A leading US nutritionist today claimed that vegetarian and vegan parents are damaging their children’s health by denying them meat.

This is a bizarre claim in the first place, but when you look at the research Lindsay Allen bases her claims on, it becomes close to comical:

Prof Allen conducted a study of impoverished children in Kenya, and found that adding as little as two spoonfuls of meat a day to their starch-based diets dramatically improved muscle development and mental skills.

The African study involved 544 children in Kenya, typically aged around seven, whose diet mainly consisted of starchy, low-nutrition corn and bean staples lacking these micronutrients. Over a period of two years, one group of the children was given a daily supplement of two ounces of meat – equivalent to roughly two spoonfuls of mince.

Two other groups received either a cup of milk a day or an oil supplement containing the same amount of energy. The diet of a fourth group was left unaltered.

The changes seen in the children given the meat, and to a lesser extent the milk or oil, were dramatic.

And from this, she’s deduced that

There’s absolutely no question that it’s unethical for parents to bring up their children as strict vegans

See what she did there? She extrapolated data relating to poor children in Kenya to apply to the whole world. Does she not think that, perhaps, parents of children in developed countries may have better access to supplements, which will prevent their children from missing the nutritional value provided by meat? Does her magically extrapolated study account for this? No, because the substitutes given just contained “the same amount of energy”.

And as we progress from the sublime to the ridiculous, Sir Paul McCartney has this to contribute:

From my own point of view, it has been a good thing for me and my children, who are no shorter than other children.

Whilst it’s good to know that Sir Paul McCartney’s children aren’t of short stature, I haven’t read any claims by our Prof that children would be shorter.

I’m not sure what particular axe the Prof has to grind, but this is just bad science at it’s most disturbing and strange.

This is one of the finest albums of any genre I have heard in a very long time. Almost the whole album consists of Emiliana’s beautiful voice and acoustic guitar.

It’s everything Norah Jones should be, and would be if she wasn’t so obsessed with very poor cover versions of inappropriate songs and over-cooked commercialism. Emiliana has an absolutely amazing voice, and a song-writing skill that blows me away.

This is certainly worth a listen, and I’d definitely recommend buying it.

It’s actually worrying how true this is. And it made me smile.

All we need now is to elect me as leader of the Conservative party. I’m not a Conservative, but Blair’s not a Labourite and that didn’t make much difference. I’d soon beat some sense into Mr Blair. Mr Howard does a reasonable job, until he decides to go into self-destruct mode, annoucing silly populist policies. I’d be much better. And my surname fits.

Abut a week ago today I climbed off a plane in Philadelphia, and took the little train to 30th street station where I was going to catch a larger train to New York. Somewhere in 30th Station I passed a news stand; outsde it stood three soldiers, looking ridiculously young and gawky: a blonde girl, a white guy and a hispanic. They had baggy green uniforms, the usual guns and so forth. I don’t know what they were doing there, and they didn’t seem to, either. So far as I know, they were about 6,000 miles from anyone who might seriously be trying to kill them. As I walked towards them, a middle-aged couple ahead of me walked right up to the soldiers, shook their hands, all three of them, and said something about how proud they were.

This confused Andrew Brown, and it also confuses me. It just seems such a strange thing for someone to do. Maybe it’s seen as polite and proper to thank every member of the army you come across for their service – but why do it when they’re on duty? Maybe it’s a strange sign of respect? I certainly don’t get it.

I do love stories of technological incompentence by the very government which expects us to trust it with an ID Card Database. One would have assumed that the Criminal Records Bureau would have had a fairly secure system, what with its main aim being to protect vulnerable people like children and the elderly, but apparently not:

errors are quite common because the OCRed applications are retyped. And not cross-checked

And, just to remind you, this government can’t even keep DVLA records up-to-date.

Are you sure you want to trust it with your very identity? I certainly don’t.

Ant and Dec have shown that there’s a renewed appetite for variety shows, and so this announcement seems a sensible one. It looks like it could be a very good show – but it could also fall flat on its face if the quality of the idea isn’t carried through to the production.

A gay couple have become the first same-sex pairing to announce their engagement in The Times forthcoming marriages column.

How cute. Clearly more of a gimmick than a genuine step forward, though – what’s groundbreaking about saying ‘We will get married when the state says we can’? I suppose it shows that The Times is plodding into the twenty-first century, at least.

But it did get me thinking: Imagine the furore if Charles had announced that he was going to marry his butler, with whom he may or may not have had a brief fling, instead of Camilla… That would certainly have got the tabloids talking and left the constituional boffins with something to work out.

A very neat, albeit Greek, example of rapid lexical degredation (of the word ‘kudos’ in this case). From now on, I shall only use it in the traditional sense. Yeah, right. Though actually, a quick search reveals that I have never before used that word on the blog, so I’ve not done badly thus far!

How can a news report in which an important public figure says

I don’t know whether or not it’s good that we embrace all religions

be given such a cushy headline and be effectively buried?

The best estimates suggest between one and three in every 1,000 patients given a general anaesthetic wake up during their operations

I had no idea that this was so relatively common. I guess it’s actually quite scary if you think about it. But you have to wonder what exactly is meant by ‘best’ estimates – do they just mean ‘best’ in the context of the article (ie the scariest) figures?

Another thing which has surprised me this week is a review which claims fifty percent of smokers will have their lives shortened by smoking by between ten and sixteen years. I knew smoking was very bad for you, but even I didn’t realise it was quite that bad. Not that this changes my position on smoking bans.