Making sure your diet has gotta lotta bottle

If there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to have you looking again at your diet and wondering if it’s nurturing you or killing you, then it’s something such as a heart attack in the family.

The Other Half is now attending rehab sessions after his recent Event and these include a weekly talk.

Recently, one on nutrition provided the news that no, locally-produced honey does not render you immune to local pollen. It also included a call for those present to drink more milk, since there’s a risk of an osteoporosis timebomb and they need their calcium.

It’s probably already far more of a problem than most of us realise.

According to Guidelines for diagnosis and management ofosteoporosis (1997) by JA Kanis, P Delmas, P Burckhardt and others, which was published by the European Foundation for Osteoporosis and Bone Disease, in “women over 45 years of age, osteoporosis accounts for more days spent in hospital than many other diseases, including diabetes, myocardial infarction and breast cancer”.

And that’s just women – osteoporosis affects men too.

Of course, the milk-drinking advice included stating that the milk should be skimmed or semi skimmed, and noting that, while calcium can also be found in cheese, you should only to eat a matchbox-sized amount of that in a single day because of the mortal threat of fat.

Look away now – this could be the death of you

Bad luck: today’s lunchtime salad – made at home – included about two Swan Vesta-sized matchboxes worth of feta (together with chick peas, broad beans, sultanas, a little couscous and a ‘dressing’ of plain, Greek-style yogurt).

Having had a small glass of apple juice before leaving home, my breakfast had consisted of a hard-boiled egg, a little poached salmon, some edamame beans and a squirt of teriyaki sauce, with an espresso on the side.

Thank you Itsu: tasty, healthy food, and actually cheaper than the far more conventional breakfast fodder I’ve been having recently.

There was a mid-morning ‘snack’ of a few dates.

Oh dear – never mind the cheese, am I in danger of eating too much fruit, given how it all sugars?

The point, though, is that my rule-shattering amount of feta for lunch should be considered within a wider context of a fairly healthy diet as a whole.

But back to osteoporosis and calcium intake.

I recall reading, approximately 15 years ago, that women on a  diet had a bone density deficit of 22%.

This should surprise nobody, given that one of the first things that goes out of the window when you start dieting is dairy produce.

And on this subject, let’s take a little look at figures for osteoporosis in France and the UK, since the French notoriously eat more cream, cheese and butter than any other nation on planet Earth.

In 2010, there were approximately 377,000 new fragility fractures in France. The number of people aged 50 plus, with osteoporosis, was approximately 3,480,000.

Bone – healthy and not-so healthy

The economic cost of new and prior fractures was estimated as €4,853m each year and it is further estimated that, by 2025, that figure will have increased to €6,111m.

In 2010 in the UK, there were approximately 536,000 new fragility fractures. The number of people aged 50+ with osteoporosis stood at approximately 3.21m. The economic cost of new and prior fractures was £3,496m (€5,408m) each year; by 2025 burden will increase by 24% to £5,465m (€6,723m).

These statistics are from A Svedbom, E Hernlund, M Ivergard, et al, Osteoporosis in the European Union: A compendium of country-specific reports, 2013.

It’s worth noting that calcium deficiency is not the only cause of osteoporosis, but that alcohol consumption and smoking both also increase bone fragility.

In which case, given levels of smoking and alcohol consumption in France (and given that it has a higher population), the lower number of fragility fractures is even more remarkable.

But then again, the French have not – thus far – lost any sense of a national cuisine; of the traditional and largely seasonal food that has sustained them down the centuries.

We have. We expect asparagus and strawberries in December, and are faced with a dizzying array of culinary styles in shops and restaurants.

And in a way, the culinary snapshot from our recent trip to Rye is indicative of that: poor versions of a ‘national’ dish – fish and chips – cooked on the basis of pre-prepped, largely-frozen ingredients, while local gems such as Cromer crab were noticeable primarily by their absence.

That’s not to say that there is no place for culinary evolution and global influences – or that the French don’t have these (see couscous as an example of the latter), but merely that we have gone to an extreme.

Subject to the whims of British culinary fashion

We fall out of love with genuine British ingredients – and then it takes a celebrity chef to bring them back into fashion. See cooking apples and cauliflowers as but two recent examples.

Sainsbury’s summer TV advertising campaign, “tigers don’t eat quesadillas”, also illustrates the current climate, starting from the perspective of a family where the children get to say what they will and will not eat.

