Is the Food Standards Agency fit for purpose?

Fans of Betteridge's Law will already know the answer....

This is about the latest food scare of course. Toast and “overcooked potatoes” which was later revealed to refer to roasted potatoes (and well-fried chips) are the supposed culprits this time. It's not the first time we've been warned about acrylamides, and probably won't be the last. It's all nonsense, sadly. The basic problem with the FSA approach is that it identifies and publicises chemicals as being likely to be a cancer causing agent, without any(*) consideration of the dose required. As David Spiegelhalter's excellent article explains, a typical human diet contains around 100th of the dose that has been observed to lead to a modest increase in the rate of tumours in animals. And despite all the studies that have been done, no-one has found any link between acrylamide and tumours in humans. But that doesn't stop the FSA generating scare stories about how we shouldn't toast bread properly, or roast our potatoes (I heard someone recommend 45 mins in a cool oven which would just produce soft greasy pallid lumps).

Incidentally, that article probably doesn't blow DS's horn sufficiently for people to realise how authoritative an expert he is. He is Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory, Centre for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge. When he writes about something, he's probably right.

Anyway, I'm going to keep on roasting.

* not strictly true as a careful reading of David Spiegelhalter's article reveals. But the margin of safety has to be astronomical, rather than merely huge, in order for them to discount it.

"untrue" that excessive calories caused obesity

So according to the National Obesity Forum (as reported by the BBC), it is

"untrue" that excessive calories caused obesity.

There's usually a gram of truth underlying each new bit of dietary advice that pops up in the news every 5 minutes. But it's generally buried under a mountain of hyperbole. It now seems clear that the anti-fat advice that I grew up with was somewhat exaggerated. However, does the NOF really expect us to believe that this fine fellow:

built up his fine physique through a strenous regime of cold showers and beatings alone? Incidentally, he's not one of the really fat ones, but he won the one tournament that we went to.

Nothing about this on the NOF website, which seems a bit odd.

Boing

Just in case you needed another reason for buying Sea Neuk, it comes with a limitless supply of tasty wild rabbit, like this one which has just had a few hours in the slow cooker with some red wine and a large bunch of rosemary.

My bloodthirsty hungry sister tells me that she's bagged one since I was last there. Actually, before I get savaged by the bunny-huggers, I should let on that I didn't shoot this one either.

Possibly the best pizza in the world

Another trip to Tokyo on Tuesday, this time to the EU Delegation to hear a European science bigwig talk about funding opportunities. When notified of the event, I had recognised the name - Don Dingwell - as the current President of the EGU, which was one added point of interest, but he was visiting in his capacity as the Secretary-General of the European Research Council, to publicise their grant schemes. Oddly, he's Canadian, but has been in Europe for a long time. The odds of a non-Japanese leading the JpGU or heading up a major national funding agency must be very long indeed.

He was pushing the ERC grant scheme as being incredibly attractive, high on science and low on restrictions. I suspect he wants more applicants and a greater global presence in order to justify a large research budget that the committee can then share out amongst their friends (he has one of these grants himself, naturally). But the more he talked it up, the more jules and I thought....meh. When we consider that we have plenty of funding for 5 years for 3 people (postdoc/researcher position to be advertised shortly...) and pretty much complete freedom on what we do (within a general theme), it actually sounds pretty similar. Plus, we didn't have to be world class to get it, or even fill in a 30 page application :-) Of course what we have here won't last for ever and it would be a nice parachute back to the UK when the gravy train hits the buffers (or we get sufficiently fed up to leave), but we wouldn't stand much chance of getting funded anyway. Predictably (but sadly) all the questions from the Japanese attendees were along the lines of "can we get your money without having to cut our apron strings and actually go abroad"...I only exaggerate a little.

After that, we went to have the best pizza in the world. Or so I thought at the time. However on re-reading more carefully, it seems that although the prize-winning chef did indeed win several awards while working there, he has subsequently set himself up somewhere else. It was still very good though, with not a kani-jaga-mayo pizza in sight. Which may explain why it was not completely full. That and being a rainy Tuesday evening. Not only the food, but also the service was good - it was a nice touch to bring the pizzas out sequentially so we had the second one fresh and hot to share. It's also handy location right next to Omotesando station so we might be back some time when we have another central Tokyo engagement.

 Due to the absence of a small decent quality camera (see previous TX5 failure) the pics are rubbish ones from my ipod.