No Nurse! I Said - Prick His - Oh Never Mind!

For readers of the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, you'll already know that despite the stress the diet places on unprocessed foods, tomato paste is the best form of tomato because the boiling process releases the lycopene better than other forms of cooking. Now we know that the same is true of peanuts.

"Lloyd Walker, chair of Alabama A&M University's Department of Food and Animal Sciences who co-authored the study, said these phytochemicals have antioxidant qualities that protect cells against the risk of degenerative diseases, including cancers, diabetes and heart disease."

Apparently, boiling doesn't destroy these phytochemicals as much as roasting does. And raw peanuts don't release the chemicals as easily as cooked peanuts do.

Similarly, the tomato lycopene is released by the boiling process and becomes more available to the body than raw tomato or other forms of it.

And we shouldn't forget that teas started as a way to infuse the healing properties of herbs into water and make them more effective. There's another important lesson here - some delicate properties of teas and herbs are destroyed in anything hotter than boiling water.

Roundup Of Recent Interesting Bits

Roundup:

Biofuels may become more attractive if this membrane that filters out methane and CO2 becomes widespread in use.
As I say, the wheel of life keeps rolling along, yes we have species extinctions but there are a lot of new species being discovered too.
Cloned animal (meat) products may be in your diet already.
But eating cloned meat may be okay of you use potato starch compostable cutlery.
And it all doesn't matter, because the Matrix is closer than you think, and Microsoft is going to be spearheading the changes. Apparently. Get set to be rebooting your brain several times a day... %)

New Psoriasis Drug.

New Psoriasis Drug - this should be good. I have a mild form of psoriasis and it was the first time in my life anyone had told me I had "an incurable disease" which was both upsetting and also rocked my faith in the medical profession.

But this is a 3 month injection and it apparently shifts the plaque form of psoriasis - inform your doctor if you have a need, you might find it is good for you.

Plasma, LCD, Energy Stars, And How To Pick 'Em

If you're in the market for a new TV, bear in mind that all plasmas and some LCDs will not pass energy star compliances, apparently.

That little finding is no news to me, as plasma TVs have always struck me as a pretty inefficient way to light one's home. (I mean, as in the amount of energy they consume for each candela of output, so that if you put the picture on a white screen, you'd use a light meter a standard distance away versus a power meter measuring consumption. Not that you'd use it for lighting, but this is the fairest test I can think of.)

The other day I was taking someone through the plasma/LCD jungle that electronics showrooms have become, and I hit on the best way to explain how to select the TV that's best:

I urged them to select the picture quality they'd be prepared to accept, then walk among those TVs and test the temperature of the screen with the back of their hand. Coolest display wins.

And that's as simple as it gets. Whether plasma or LCD, the amount of heat given off by the screen is a measure of the energy that this particular TV wastes. Heat is wasted energy, and also it prematurely ages the electronics and the actual screen elements, be they plasma dots or LCD domains. NOTE this does NOT apply to rear projection TVs or TV projectors, although the heat test is a reasonable guide to projector efficiency.

So that's the simplest thing you can do right now when buying, to ensure that the TV you buy os the most energy efficient. And you don't even need a Government dude with a pocketful of energy star labels to show you how it's done...

Fats and Meat Don't Increase Prostate Cancer Risk

Beef-eaters rejoice, your gonads are not at risk from fats and meats alone! They are under threat though, if you over-consume and thereby make yourself obese - that will definitely up the risk, and add the risks of Type 2 diabetes and a lovely selection of cardiac and respiratory illnesses.

As I point out in The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, meat has formed part of our diet for a really long time, and our bodies depend on it. An abundance of meat, not so. Meats and animal fats are our natural food and in order to have a sensible effective diet you need some meat, and it's about time scientists produced this result.

SOURCE: International Journal of Cancer, September 15, 2007.