I know it’s not hip parenting these days, but what was actually wrong with ‘Dinner time! Come and sit down!’ followed by (if required) ‘that’s what’s on the table – if you don’t like it, there’s nothing else’?

The idea of giving small children a choice about what they eat is nonsense: they need to be able to make an educated choice before being given a choice – and that means a food education first.

Nor is that an education where you make pronouncements on what’s good or bad for health. It’s a question of educating the taste buds.

Okay, it’s still probably going to be something of a battle, given the amount of high-processed, industrialised junk around the place for children to be tempted by. And Big Food spends an awful lot of money working out precisely how to get children hooked on that junk, so it’s not an evenly-matched battle: this is classic David and Goliath.

But getting home in the evening and asking your pre-primary school child what they want for dinner – and then responding with “you can’t have dippy chips every night” because they regularly have that because you don’t want to cook a fresh meal after a day at work, is not the answer and not the way to a healthy diet.

And why quesadillas? What’s wrong with a salad? It doesn’t have to be limp, tasteless lettuce and cucumber, with flavourless tomatoes.

Take some broad beans (in season at present). Pod and cook for 3-4 minutes, in unsalted water, depending on size. Allow to cool before popping the little green gems out of their skins.

Hull and halve some strawberries (also in season).

Broad beans. In season now. Yummy

Pop on a plate together with some feta – the natural saltiness of the cheese is a fabulous foil for the beans, and works well with the fruit too.

Dress with some Balsamic vinegar.

If it’s a main meal, have some good bread on the side or a few new potatoes (also in season).

Colourful, tasty and healthy – and not complicated.

The media doesn’t help – producing scare stories about health and further confusion about diet.

I freely admit that I find myself wondering if I’ve got it basically right: am I getting enough calcium, for instance, or do I need to start guzzling a pint of skimmed milk every day?

Indeed, am I really getting it all so badly wrong that today’s second matchbox of cheese will ensure that I won’t live long enough to get osteoporosis?

Pill-pop nation

They're not sweeties

One of the big news stories last week featured reports of a study by Imperial College, London, showing that statins have almost no side-effects.

It came hot on the heels of a report from NICE – the National Institute for Health and Excellence, which among other things, provides guidelines on medical treatments in the UK – announcing that, in order to reduce death from heart disease further, the threshold for prescribing statins should be lowered from a 20% risk over 10 years to a 10% risk over the same time.

Now: a disclaimer. I am not now nor ever have been a scientist or medical expert. So what follows are merely the personal conclusions of someone who might be judged to fall within the latest category that NICE is talking of.

And after the disclaimer, a statement.

I have never had a cholesterol test (I haven’t been near a doctor in years) and, on the basis of what I have read, I do not believe that cholesterol is the big problem or that high cholesterol is the cause of the UK’s rates of heart disease – and I would not willingly take statins myself.

Cholesterol is a vital building block in the body. Evidence suggests it is actually dangerous to drive it down – especially after the age of 50.

Mind most doctors have big doubts about the latest NICE announcements. According to other research by Pulse, the GPs’ magazine, of 511 GPs polled on a variety of issues, 57% opposed the NICE proposal, and 55% would not take a statin or prescribe one for a family member based on the new NICE-proposed lower threshold.

What we seem to be seeing is what Dr Phil Hammond – GP and comedian (and do see him if you get the chance: he’s very good) – has described as the “medicalisation” of society.

Statins have made vast profits for Big Pharma over the years – due to patents and stuff running out, those have reduced of late, so the NICE advice must be, err, nice for these same corporates.

However, it’s worth noting that eight out of the 12 members of the NICE panel that recommended the change have declared ties to the manufacturers, including Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

On only a very slightly different note, a quick glance at thelist of the NHS website’s partners-in-public-health list – (hat tip to Zoë Harcombe o Zoë Harcombe) – gives an indicator of just how much the country’s health has become utterly tied in with corporate interests and, therefore, with the search for profits.

As I explained three years ago, the current government decided to involve more Big Food representatives in making public health policy – and one of the earliest examples of this sawgovernment health ‘advice’ effectively providing free advertising for branded, processed foods.

It’s not difficult to begin to see where problems lie – or where they can be seen or suspected.

