Encyclopedia Page: Boyd, Eric
Eric Boyd
Unquestioned Medical Opinions? By Eric Boyd. Throughout the report there is not one mention of the considerable scientific controversy surrounding the simple question: Does tobacco smoke harm non-smokers?
September 22, 2004 Letter to The National Post Editor.
Holiday Relaxing But Not Slimming
Trying to lose weight while on vacation just doesn't work
August 7, 2003
The long sandy beach and kilometres of level, paved pathways made Rondeau Provincial Park the perfect place for me to escape the daily bustle and do my small part in the war on obesity.
I'm almost skin and bones now and friends warn me of a disappearing derriere but my body mass index (BMI) places me among the overweight slobs draining our health care system of huge amounts of money.
Certain this money could be better spent on more fact-finding reports, I was determined to finish my personal battle against this global killer by losing a few kilos of excess skin biking a 16-kilometre trail and walking barefoot in the sand for another 10 kilometres every day I was there.
The 16k trail is mostly roadway respectfully shared with other cyclists, skunks, turtles, cars, walkers and in-line skating enthusiasts of all ages. About five kilometres of trail runs through dense forest. Through this rough, narrow section speed is essential.
Speed helps outrun West Nile infected mosquitoes hovering in wait above the swampy ground and, coupled with adroit avoidance of overhanging underbrush, also confuses the guidance system of deer ticks responsible for Lyme disease causing them to miss my elusive bare skin and land humbled in my wake.
A small, washed-out section of trail forces me to dismount and walk along 300 metres of warm, sandy beach. Not too many accept the risks of getting here and I was often alone.
After racing through the bush at breakneck speed, I paused here for tranquil, pensive moments with the waves to lightly toast my skin under the warmth of damaging ultraviolet sunlight and to enjoy a cigarette.
The park is a public health nightmare. Six out of 10 on the beach flaunt their flab while inviolable children laugh and splash alongside the ever-present E. coli, and who knows what else, in unchlorinated, unfiltered water.
Food often stored at less than optimum temperature is partially cooked, sometimes on dirty sticks, over carcinogen-spewing campfires. And all of this dangerous activity under a high smog advisory!
The park is also a smoker's mecca. Smokers sit unashamedly and unharassed, smoking in quiet pleasure under the shade of trees, laying on the beach or while enjoying a leisurely walk down shared pathways. They exchange pleasantries, not health warnings.
I wondered why, with all of the many risks we face each day, smokers are castigated for their simple pleasure. Why, given ceaseless, often contradictory risks, has it become socially acceptable for complete strangers to confidently become a smoker's personal health adviser: "You really should quit that filthy habit."
Why do smokers meekly tolerate the incessant jocular comments, the pretended coughs, the excessive taxes and the ruthless banishment? Why is the very simple task of accommodating smokers needlessly shunned when sometimes extreme measures are taken to accommodate others in our diverse society?
Surely the anti-smoker campaign that has brought us here is far more dangerous to our free society than any risk associated with smoking. And those unfulfilled public health extremists who continue it are now expanding their cancerous campaign to include the food we eat with yet another war -- this one on obesity.
Claiming the cancer risk of being overweight is just as bad as the risk associated with tobacco, the American Cancer Society kicked off its new war with the Great American Weigh In. That should sound vaguely familiar. It's modelled after the 30-year-old Great American Smokeout.
Dr. JoAnn Manson of Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital thinks the anti-smoking program has been effective because laws have been created to ban smoking in many places. She believes an effective anti-fat campaign could utilize similar techniques.
A new crop of amateur health experts is being primed to demean total strangers: "You really should lose that ugly flab." Soon the overweight among us will be forced to endure the jocular "Hey tubby, packing on a bit of weight, eh," the pretended puffed up cheeks and inevitable excessive taxes. All of it well-intentioned.
But who pays the price when we later learn these health experts have been wrong? Who pays when we learn the touted low-fat diet has actually increased our rate of obesity? Who has suffered when we learn that reduced smoking has added dangerously to our waistlines, skyrocketing tranquillizer consumption and forgotten memories? Who dies when we learn the highly recommended cancer-fighting sunscreens, beta carotenes and high-fibre diets have actually caused cancer? Credible research suggests all of these are true.
With health advice being so unreliable, who should be making the choice between the cancer risks of a high-fat hamburger and the cancer risks of its soy-based substitute?
Who should choose between a slightly increased risk of lung cancer and a slightly decreased risk of Alzheimer's disease?
Who should choose between the contradictory risks posed by insects and insect repellents, the sun's rays and sunscreens or the even greater risk supposedly posed by combining the two?
And just how well intentioned is unreliable advice if it is wrongly conveyed to us as gospel?