Change To Prostate Cancer Biopsy Procedures

This is still the least acceptable outcome in my mind. As some of you may know, I began developing prostate cancer at age 48/49 and I checked into the treatments available to me. Not good news, the most common intervention, being a surgical procedure, results in impotence and incontinence for the vast majority of men, and chemical methods and radiotherapy having figures not all that different.

I developed The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook diet because this option has no side effects, unless you count a slow 1Kg/mth weight loss as a side effect. Being a bit of a scaredy-cat, I used nothing else but the diet for seven months, and at the end of that seven months, my PSA had reduced from 4.8 to 0.8, and my urologist said there was no need to take a second biopsy set of samples because a PSA that low meant there was no more cancer.

The first biopsy? That showed over 60% of cells with high grade PIN, which is cells turning cancerous. I'm confident, two years later, that this percentage will be hovering somewhere between zero and naff-all.

I developed the diet from some food hints my urologist gave me, and seven months intensive research on the Internet, ultimately testing each combination on myself. And "combination" is a carefully chosen word here, because one of the things I as a generalist found and which most specialists would miss, is that some foods harmonise together extremely well.

For example, tomato is good. Tomato sauce is better, and tomato paste is best, at supplying several antioxidant groups to fight the cancerous cells.

But tomato paste and grape seed oil together are up to TEN TIMES more effective than tomato paste alone, meaning you can use a lesser quantity to cook with and still get a huge benefit from the combination.

So if your prostate cancer is still in the low stages, try the diet. It's now worked for several people to lower PSA, has helped a woman get over cancer of the womb, and (because certain causes are similar) a Type 2 diabetes sufferer reduce her cholesterol and blood sugar.

Moronic Statements are Oxymoronic

If I read this right, then we'll actually be unaffected on the whole. But a bit warmer...

Look, I'm all for bringing attention to bear on the fate of the world, and I'm all for everyone getting on that bandwagon and making people more aware of what's going on. What really shits me is when otherwise trustworthy, respected, and august bodies start dribbling crap and confusing people.

I don't care WHERE you live, drought and flooding are mutually exclusive. Sorry.

Australia may experience flooding in some regions and drought in others, that I can accept. We're a big country, with room for wide variation. But none of that is made clear by that article, it's just badly written and doesn't convey what may happen.

Temperatures rising means more energy in the weather systems. And there's no use saying Australia will be affected as though only Australia will be affected, the entire world is a system that constantly tries to balance itself out, and adding more energy to the system means everywhere will experience wilder weather and more extremes.

It's just that the whole article sounds like an exercise in panic-mongering, which is not as good as an exercise in gradual and coherent education would be.

Folks, batten down the hatches, because there is definitely going to be an interesting ride weatherwise in the next few years. But please don't go running around the streets bellowing "Fire! Flood! Drought! Famine! Doom and gloom!" because that will not help.

Bottler Of A Footprint

One last thought, this time about bottled water. I mentioned the sensationalist thing about using the most water per household (in indirect ways) of any country in the world, yesterday. Today, quite coincidentally, on TV was something that really DOES deserve headlines - bottled water.

They mentioned another footprint, the "carbon footprint" and I'll add two more, the "rubbish footprint" and the "greenhouse footprint." I'll readily admit, I made those two up on the spot, but they should all be forming part of our ecological awareness.

Do you know how much water/energy/material goes into making the bottles, filtering the water, and filling those bottles? Distributing them by the truckload? Displaying them in outlets and keeping them cold for you? And then, do you recycle the bottle or throw it in with the general rubbish? Are you aware how much water/energy/pollution is needed to recycle the plastic? Or that some so-called recycling plants actually just throw them into the landfill anyway?

I'll set you a thought challenge - it's not a very responsible challenge, but it should point out something to you. Collect all your rubbish for a week - including the fine plastic garbage bags - and pile it up on a fireproof surface in or around your home. Now seriously consider setting fire to it. Would you like that amount of smoke and smell and toxic fumes in your place?

