Why the poor pay virtually no attention to ‘quit smoking’ campaigns

Years ago, while working on a street outreach program feeding the homeless, I observed that virtually every one of our clients was a smoker. (In fact, researchers now estimate that about 94% of the North American homeless population smoke). These are men and women whose health is already severely compromised because of their living conditions, mental health issues, addictions or disease – not to mention lack of money for smokes.

Why are they adding a known health threat like tobacco to the mix as well?

A fascinating study in the UK sheds some light on that question by observing that the poorer you are, the more likely you’ll be to take up smoking, and the less likely you’ll also be to quit smoking. It helps to explain the spectacular lack of success that otherwise effective anti-smoking campaigns have among lower socioeconomic populations.   Continue reading

Do you know the bitter dark secret behind that sweet taste of chocolate?

John Robbins is the only son of the American founder of the Baskin-Robbins ice cream empire and was groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps. Instead, he chose to walk away from the Baskin-Robbins fortune, as he explains “… to pursue the dream of a society that is truly healthy, practising a wise and compassionate stewardship of a balanced ecosystem.

The best-selling author of Healthy At 100, The Food Revolution, Diet For A New America, and many other books revisits everybody’s favourite guilty pleasure – the chocolate bar - in an online essay called Is There Slavery In Your Chocolate?

Most of us, he writes, rarely if ever contemplate the journey that brought all that delicious chocolate to our local store shelves. Nor do many of us know the very dark side of our chocolate consumption.   Continue reading

Why industry lobbyists and pseudo-scientists insist that the “meat and butter diet” is actually good for us

Did you ever notice those little food pyramid guideline posters that are issued by the government to remind us how to eat healthy? Did you also notice how these guidelines have managed to change over the years? Turns out that industry lobbyists, front groups, special interest organizations, and a long line of pseudo-scientists are working very hard to demand official dietary guideline changes that will benefit their specific financial goals. And compared to other arguably healthier non-government eating programs like the Mediterranean diet or Harvard University’s Healthy Food Pyramid Alternative, one wonders just how good these processed carb-heavy government pyramids are anyway.

This year, the powerful lobby group called The Sugar Association, for example, is calling any official government recommendation to reduce daily sugar consumption “impractical, unrealistic, and not grounded in the body of evidence.” Continue reading

How 10-year old children are helping Philip Morris earn billions in cigarette sales each year

Philip Morris CEO Louis Camilleri

It’s bad enough that cigarettes are deadly for those who choose to smoke, but workers in the tobacco industry can be equally at risk.  A report called Hellish Work released by Human Rights Watch has revealed 72 cases of children as young as 10 working 12-hour days in Kazakhstan tobacco fields for Philip Morris International, a job with particular risks for child workers, warn the authors of Hellish Work. Nicotine absorbed through the skin is a serious health issue. Those handling tobacco leaves can absorb as much nicotine daily as they would get by smoking 36 cigarettes – a staggering dose for children.   Continue reading