It seems that unconditional acceptance of this growing health extremism also means we must forfeit our freedom to choose what we eat and what we do. Individual choices become public health issues measured against some illusory costs to the society we share.
Maybe we could start reversing this threatening trend by politely telling those offering unsolicited health advice that "I'm tired of talking about my bad habits. Let's talk about yours for a while."
No need to be so kind to the Dalton-who's of this world who believe increasing taxes and oppressive restrictions should influence what we choose to put into our mouths.
But the peacefulness of this moment has boiled away. Time to join daredevils at the pier overlooking Rondeau Bay, and countless others along the Erie and Huron shores, staring directly into the sun for an extended period of time, as it ends another beautiful day.
Eric Boyd of Waterloo walked 10K and biked 16K at least twice each of his six days at Rondeau Provincial Park. His caloric output far exceeded input but he returned from his holiday weighing exactly the same as the day he left.
The risks of smoking are greatly exaggerated
Wednesday November 20, 2002
Too much is made of the 4,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke. We're told these chemicals are so harmful that they are responsible for the deaths of millions worldwide. Untold in this "war on tobacco" is that each of the plants we consume consists of an equally daunting thousands of chemicals many of which are recognized poisons or suspected cancer-causing agents.
ERIC BOYD
Cayenne peppers, carrots and strawberries each contain six suspected carcinogens; onions, grapefruit and tomato each contain five -- some the same as the seven suspected carcinogens found in tobacco.
High-heat cooking creates yet more dietary carcinogens from otherwise harmless chemical constituents.
Sure, these plant chemicals are measured in infinitesimal amounts. An independent study calculated 222,000 smoking cigarettes would be needed to reach unacceptable levels of benzo(a)pyrene. One million smoking cigarettes would be needed to produce unacceptable levels of toluene. To reach these estimated danger levels, the cigarettes must be smoked simultaneously and completely in a sealed 20-square-foot room with a nine-foot ceiling.
Many other chemicals in tobacco smoke can also be found in normal diets. Smoking 3,000 packages of cigarettes would supply the same amount of arsenic as a nutritious 200 gram serving of sole.
Half a bottle of now healthy wine can supply 32 times the amount of lead as one pack of cigarettes. The same amount of cadmium obtained from smoking eight packs of cigarettes can be enjoyed in half a pound of crab.
That's one problem with the anti-smoking crusade. The risks of smoking are greatly exaggerated. So are the costs.
An in-depth analysis of 400,000 U.S. smoking-related deaths by National Institute of Health mathematician Rosalind Marimont and senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute Robert Levy identified a disturbing number of flaws in the methodology used to estimate these deaths. Incorrectly classifying some diseases as smoking-related and choosing the wrong standard of comparison each overstated deaths by more than 65 per cent.
Failure to control for confounding variables such as diet and exercise turned estimates more into a computerized shell game than reliable estimates of deaths.
Marimont and Levy also found no adjustments were made to the costs of smoking resulting from the benefits of smoking -- reduced Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, less obesity, depression and breast cancer.
If it were possible to estimate 45,000 smoking-related Canadian deaths as some health activists imagine -- and Marimont, Levy and other respected researchers think it is not -- then applying an identical methodology to other lifestyle choices would yield 57,000 Canadian deaths due to lack of exercise and 73,000 Canadian deaths blamed on poor diets.
If both the chemical constituents of tobacco smoke and the numbers of smoking-related deaths are overstated -- and clearly they are -- how can we trust the claim that tobacco smoke is harmful to non-smokers?
The 1993 bellwether study by the Environmental Protection Agency that selectively combined the results of a number of previous studies and found a small increase in lung cancer risk in those exposed to environmental tobacco smoke has been roundly criticized as severely flawed by fellow researchers and ultimately found invalid in a court of law.
In 1998, the World Health Organization reported a small, but not statistically significant, increase in the risk of lung cancer in non-smoking women married to smokers.
Despite these invalidating deficiencies, the Environmental Protection Agency and World Health Organization both concluded tobacco smoke causes lung cancer in non-smokers.
One wonders whether the same conclusions would have been announced if scientific fraud were a criminal offence.
When confronted with the scientific uncertainty, the inconsistency of results and the incredible misrepresentation of present-day knowledge, those seeking to abolish tobacco invoke a radical interpretation of the Precautionary Principle: "Where potential adverse effects are not fully understood, the activity should not proceed."
This unreasonable exploitation of the ever-present risks of living infiltrates our schools to indoctrinate trusting and eager minds with the irrational fears of today. Instead of opening minds to the wondrous complexities of living, it opens the door to peer ridicule and intolerance while cultivating the trendy cynics of tomorrow.
If we continue down this dangerous path of control and prohibition based on an unreliable or remote chance of harm, how many personal freedoms will remain seven generations from now?
Eric Boyd of Waterloo has management experience across a wide range of sectors.