Last week’s research from Imperial College was a meta-analysis: in other words, a meticulous survey of previous surveys – in this case, 29 different studies.

But while the meta-analysis itself had no corporate backers, who knows who backed all those other studies?

Not only do we know that research is often produced that has been financially supported by the industry, but it’s also known that Big Pharma is most secretive with trial data – it doesn’t like sharing it with anyone, even in the medical profession – and there are plenty of people around who will assert that the same companies skew trials to start with by using ‘pre-trial trials’ to weed out anyone who obviously shows signs of side effects.

So the ordinary GP has little chance themselves of knowing all the details of any drug – they have to rely on the companies who sell them, just as we have to rely on our doctors.

The thing with statins, though, is that there is no substantial evidence for the big claim that levels of cholesterol cause heart disease.

That myth came into being because of the American researcher, Ancel Keyes.

After WWII, heart disease among men in the US reached epidemic proportions.

Keyes thought he knew why – that a diet rich in saturated fat caused high cholesterol caused heart disease – and he set out to prove it.

After a small study in the US, using men only, he looked further abroad and eventually produced what has become known as the Seven Countries Study, which bore out his great theory.

The trouble is, Keyes didn’t study seven countries. He studied 22 – and ditched most of the findings because they did not tally with what he wanted to find.

This is not a natural product

It ignores the French ‘Paradox’ – only a paradox if you believe Keyes – that sees the French eat more dairy produce than anyone else on Earth, never mind all that foie gras and duck confit, and yet still have far lower rates of heart disease than exist in the UK or US where the low-fat mantra has been so willingly churned out and gobbled up.

Yet Keyes’s work became the foundation for the health and diet advice of the last 40 years: cut out fat and fill up with starchy carbs.

It’s almost certainly been a contributory factor in the rise of obesity, but on a positive note, it’s provided Big Food with wonderful opportunities for creating and marketing as healthy, artificial fats and fat substitutes.

We now have a position where the British Heart Foundation has links not just with the NHS – see that previous link – but also directly with Unilever, which produced Flora.

And Flora is now able to be marketed as ‘heart healthy’ – watch out for the link between the foundation and the product in advertising. Unilever is also on that list of NHS ‘partners’.

In recent months, an increasingly desperate-sounding British Heart Foundation has taken to making statements on health stories that have the ring of a siege mentality about them.

When Sweden become the first country in the West to ditch the low fat diet advice last October, the foundation was sticking its fingers in its ears and claiming that low fat was still best.

With each new piece of research that is slowly rehabilitating natural saturated fats, it does the same.

The cynic might speculate on how, were it to do otherwise, that relationship with Unilever could become strained.

An increasing number of doctors are voicing concerns about medicalisation, just as increasing numbers of doctors are also stepping away from the diet mantras of the last four decades.

We’re starting to see the issue of sugar being raised much more, in terms of the serious damage that high consumption can do.

And it’s worth noting that, in the case of sugar, much of it is hidden.

I was in M&S a few weeks ago, looking for a yogurt for breakfast. I couldn’t find one that didn’t have sugar in it – not least the ones that are sold on the basis that they are ‘low fat’; healthy, in other words.

This IS a natural product – and it will not harm you

And then there’s high-fructose corn syrup that manufacturers have taken to shoving into all manner of processed foods to make them more palatable and to make the consumer buy them again and again.

Again, this is not obviously sweet foods we’re talking about. High-fructose corn syrup is used in breads, cereals, breakfast bars, yogurts again and soups.

Who thinks of sugar in soup or in bread? Cereals have been sold to the public for decades as a healthy breakfast, and breakfast bars come into the same category.

This is what hidden sugars means.

As an increasing number of people raise the issue of these hidden sugars, and as an increasing number of comparisons are made between the attitude of Big Food and that of Big Tobacco, the industry is fighting back.

Those links with the likes of the NHS and the British Heart Foundation should make us skeptical of any defences of what has become the status quo on health and diet advice.

Just as those links between NICE members and Big Pharma, and between Big Pharma and disease, should make us equally skeptical.

What is needed is far greater transparency in all these cases – and far better regulation, properly enforced.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with profits. But when the search for profits trumps people, then it’s a sign that something is very wrong.