I'm betting you wouldn't - yet oxidising and breaking down that rubbish in a landfill or waste disposal plant will release exactly the same amount of pollution to the ecosystem. Not only that, but between five and twenty times that much toxicity has already been released by the manufacture of those goods - that the rubbish is now the sad remnant of.

Think about that the next time you buy plastic bottles of milk, tins of foods laced with preservatives, and your week's worth of loaves of bread from a factory outlet in plastic sleeves, and carry it all proudly home in six plastic shopping bags driving your six cylinder 3.8 litre touring class vehicle. THAT'S where you'll start to make a difference!

Got Booze and Brains, Now Just Gimme Good Looks.

Always good to have a "bad habit" legitimised by research. God bless the Kiwis sometimes...

Depending on your body type, ethnicity, and habits, between one and four drinks a day increases "cognition." It makes you smarter. In one way, I knew that. We all know that, in some deep atavistic fashion. See? We're smart about alcohol!

Okay. According to my research for The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, it was already known that a glass of red wine a day confers a health benefit for most people, and especially for my target audience, prostate cancer sufferers. I also unearthed that other alcoholic drinks confer benefits, provided they are used in moderation. If you're European, in fact, you have a gene that confers some immunity from some effects of alcohol.

And there are certain forms of alcohol that are better than others for you, especially if they are made in the time-honoured ways without commercial chemicals. I'll just say this - I like cider, I like beer, I like red wine, I like mead. Now that I have a reason to imbibe one or two a day, life is distinctly looking up again...

Water Wail

We're bad at water conservation, if this study is anything to go by. I've had this article on the back burner for a while, until inspiration should hit me - and it finally has.

The thing here is, the hidden water costs are in things like making the fertiliser to produce the grapes or the feed for the beef, in processing those products, and then delivering them to us. But these things recycle. Eventually, all that water circulates back.

The trick for us is not to take it out faster than it can trickle back into the system. That, and the fact that a good percentage of that water that fell on the grapes or the feed for the stock, would have fallen anyway, and produced no benefit to us at all, had we not fortuitiously had a farm underneath it...

Once you realise that, the water footprint becomes a bit less of a scandal and a bit more of a "what can we do to reduce it?"

It's another example of blowing something up out of proportion. Yes a decent steak may have cost 100 litres of water to produce - but if you didn't create the demand for it by eating it, I estimate that 75 litres of that water would still have gone around the cycle anyway. So whoopee.

Those people who have a smaller water footprint are also invariably living in poverty and squalor. Don't forget that. They have no choice but to forego that steak. And if you counted how much water per person went through the aquifers and the hydrological cycle, I'm sure you'd find that this figure depends on the rainfall and water flows for the region, not the profligate lifestyles of the population.

I wonder how much of a headline that would make? "Australia has a lower population density than almost anywhere else in the world" sounds a lot less exciting that saying "AUSTRALIANS ARE THE WORST WATER WASTERS IN THE WOOOOOOOORLD!"

Sensationalising something doesn't make you an environmental crusader, just a tosser.

The Psychology of Food and Eating

Some good points on the psychology of food and eating here - chances are you have known this, subliminally, all along.

Just a few observations - if you present a big meal on a huge plate, it will look smaller and you'll tend to eat more to compensate. Better to sneak a smaller meal onto a small plate, your brain will make the "plate 90% full = huge meal" connection even when it *knows* the plate is smaller.

Eating while using a computer is a nasty habit anyway - and you do tend to munch more when distractedly reading your RSS feeds, so don't do it. Have snacks between meals, by all means. Just not while at the computer. And if you have snacks, try and skip a meal. Have a good breakfast, snack during the day, and skip lunch.

