The Ethical Nag

This may seem a wee bit like trashing the work of Santa Claus or Mother Teresa. But what I’m suggesting today was inspired by American dentist-turned-nutritionist Dr. Susan Rubin and her recent essay on why she has decided to no longer purchase U.S. Girl Scout cookies. In fact, she claims that not only will she not buy these cookies, but she actually wants their entire cookie fundraising program to “go extinct”.

And this isn’t just because those American Girl Scouts sell Tagalongs, Thin Mints, Samoas and DoSiDo cookies that are not healthy.  They are cookies, for Pete’s sake, and as an occasional treat, Dr. Rubin has little quarrel with treats.  But there is one ingredient in these cookies that endangers planetary health as well as personal health. Dr. Rubin explains:

“The more I’ve learned about food and food systems, the more I’ve learned about our fragile environment. Every single flavor of Girl Scout cookies this year contains palm oil. While it is a saturated fat, that’s not why I don’t want my kids eating it. The issue is environmental.”

Dr. Rubin goes on to say that to grow palm oil, we destroy rainforests. And that means destroying the planet’s most biodiverse ecosystems, home to millions of indigenous people, rare plants and endangered animal species, and creating runaway climate change that will impact our very future on this planet.

I wondered about our own Canadian Girl Guides, who also sell cookies to raise much-needed funds to support valuable Guiding programs.  So I contacted Lucie Page, who works in Cookie Customer Service at Girl Guides of Canada.  I asked her: “Lucie, do our Girl Guide cookies contain palm oil like those American Girl Scout cookies do?” She replied:

“Yes, they do. Palm oil is being used in both Girl Guides’ Classic and Mint cookies.”

Oh, no, Lucie!  Not the Girl Guide Mint ones!  I love those cookies. The only good news about Girl Guide cookies is that they no longer contain artery-clogging transfats, following growing worldwide pressure to reduce or eliminate this deadly fat in all processed foods. Maybe it’s about time we now asked the same hard questions about this palm oil.   Read more…

Dr. Stefan Szymanski is a professor of economics at City University London, and the author of Playbooks and Checkbooks: An Introduction to the Economics of Modern Sports. As such, he knows far more than you and I do on the subject of whether hosting Olympic Games is a good or bad deal for host cities. And now that the deliriously happy crowds have departed Vancouver, like all party hosts in the cold hard light of the morning after, we British Columbia taxpayers can re-assess our own 17-day party.

Between now and the next Olympics in London two years hence, you can expect to hear lots more of the harsh economic reality from unbiased economists like Dr. Szymanski. They know their stuff. Unlike the party-goers making their hungover but happy way home after Canada won gold in men’s hockey (the only gold medal that hockey-mad Canadians really needed to win, and a wildly popular TV event watched by 80% of all Canadians.  Just check this revealing graph of Edmonton toilet flushing usage for proof!) –  these economists study what has actually happened around the world in other host cities following their own Olympic Games.

You won’t hear any of this reality, by the way, from the Vancouver Olympic Organizing Committee and assorted boosters, politicians, corporate sponsors, or the 100,000+ party people who celebrated nightly into the wee hours along Vancouver’s Granville Street (ungraciously dubbed “the river of vomit” by The Globe and Mail’s Christie Blatchford ). Time magazine’s Sean Gregory added this description of us:

“Let’s face it: if public intoxication were an Olympic sport, Vancouver and Whistler would own the podium. These are the fourth Olympics I’ve covered, and Vancouver drinks Athens, Torino and Beijing under the table. And all of that drinking has led to a lot of public urinating. The city has had to force liquor stores to close at 7 p.m. on the nights the Canadian hockey teams played. Vancouver appears to have more morons per square foot than TV’s Jersey Shore house.”

Kind of makes you proud to be a Canadian, eh? Then BC Business magazine predicted in its February Olympics feature, Ten Debt Sentences:

“You can count on three things being true with these Winter Olympics: the initial cost estimates for staging the Games will be underestimated, the Games will almost certainly lose money, and organizers will claim they made a profit. Yet all this appears to be forgotten when a new city hosts the next Games.”

As quoted in Why the Olympics Are Bad Business, sports economist Dr. Jeffrey Owen of Indiana State University reminds us:

“To date, there has not been a single study of an Olympics or other large-scale sporting event that has found empirical evidence of significant economic impacts.”

Now that our obscenely expensive 2010 Vancouver Winter Games party is history, let’s revisit this Washington Post essay in which Dr. Szymanski dissects these five common Olympic myths: Read more…

Poor Toyota.  The car maker has been forced to recall more than 8 million vehicles worldwide after news that at least 34 deaths have been linked to Toyota vehicle problems going back as far as 2004. But compare those 34 deaths with the more than 1,000 reports of patient deaths linked with the prescription drug Avandia in just one nine-month period last year, a death rate described by an Institute for Safe Medication Practices report as: “more than any other drug we monitor.” John Mack, editor of Pharma Marketing News, warns:

“If people are afraid to buy Toyotas, then based on average yearly death rates, they should be about 400 times more afraid to take Avandia.”

Avandia (which is the brand name for the Type 2 diabetes drug rosiglitazone, manufatured by drug giant GlaxoSmithKline) was once taken by millions worldwide, but that changed after a Cleveland Clinic study released in early May of 2007 suggested that Avandia increased a user’s odds of heart attack by 43%.  At the time, Dr. Bruce M. Psaty of the University of Washington – who also co-wrote an accompanying editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine – urged the Food & Drug Agency to restrict access to Avandia, and then cited both the agency and GlaxoSmithKline for poor oversight.

“The primary problem here is that studies that were needed early on about the health benefits of Avandia were never done.” 

For a graphic illustration of how GSK simply distorted their study numbers, check out this AdWatch analysis of an Australian Avandia ad. 

Here in Canada, GlaxoSmithKline was ordered to update prescribing warning information on product labels for all drugs made from or containing the drug rosiglitazone: Avandia, Avandamet and AvandarylTM.  In the U.S., a ‘black box’ warning label was ordered for product packaging that advised consumers about potential cardiac damage.

Then in 2008, Dr. David Graham and Dr. Kate Gelperin, drug safety officials at the FDA, claimed that Avandia was directly responsible for at least 500 additional heart attacks every month, and warned:

“Rosiglitazone should be removed from the market.”  

Despite that strong language, annual sales of the blockbuster drug Avandia still topped $1.2 billion last year. Somebody is still prescribing this drug to patients, despite fierce attacks from researchers, scientists, the FDA itself, and now  a scathing 2-year investigative report released last week by the U.S. Senate.  

Is it just me, or do others wonder why this drug, in light of increasingly damning evidence, is still allowed on the market?   Are 500 additional heart attacks every month not enough reason to pull Avandia?  How come we are able to quickly pull millions of Toyotas off the road, but we can’t seem to get a drug that may be responsible for thousands of heart attacks and deaths off your doctor’s Rx pad?  Read more…