Awful, simply awful, when done to best target scarce police resources.
But when done to target those eating ‘unhealthy’ food? Go right ahead!
‘Staggering’ amounts of salt were found in dishes such as jerk chicken and stews, served in African and Caribbean restaurants, a survey found.So what?
Well…
‘This could explain high blood pressure, stroke and cardiovascular complications in people of black African descent,’ said Dr Derin Balogun of University College London.Note the caveats: ‘could explain’, ‘could be’.
‘These are major public health concerns. We urgently need to raise awareness among these communities that some of the foods that they love could be hurting the health of their hearts.’
If you don’t know for sure if it does, what, exactly, are you going to warn them about?
And what paid for this research? Well, would you believe, the Lottery?
The UCL team and voluntary group Heart Campaign have published their Big Lottery Fund-backed findings in a letter to the British Medical Journal.Junk food apartheid. Excellent…
Campaigners want new and specific dietary recommendations to be issued for Britain’s African and Caribbean communities.
I won't even go into the 'science' of excess salt in food, because Leg-Iron has already covered that in fulsome detail.
A vast majority of afroc-carribeans are the descendents of slaves. These slaves were bought in the slave-markets of West Africa, and then crammed into slave ships in incredibly cramped conditions with very little water, and then kepts belowdecks for the first couple of days (this greatly reduced the propensity of slaves to revolt onboard if they were kept chained until well out of sight of land) in conditions of great water stress.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the cargo died under these conditions; the ones who lived were that percentage who were predisposed to retain water better, and to withstand drought better than the average African person.
Drought adaptation also means that the person is predisposed to hang onto salt much more than the average person is; this propensity is heritable.
The descendents of slaves are therefore genetically much more predisposed to hang onto salt than is the average person in the African populations their ancestors came from, and also a lot more predisposed to hang onto salt than the average Western European (who mostly originated from places where there was never any lack of water or lack of salt, so no reason to become adapted to hang onto either).
So, when you put people who're genetically predisposed to retain salt into a culture which thinks that salt tastes very yummy indeed and uses it as a condiment on everything, then those poor buggers are going to have a problem with getting way more salt than their bodies can handle. This is why people of Afro-Carribean descent have such high blood pressure and heart disease problems; that and being generally poor and living on rubbish food which has all the flavour enhancers the producers can think of added to it (think salt, sugar, salt, monosodium glutamate and salt).
The problem is, it ain't politically correct to point out that these people were genetically selected for at one point in the past, and that this selection event has predisposed them to trouble now. Political correctness is a mindbogglingly bloody stupid thing.
That sounds almost too incredible to be true - I'm a little dubious about the timescales concerned.
ReplyDeleteSurely if it can be selected in in such a short period of time, it can be selected out by the same period (plus all the intermixing that has gone on since then)?
The initial selection basically biased pretty much the entire population, and to unbias it you need a similarly hefty selection pressure, or a big influx of new genes. In the USA at least, there isn't all that big a genetic input into the afro-carribean population, and because the problems tend not to hit breeding-age people but instead hit in later life, there isn't the immediate genetic hit effect that you would see on something more immediately deleterious.
ReplyDeleteMost of the population of Europe also show another set of genetic traits that started off small, then got selected for (admittedly not as abruptly) over time. Tolerence of lactose retained into adulthood let us eat dairy foods, and tolerence of alcohol was useful when beer was the only safe thing to drink. White skin is helpful for vitamin D synthesis where the sun isn't all that strong (but its a right bugger for those of us who have really fair skin) but causes problems in sunnier climes.
All that high blood pressure seems to be is very rapid genetic selection during effectively single events; coming from tropical areas the initial slave population was likely already somewhat predisposed towards salt retention, but nowhere near as predisposed as a population where all the low-retainers had been removed.