Are you the cook? Get a smaller set of saucepans, and when you read a recipe, mentally cut the fat in half and use body friendlier fats. Trust me, all these things work. Smaller serving sizes are great, but smaller serving vessels are even better. If there's less to go around, most people instinctively take a smaller serving on their plate. And if the plate is smaller too, they may end up eating a meal only two thirds of what they'd serve themselves if the serving vessel was huge.

Your brain is finely-honed and superbly tuned, just not for instances like this where old survival traits (like stuffing yourself at mealtimes) meet modern social requirements. (Like not becoming overweight, not taking the last serving, not appearing to be the "greedy" one.)

Unfortunately, when it has instances like this, your mind hands over to the old atavistic brain and that's why we need to fool it. So even if it sounds like utter crap to you, give it a go and be surprised.

Environmental IDIOTS Block - Wind Power?

Bad words! No <g> rating! You have been warned!

Stories like this one make me so ashamed to be known as "environmentally conscientious."

Their concerns that "400-foot turbines would loom over an adjacent wilderness area" is such a load of shit that I am just about struck speechless.

Really, when people act like total assholes like this I depair, and I think maybe we deserve to go extinct. Would they prefer a nice tail of nuclear fallout from another melted-down power plant "looming over" their precious effing wilderness area?

How about all the other wilderness areas in the world, they should all get placed under pollution stress because these dickheads are worried about one wilderness area being "loomed over?"

Pack of NIMBY assholes, I hope someone shits in your gardens and buries you and your fucking dog in oil sludge and soot and greenhouse wastes!

And to my regular readers, I sincerely apologise - but I hope that just ONE of these people reads this article and gets their head out from up their arse long enough to realise what a pack of pettyfogging shitheads they look like to the rest of the world...

Get More From Your Solar Array!

I've just posted an article to the Zencookbook Dot Com site which is hopefully the first of many, this one concerns an improvement that can be made to most solar array installations to produce a bit more output from both new or existing installations. I've also asked for someone to sponsor me with this and other experiments, so if you can help please contact me.

I've taken the step of just putting the whole idea online because right now, anything that gets more energy out of existing technology and thereby makes it cheaper to own, is desperately needed, and I'd rather see this idea in use than argue and fight with (so far) dozens of stupid company people who should know better but are all too tight-arsed to reach in their pocket and help develop an idea...

So it's public domain for non-commercial use, and if you find it useful maybe you can sponsor me or donate something I can use for further development.

Zencookbook Has A New Home!

After countless dropped-out connections thanks to the total crap Telstra are allowed to serve up and call phone lines in a capital city, I've moved Zencookbook to a hosting service, and while I was at it also changed from the rather ordinary HTML only pages to a a CSS based and hopefully compliant format. That means that only the front page is there as yet, but that's a start... Rest of site is now just a matter of transferrinf text to the new framework.

Jatropha. New fuel crop or regrettable mistake?

Keep an eye on jatropha - if this is half as good as they say, I'd say we'd be fools not to look into places where it can be planted. A lot of our farmers here in Western Australia in the last few years have discovered how much the drought can suck.

I'm not advocating turning a whole property over to jatropha production - again, as for the Mali farmers, food production should not suffer for fuel crop production - but in a drought, a crop that can produce income without needing the guaranteed rainfall might not be a bad idea...

Now for the negatives. Haven't we learned from cane toads and rabbits and tilapia? But apparently the Mali farmers manage to grow it between rows of crops, and that gives hope that it would be controllable. Also, I'm thinking of one other "weed" that I've found a use for.

Growing wild over enormous amounts of the land here are these small yellow melons, which are treated like a weed and which grow pretty much anywhere, unassisted. You can cook them into a pretty flat tasting melon pie, but the real value of them is in the seeds.

See, the seeds are similar to pumpkin seeds, and when dried and roasted, are a snack that seems to be rich in antioxidants and may possibly be an addition to the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook diet. Pumpkin seeds are one suggested food that helps our bodies to reverse cancer, but the seeds have tough outer shells and that means either nasty chewy splintery bits when roasted, or a lot of hard work hulling the seeds before roasting.