And what is also needed is an honest and thorough approach to dealing with the problems caused by a national approach to food that includes using takeaways and ping food to the extent that the UK does, not taking time to eat properly, constant snacking, the demise of cooking skills, a prevailing attitude of food as fuel, vast amounts of media space given over to faddy diets, new homes built without proper kitchens etc etc – and not just a rather lame sense of correcting it all my medicalising the populace.

That won’t be as easy as sticking fingers in ears and endlessly intoning the low-fat mantra, irrespective of the body of evidence against it, but it would be a damned sight more effective than the equivalent of the three little pigs inviting the wolf to join them for dinner.

Further reading:

The Great Cholesterol Con by Dr Malcolm Kendrick

Although now dead the Cholesterolosaurus will march on by Dr Malcolm Kenderick

Bad Pharma by Dr Ben Goldacre

Bad Food Britain by Joanna Blythman

Worth following on Twitter:

@KailashChandOBE

@JoannaBlythman

@bengoldacre

@DrAseemMalhotra

@zoeharcombe

@drbriffa

The above-mentioned may not agree with all I have written here, but are all very much worth reading and following on the matter raised in this post.

Marketing at its brightest – the charity edition

It's charidee!

I have a brand new idea for a really ace marketing campaign. How about: ‘buy our product – or the poor black child in Africa gets it’?

You like it? No?

Well it’s already happening, in essence, because it’s the subliminal message that could be taken from a number of advertising campaigns by a number of companies, which attempt to persuade you to buy their products by promising to make a small donation to charity for every unit sold.

At present in the UK, we have Kelloggs promoting itself by promising that if you promote the company, they’ll ensure that a child somewhere in the UK will get a breakfast.

@KelloggsUK has been tweeting: “RT to #GiveAChildABreakfast. Breakfast clubs are fun and help kids get their breakfast so they can focus in class”.

Now to be fair, I tweeted back at them, rather snidely suggesting that that breakfast would be sugar-laden and salt-packed breakfast cereals. They responded, saying that they give money to school breakfast clubs, with no conditions on how it is spent.

However, the core issue remains: it’s an act of marketing disguised as charity.

Only this lunchtime in a corner shop, I noticed boxes of Whiskas cat food proclaiming that if you buy those, it’ll help to “protect the tiger”.

Pampers Nappies seem to regularly advertise by saying that if you buy their nappies they’ll donate something or other – for instance, one tetanus jab to UNICEF for each packet front returned to them.

And right now, Innocent Drinks is selling bottles of their smoothies with miniature hats on top that have been knitted and sent in by members of the public, and from the sales of which the company will donate to Age UK to keep old people from freezing to death this winter.

You can see below the Twitter conversation I had with them about this yesterday.

This is a company, remember, that is 90% owned by Coca-Cola, which itself hardly has a sparkling record, facing longstanding criticisms on a range of issues from its environmental record to the abduction and murder of trade unionists at its bottling plants in Guatemala and Colombia.

So what happens if you don’t buy the product that promises to make a donation?

Remember the social media meme: ‘If God sees you masturbating, a kitten will die’? That’s a joke about blackmail.

These are rather less jokey.

What it certainly does is to philosophically change the nature of charity.

If charitable giving is about increasing sales/profits or being able to get a tax break, it alters the essential nature of the act.

If you doubt me on the tax-break point, ask yourself how you'd feel if you discovered that someone had claimed tax back on the cost of a poppy for this season of remembrance.

And if that is not the exploitation of those in need for the sake of profit, then what is it?

If nothing else, there’s a corporate cynicism here that is not in keeping with what one would hope charity would mean.

It’s even got a name – ‘cause marketing’, and in the US at least, there’s a web page from the New York State Office of the Attorney General about it, advising both companies and customers on the issue.

According to Wikipedia, “Cause-related marketing is a powerful marketing tool that business and nonprofit organizations are increasingly leveraging. According to the Cone Millennial Cause Study in 2006, 89% of Americans (aged 13 to 25) would switch from one brand to another brand of a comparable product (and price) if the latter brand was associated with “good cause” ... Earlier studies by Cone indicate an upward trend in the number of Americans who associate their own buying habits with cause marketing as well as an expectation that those companies to be “good corporate citizens”.”

So it works to increase sales.

It works in a different way too.

The American Heart Foundation gives out a stamp of approval via its food certification programme, which permits the use of its ‘heart check’ logo on products that meet its low-fat, low-cholesterol standards, such as Cheerios, the breakfast cereal.

