by individuals and organizations that are known critics of the sugar industry."

The new paper focuses on an industry-sponsored study referred to as Project 259 in documents generated by the Sugar Research Foundation and its successor, the International Sugar Research Foundation, and dug up decades later by Glantz and his colleagues.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham in England conducted Project 259 between 1967 and 1971, comparing how lab rats fared when fed table sugar versus starch. The scientists specifically looked at how gut bacteria processed the two different forms of carbohydrate.

Early results in August 1970 indicated that rats fed a high-sugar diet experienced an increase in blood levels of triglycerides, a type of fat that contributes to cholesterol.

Rats fed loads of sugar also appeared to have elevated levels of beta-glucuronidase, an enzyme previously associated with bladder cancer in humans, the researchers said.

Months after receiving these results, the International Sugar Research Foundation failed to approve an additional 12 weeks of funding that the Birmingham researchers needed to complete their work, according to the authors behind the new investigation.

SOURCE. Journal article here

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Judicial Watch sues Kentucky over alleged 'dirty voting rolls'

A conservative watchdog group is suing Kentucky over its alleged failure to maintain accurate voter registration lists, claiming 48 counties in the state have more registered voters than citizens over the voting age of 18.

Judicial Watch filed the federal lawsuit against Kentucky’s Democratic Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky on Wednesday.

In its complaint, Judicial Watch claims that Kentucky leads the nation in the number of counties where total registration exceeds the citizen voting-age population.

“Kentucky has perhaps the dirtiest election rolls in the country,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said Wednesday. “Federal law requires states to take reasonable steps to clean up their voting rolls—and clearly Kentucky hasn’t done that.”

Fitton said the lawsuit aimed to “ensure” that Kentucky citizens have “more confidence” that elections in the state won’t be “subject to fraud.”

Kentucky is required by law to disclose to the federal Election Assistance Commission the inactive registrations it carries on its voter rolls. Judicial Watch claims the state “failed to do so.”

According to Judicial Watch, Kentucky also is required by the National Voter Registration Act to make registration-related records publicly available by request -- but the group claims the state did not make records available to them.

“Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections,” Fitton said.

But the Kentucky secretary of state’s office told Fox News the lawsuit is “without merit.”

“We are confident the facts will prove Kentucky is following the law and doing its due diligence to protect voters’ rights and franchise,” Grimes’ spokesman Bradford Queen told Fox News Wednesday.

Queen told Fox News that under Grimes’ leadership, Kentucky “has and will continue to” maintain the state’s voter rolls in accordance with all federal and state statutes, ​“including the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.”

“Judicial Watch is a right-wing organization masquerading as a citizen advocacy group, and a majority of its lawsuits have been dismissed,” Queen said. “In reality, Judicial Watch wants to make it harder for people to vote, and the Commonwealth and its State Board of Elections won’t bow to their efforts.”

Judicial Watch is also currently suing the state of Maryland and Montgomery County over their alleged failure to release voter registration documents.

SOURCE

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An End to Democrat Stonewalling on Judicial Picks

Blue slips are out.  "No more Mr Nice guy" from the GOP at last

Don’t say we didn’t warn you, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told Democrats at a rocky Senate Judiciary meeting last week.

When Democrats blew up the 225-year-old judicial confirmation rules in 2013, Grassley said they’d regret it. Now, four years later, the left is finding out just how right he was.

Sure, clearing the way for a simple majority to rubber-stamp Obama's judge nominees seemed like a good idea at the time. But now that the shoe is on the other foot, liberals suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of the same process they manipulated.

President Donald Trump certainly doesn’t mind. He’s been filling bench vacancies at lightning speed, shattering records set in much less partisan times.

Now, left without the only weapon that could stop a confirmation—the filibuster—Democrats are grasping for anything to put the brakes on this high-speed train of nominees. What they’ve settled on is a century-old tradition born out of common courtesy: the blue slip.

Dating back to 1917, if a president nominated someone to the Senate, committee chairmen would send an evaluation form of sorts to the person’s hometown senators. They could return it, signaling their willingness to hold a hearing, or withhold it—usually grinding the progress on that nomination to a halt.

Desperate for leverage, liberal senators like Sens. Al Franken, D-Minn.; Ron Wyden, D-Ore.; Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.; and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., have tried to use these blue slips as the obstructionist method du jour.

There’s just one problem: The practice has never been an official Senate rule. Instead, it’s more of a gentlemanly agreement to give deference to the two leaders who may know the person in question best.

So while senators have taken to withholding their blue slips in protest, there’s nothing stopping Grassley from moving forward without them.

And on Thursday, he promised to do just that. The longtime conservative announced to his colleagues that his patience has officially run out.

“As I’ve said all along, I won’t allow the blue slip process to be abused. I won’t allow senators to prevent a committee hearing for political or ideological reasons. … The Democrats seriously regret that they abolished the filibuster, as I warned them they would. But they can’t expect to use the blue slip courtesy in its place. That’s not what the blue slip is meant for.”

The tradition was never created, Grassley went on, to be a home-state veto. And after Thanksgiving, he refuses to treat it like one.

When the Senate flies back from turkey day, the Iowa Republican has already announced his plan to move on 8th and 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals nominees David Stras and Kyle Duncan.

“I’ll add that I’m less likely to proceed on a district court nominee who does not have two positive blue slips from home state. But circuit courts cover multiple states. There’s less reason to defer to the views of a single state’s senator for such nominees.”

For Trump, Grassley has been a perfect partner in accomplishing what most voters agreed was one of their biggest priorities: reshaping the federal judiciary.

“When the history books are written about the Trump administration, the legacy will be the men and women confirmed to the trial bench,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, explained. And when that happens, some of the credit will almost certainly belong to leaders like Chuck Grassley.

SOURCE

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Blood pressure nonsense

They keep putting the "safe" level down

Seven million more people in England would be classed as having high blood pressure under controversial new guidance.

Doctors have expressed alarm over a change that would result in four in ten adults being classed as ill, warning of a statins-style row over the medicalisation of healthy people.

However, blood pressure experts insist that it is right to focus on a risk that is one of Britain’s biggest causes of death.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) is looking at whether to lower the level at which blood pressure should be treated, saying that there is currently “no natural cut-off point above which ‘hypertension’ definitively exists and below which it does not”.

SOURCE

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