The pigmelon seeds have thinner outer coverings. Also, with pumpkins, you need to get the seeds when pumpkin is being processed, or grow pumpkins especially for seed. These pigmelons are pretty much good for nothing else but their seeds, except that the pulp and stems and leaves would make a good return to the soil of organic matter - since you're extracting the seeds, you can be pretty sure the plant won't get away under your crop because there's no seeds to grow from.

So it makes sense to me to grow some of the things that don't need precise rainfall and pH and NPK ratios, during the worst years of drought, and revert to mostly food crops and a bit of "insurance cropping" during the better years. And if demand for these products grows, who knows we may open up a whole new belt for more eco-sensitive farming.

Links To Articles Of Interest Aug 07

To CFL or not to CFL?:
First, a link to a guide to CFL light bulbs - please note that there are a number of things that can be described a bit more.

CFL lights are Compact Fluorescent Lamps and they combine the humble fluoro tube (a bit coiled in on itself and mangled, but the same, basically) with an electronic circuit which replaces the big metal ballast in a traditional fluoro light fitting. Ballasts, being a winding of wire, had some resistance and lost some energy due to heat, and were prone to buzzing when the core laminations began to separate. The electronics still wastes some energy as heat but is generally less wasteful and not noisy.

CCFL lights are Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamps and they include a tiny inverter so that they can operate off 12V. Think of those older 12V powered fluoro light fittings that were so popular as car trouble lights in the late 70's and early 80's - this is them, married to a CFL style lamp.

On the drawback side, the article I reference above mentions that you might save $80 a year on an average household power bill by using CFL light bulbs, and that CFLs cost more to initially purchase, and that may both be true - but there is a far more compelling reason to buy CFL - you are saving pollution which would have been generated by the power station to supply the extra power. That alone make it imperative to switch to CFL or CCFL style lighting.

On the bonus side, using CFLs means you can light up some of the more dimly lit areas of your home and still generate less pollution. Also, CFL light globes are now a LOT cheaper than you think. Shop around, I'll give you an idea or two to start you off:

In Woolworths, a CFL bulb costs around the $5.00 mark, occasionally you may find two to a pack for that price, but in general, Woolworths is a grocery store not an electrical/hardware store. Going to Bunnings I can pay $9.00 for a blister pack of four of the same wattage CFL, and if you go to a discount store you can pick up two packs for $3.00 sometimes.

As the article also states, CFL are a fluorescent tube based light and include some mercury. Better to recycle these and return the mercury to the manufacturing process than let it seep through the water table from the landfill to your water...

BONUS POINTS: If you realise that by buying a solar panel and a gel battery and running CCFL light bulbs outside, you can have a garden lighting system that is as well lit as a fluorescent lighted garden, for no further outlay, no further energy costs, and no further pollution. I've been using this system with a small 300mm X 300mm 4W solar panel and a cheap $20 gel battery for a year, and it lasts well into the wee hours of the morning, I have a little timer on it so it turns on around 8PM and off again at 2AM and it has never let us down. And it has cost $0.00 in electricity or pollution since then.

Buy Fresh, Buy Local:
My second find of the month involves buying local and buying fresh. Don't think "oh, that's a simple concept, why is he bothering?" and dismiss it. This is at one swoop the best thing you can do for your quality of life, and if you don't do it you pretty much deserve what you get.

It's so simple - ask at your corner store, your grocer, your butcher, your supermarket - "Is there a local produce section please?" and if there is, buy whatever you can from there over the shiny offerings from the "national warehouses ensuring that you get the freshest produce ever."

Anything you can do to break the large supermarket chains' holds on produce markets, will result in a better quality of life for you and your family. If your local "SuperHugeMarket" isn't selling those tomatoes that they've had in the chiller room for the last eight months so they can name their own price for tomatoes this season, they will stop doing it. Their price of tomatoes will go up, but your local markets will have reasonably priced - and more importantly, fresh and healthy - tomatoes.