We have something similar in the UK, where the British Heart Foundation has links with Flora, a brand that is owned by Unilever, which is also involved in the UK government’s public health policy-making process.

Innocent Drinks get antsy

But let’s hop back to those Cheerios for a moment. Ingredients – “Whole Cereal Grains (77.8%) (Whole Grain Oats, Whole Grain Wheat, Whole Grain Barley, Whole Grain Rice, Whole Grain Maize), Sugar, Partially Inverted Brown Sugar Syrup, Wheat Starch, Salt, Tripotassium Phosphate, Colours: Carotene, Annatto And Caramel, Antioxidant: Tocopherols, Vitamins And Minerals: Vitamin C, Niacin, Pantothenic Acid, Vitamin B6, Riboflavin (B2), Thiamin (B1), Folic Acid (Folacin), Vitamin B12, Calcium Carbonate And Iron, To produce 100g Of This Product 77.8g Of Whole Grain Was Included In This Recipe”.

Yay! Low fat! Yay! Actually, 3.2g of fat per 45g serving, of which 1.5g saturates. However, the same serving also includes 28.7g of carbohydrate, 12.4g of which sugars.

Now take a look at Flora Original Spread (they’ve stopped calling it margarine after that became box office poison), which is part of a brand that is sometimes marketed as linked to the British Heart Foundation.

Ingredients: “Vegetable Oils (Seed Oils 85%), Water, Salt (1.4%), Buttermilk, Emulsifier: Mono- and Diglycerides of Fatty Acids, Preservative: Potassium Sorbate, Citric Acid, Vitamin E, Vitamin B6, Flavouring, Colour: Beta-Carotene, Folic Acid, Vitamins A, D and B12.”

Now, what do you think the ingredients list looks like on a pack of unsalted butter?

You won’t easily find any such list – because there’s only one ingredient in unsalted butter, and that’s cream.

Then ask yourself why butter doesn’t need added “flavouring” and why Flora Original ‘Spread’ does. And why it needs colour added too. Could it be because you wouldn’t want to spread it on anything if these things were not added? And if it would taste dire of or nothing, and if it looked awful without added colour, why would anyone think it a ‘natural’ and healthy food to consume and why would anyone buy and consume – it?

Of course, conventional advice is that fat is bad for you – so buy those foods that call themselves low-fat, even if they’re stuffed with sugars to compensate for the lack of taste and ‘mouth feel’ that occurs when fat is stripped out.

This orthodoxy is, however, being challenged.

Dr Aseem Malhotra, an interventional cardiology specialist registrar at Croydon University Hospital, London, recently made the headlines after penning a shocking (to many) article in the British Medical Journal, which said, briefly, that saturated fat is not the problem – and may actually be good for your health. And that the real problems are caused by sugars.

To emphasise: that’s a non-technical summary, so please do read the original article, which you can access here.

Dr Malhotra is not the first to point this out, but he has enough of a profile to ensure that the story was picked up widely.

The British Heart Foundation continues to reject such conclusions, but its relationship with Flora/Unilever means that, at best, it has a conflict of interest. The same is the case in the States with the American Heart Foundation.

And this is at a time when there is an increasingly loud voice saying that sugars – many of them hidden – are the major dietary health problem in the West, and that this is what needs to be tackled.

As has been said by others, the attitude of Big Food to this is reminiscent of the behavior of tobacco companies – and its difficult to see cause marketing as not being an entirely deliberate and calculated tactic in creating an image of corporate responsibility and moral behavior that enables to multinational companies to continue behaving just as they please, while customers, trying to do the right thing, make choices based on that cynical marketing.

As Jim Royle might so eloquently put it:  ‘Charity my arse’ .

• You can follow @DrAseemMalhotra on Twitter for more information on diet.

Junk culture

Fine in a fritter, but not in the inbox

One of the greatest delights – I use the word loosely – on returning home after any sort of trip away, is the Everest of mail that has accumulated.

Wading through, it’s quickly clear that the overwhelming majority of the pile is utter and complete junk.

When I’m ‘in residence’, the chances are that I’ll unlock the door every evening to find that, if there is anything on the mat, it’ll be yet more junk.

Now I know that the flats stand on the site of a scrap yard, but the amount of crap that lands through the door is just taking the piss.