If you can do this, and avoid the trap of preservative-laden or "convenient" produce, you're taking a step towards a healthier life. If you purchase a copy of my Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, you'll be making another.

The Colour of Cancer-Free

Found a "fresh minted" article here that will help with the diet in the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, but it needs a bit of clarification I think. Before you go rushing out and buying everything in sight based on colour... hehehe...

First, this article, as in so many others, barely mentions the words "fresh" nor "natural." Not as in "the kind my supermarket would have you believe but in fact we've stored this stuff for up to a year already and bombarded it with chemicals to keep it looking bright and fresh" but the kind of fresh you get from taking a vegetable that has ripened in the ground, been harvested no more than a few days ago, and brought all nice and cool and crisp to the market where you've taken it home and cooked it within a day sort of fresh and natural.

Because, if the fruit or vegetable has been treated to make it keep longer, it's now contaminated with chemicals that are NOT in the human species' diet plan. If it's been stored for any length of time, the active ingredients have lost their potency and you may as well eat coloured starch. And most importantly, if it's out of season, then for most fruits and vegetables we've lost the other great natural healing force, the Pulse. In the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook I mention the Pulse for a range of ingredients and how it's actually a large part of the effectiveness of the diet.

Also note that not all things that are brightly coloured are automatically good for one. The beautiful red colour of Amanitae mushrooms hides a potent toxin that kills flies on contact and can kill a human almost as easily.

Also, bear in mind that the things that give a food the colour and the tart taste are the ingredients we want? Of grapes, it's the skins and seeds (especially the seeds) which give the antioxidant effect, and that is why red wine (which is brewed with the skins and seeds in the vat) is effective while white wine (which is brewed from white grape juice only, no skins or seeds) is not. The old saw that the "goodness is in the skin" of a vegetable is for a large part the truth.

Can I put it any plainer? Old wives' tales had to originate from something. Our ancestors didn't all know how to read and write, but they knew how to pass on observations. The family down the road, that peeled the skins off their vegetables and ate mostly potatoes and very few others, their kids sickened every year. It's as valid an observation as any made by a scientist in their laboratory today, and the way we passed that knowledge on was by repeating it until it stuck and became an old wives' tale...

So if you have any old lore like that, it needs to be preserved. If you leave it in comments here, I will try and collect it inot a coherent and searchable web page every so often. Meanwhile, have a great day, and don't forget to eat your greens, and your reds, and your purples.

Green is the new stupid

No apologies to using a hackneyed paraphrase. This is a hackneyed subject, no matter what. When I first saw the original article appear, my first reaction was "what a pack of eedjits!"

I haven't changed my mind, either. Let's assume, for this scenario, that black backgrounds really do save energy. (They don't on some monitors, by the way.) So how long do you typically spend on the serach engine results page? An hour a day in total? That's under 5% of the day. Assuming that your monitor uses 20% less power on that black screen, that's a saving of 5% of 20% of total power use, or 1% power saving. I could save that by hitting keys slower when working, so that my body doesn't produce as much heat load for the air conditioner to have to move...

Then too, the penetration of LCD monitors means that the backlight stays on at the same level, and switching pixels to black could actually increase power consumption. Also, on some older tube type monitors, clamping the EHT power supply down rather than switching it off can sometimes be used to produce black. Again, those monitors actually use more power when displaying black.

And of course, while the penetration of LCDs is estimated at 75% in the Google blog article, most of those are in a work environment, many home computer users still have tube type monitors. So the work related monitors are at best not going to experience a practical difference displaying black, and besides, most workplaces pretty much discourage keeping a search engine with a black background open instead of a crisp white document, so these will typically spend much less than an hour a day with that page on top, anyway.

And the homes users, they may use a search engine, but only to find new crisp white pages to read and crisp white games to play.

Best way you can save energy with your monitor is to turn it off when not using it.

1918. Hmmm 2018 is not far away.

It killed more people than several world wars, then vanished. The one year outbreak in 1918 - 1919 killed what was initially thought to be 40 million (!!!) to 50 million people but a more recent revision of these numbers says that figure is approximately double what was initially thought. Spanish Flu could very well have been the closest the human race came to a mass extinction event in recorded history. Let me put this into perspective for you. It is now believed that between 80,000,000 and 100,000,000 people lost their lives to that microscopic killer. That's between four and five times the population of Australia...

The Spanish Flu (or "La Grippe" or "Swine Flu" as it was also variously known) was one variant in the dance between predators and prey, and we weren't the predators in that round... That variant is still latent within the structure of today's viruses and can emerge again, and of course there are any number of other variants which could become even more efficient infectors. It produced extreme symptoms that masked their activity and caused the virus to be misdiagnosed by the much lesser medical knowledge of the time, puzzling doctors. One of the killers was the bacterial pneumonic and bronchial illnesses that resulted from the way the virus acted.

And I'm mentioning that because I believe that I've just survived the great great grandchild of that virus. As you may know, here in Western Australia we have had four young lives cut short by the virus and the bacterial infections it engendered, and in Queensland now, another child has lost the fight. And no-one has checked on how many of the older and more infirm have passed on from pneumonic infections this flu season, and how many of those were attributable to this new virus strain. I'm not even a little sure of any of this, because I am not an epidemiologist, but I think it should be investigated by one.

All I have to go on is the fact that I have never had a flu lay me low for over three weeks, almost four weeks in fact. And five children have been killed by a flu. And an unknown number of seniors. It may not be the global pandemic this year that Spanish Flu was back at the start of last century. But it's early days, and certainly the last 20 years have marked an ever increasing virulence...

One last thought: If anyone is a medical person out there, can the blood of person who has fended off a virus be used to produce an antibody that can be grown and used to inoculate those most at risk? Because if so I need to get me to a laboratory.

Killer Soft Drink

A new study about soft drinks has concluded that one soft drink a day will do you harm. Geez I wonder why I am not surprised and neither should you be. Soft drinks all contain additives and preservatives up the wazoo, to stop what's inside from spoiling on the can and leading to a nasty lawsuit when a drink does obvious damage rather than the hidden subtle damage.

Remember the additives? If a soft drink was composed of fruit, water, and carbon dioxide, then I'd say they would be okay in quantities of one a day. But in addition, every soft drink contains additional very processed white sugar or artificial sweetener, and very artificial and unnatural preservatives, colourants, flavourings, modifiers, and, if you're lucky, up to 5% fruit juice. (Which by the way is not guaranteed to be pure fruit juice even if they had trademarked the name "pure fruit juice" because pure fruit juice has to have some form of preservative in it too.)

Of course the soft drink manufacturers immediately struck back with their most powerful weapon, the old "no it doesn't, either, nyah nyah! You can't prove a thing!" ploy. And of course I'm going to believe their research with its vested interest only in selling soft drink - NOT your health - to give me the results that I can trust, as opposed to a whole range of bodies whose research is set up specifically to find out what things are harming my health. But I must be in the minority, because I still see those drinks on the shelves...

The study doesn't actually go far enough for me, there are a few things I'm curious to know. For example, what about soda water drinkers? Are they at greater risk of arterial plaques and heart disease? What about beer? What about microbrewery beers produced without the range of preservatives and additives? Ciders and meads?

Because I'm betting that if you add fizz to something, it will not harm you aside from maybe giving you hiccups, but as soon as you add something whose parent food is a chemical formula, things are gonna get distinctly dangerous.

One last thought. Making all those chemicals costs us heaps in energy and pollution. Processing it all costs a lot in energy and pollution. Drinking it gives you a raft of health problems that are better off avoided. So why?