Given the number of trees that have been sacrificed to tell me that there are special offers at pizza and kebab and fried ‘chicken’ outlets, plus the menus from Indian and Chinese home-delivery takeaways, you could be forgiven for thinking we must be surrounded by them, which is not quite the case.

Is there some sort of equation that balances the number of ‘jobs’ created for people to shove such junk through doors with the impact on the environment of all this printed dross?

Would the economy actually suffer if all this rubbish simply wasn't even printed any more?

Not that it’s just junk food that’s advertised on the junk mail.

We get assorted other offers and opportunities, including quite a few from varied flavours of the God Squad. There may be few old-fashioned churches in the area, but those rather more modern evangelical, all-singing, all-dancing congregations are on the rise, meeting in everything from community centres to former industrial units.

Still, at least if they’re shoving stuff through the door, they’re not actually knocking on it. Although they do that too on occasion.

There are few political callers, even at election time: perhaps they're all too embarrassed.

But junk mail is hardly limited to what comes through the letter box.

I doubt that I’m alone in getting irritated by online junk mail – or spam, as it’s often known. And it’s not limited to stuff appearing in my inbox.

Facebook has become particularly bad, with ‘suggested posts’ cluttering up timelines.

These seem to largely consist in advertising absolute tosh. The ones I get are particularly of the get-very-slim-very-quickly variety.

And I get more, presumably because a bit of software somewhere has noted that I comment on them – which is sort of amusing, because what it appears not to spot is that my approach is of commenting that they’re exploitative, snake oil bullshit.

It frankly astonishes me that these con merchants are even allowed to advertise. I suspect, though, that they’re mostly not based in the UK and are not, therefore, liable to UK laws on protection of consumers.

Still, as long as Facebook is making money out of ‘companies’ exploiting vulnerable people …

And let’s be completely clear about this: the people who will respond are vulnerable. You have to have reached a point of desperation where you’ll try anything to conform to societal expectations that are frequently completely unrealistic and even downright unhealthy to respond to such ads.

You can not, as one advert suggests, lose 30kg of “belly fat” in just a few weeks. That’s something like three of the biggest bags of cat litter I can get – and there are not many people who will be carry that as “belly fat”.

And if they were, no doctor on planet Earth would recommend trying to shed it all in something like three months by taking some crackpot supplement that’s probably about as efficacious as if they were made of the same sawdust that finds its ways into the counterfeit fags that are made in China.

Then there is all the spam for ghastly-looking leggings that apparently “burn calories”. No. No they don’t. That’s as impossible as muscle turning into fat.

How do people get to make such patently false claims – openly and in public, and then charge the vulnerable/gullible? Oh, and it’s fine to say people should exercise personal responsibility, but why not some business responsibility too?

Some businesses that make false claims get dealt with – they get dragged into court and are penalized when trading standards can get hold of them.

Yet patently false, exploitative spam is not merely allowed in social media, it’s foisted onto your personal timeline.

Now I appreciate that Facebook needs to make money – it’s not a charity. And I have no issue with that. But as far as I was aware, it was making money – and plenty of it – before it decided to foist spam on people in this way.

This isn’t about freedom of speech – it’s about patently false advertising claims.

So, what to do about this deluge of crap.

I am wondering whether to put one of those labels on the letterbox at home: the one that says: ‘no unsolicited mail’.

And if I then continue to get flyers from estate agents who desperately want me to let them sell my home, I’ll pop them back in a postbox with a fucking brick attached and the postage unpaid.

But since I use Facebook, in part at least, for work-related matters, it’s not simply a case of stopping using it.

Perhaps Facebook would like to operate a little bit of corporate responsibility, for a change? It’s a nice thought.

And while we’re at it, what about all the free bloody magazines and newspapers?

I actually got on a bus one night in London a few years ago (on the way home from a Divine Comedy gig in Camden, as it happens, with the excellent Duke Special as support) to find that the bus was almost knee deep in discarded such freebies.

Only a few mornings ago, coming down some steps near Euston station, I was faced with three people trying to shove three different publications into my hand from right, left and directly in front of me.

That was after someone standing outside WH Smith tried to hand a leaflet for weight loss.

Is all this throw-away matter indicative of a generalised junk culture? I leave the answer to you, but it does feel like it at times.