More diet nonsense

There is no basis for any of this in the double blind studies. It is all just attention-seeking behaviour based on epidemiological speculation. And the "low-fat=good" assumption underlying most of it is KNOWN TO BE FALSE. See here, here and here. As for the water myth, there is no basis in nephrology for that either. It's just an old wive's tale. And if the Australian diet is so unhealthy, how come Australians have exceptionally long lifespans? But who cares about evidence when you have "official" wisdom to guide you?

Only one in 10 adults drank enough water to maintain their health, a study of Australians' dietary habits has found. And many Aussies were failing to hit most targets set by dietitians, according to a new healthy eating "index". Melbourne scientists have devised a 15-step checklist - called the dietary guideline index - by combining the latest recommendations from health authorities. The DGI was designed to make healthy eating easy by using scores of between 0-150. People could use the index to rate themselves in 15 categories - including fruit, vegetable and fast-food intake - worth up to 10 points each.

And by applying the DGI to the most comprehensive survey of Australians' eating habits, research leader Dr Sarah McNaughton, from Deakin University, has exposed the nation's diet secrets. Dr McNaughton said women aged 50-64 were the healthiest eaters in the country - and men aged 18-29 the most likely to neglect their health. "If you score 150, that means your diet is pretty much perfect and nobody in the survey has a perfect diet," Dr McNaughton said. "Younger people, particularly men, tend to have less healthy diets. "That can be for a whole variety of reasons, but it's often because younger people take less time to cook for themselves."

Results published in The Journal of Nutrition showed 10 per cent of Australian men and 14 per cent of women were drinking enough fluids (low-calorie soft drinks were accepted in the guidelines). However, Dr McNaughton said the most concerning result was the "very low" vegetable consumption. Just 15 per cent of men and 22 per cent of women ate five serves a day.

More than half of Aussies were also eating too many foods high in saturated fats, salt and sugar and not enough cereals and dairy. Women scraped over the line for daily fruit intake with 55 per cent eating the recommended two pieces, but only 46 per cent of men. Dr McNaughton said adults could improve their diet and enjoy better health if they identified their weaknesses using the DGI.

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Pollies 'suffer mental problems'

Why am I not surprised?>

Many Australian politicians are suffering from mental health problems but are reluctant to seek help, New South Wales Treasurer Michael Costa says. Mr Costa said a number of state parliamentary colleagues approached him about their mental health problems after he publicly revealed his battle with bipolar disorder in 2001. Bipolar is defined as a mental condition involving extreme mood swings. "Once the article (on his disorder) was written, I had people come up to me, independent politicians, and I won't name them, and they said: 'I read that article and I've got such and such a problem. What do you think?'," he told a Black Dog Institute function at Sydney's Prince of Wales Hospital today.

Mr Costa, who manages his disorder with medication, said he gave them advice and told them to seek professional help about their problems. He said many politicians with mental disorders were often unwilling to reveal them. "People are very reluctant in political life to come forward with their issues relating to mood disorders," he said. "The reason for that is politics is a contact sport where aggression and arguments are par for the course, and there is a temptation too great to use any weakness as part of an argument to deal with a policy issue."

Mr Costa said opponents to his stance on electricity privatisation in NSW had used his bipolar disorder, previously referred to as manic depression, against him. "(They said) my views on this were characterised as being a function of my manic depression," he said. "You talk about stigmatism ... we have a long way to go, particularly in the realms of politics."

He said he wished more high-profile people would open up about their condition to help abolish the stigma attached to illnesses such as bipolar. "There is a tendency for many people to misassociate mood disorder with intellectual impairment, and I find that incredibly frustrating," he said. Mr Costa said he used to suffer badly from bipolar but had now found the right combination of medication to manage the condition. "I sought treatment. Anyone that seeks treatment for depression clearly has a bad case of depression. But the good news is that there are medicines, there are strategies," he said.

Mr Costa said his family had a history of mental illness. "My sister is a schizophrenic and my mother suffered from bipolar disorder," he told the audience. Mr Costa was at the Black Dog Institute, a facility dedicated to mental health disorders, to launch the book Managing Bipolar Disorder. Edited by psychologist Kerrie Eyers and University of NSW psychiatry professor Gordon Parker, the book is a collection of case studies and diary entries from people with bipolar who talk about their experiences in a light-hearted and non-clinical way.

Mr Costa said the book would be a welcome resource. "If we are going to get on top of this issue, particularly for our younger people, we need people who have suffered from mood disorders to come forward and tell their story and say that there are good treatment regimes for these problems," he said.

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Rudd needs to stop diplo-babble and Bureaucratese

A TELLING exchange occurred between Kevin Rudd and an ABC journalist, Louise Yaxley, at the NATO summit in Bucharest in April. Yaxley asked Rudd if NATO leaders had changed the rules of engagement that applied to NATO soldiers. Rudd responded, "You mean RoEs." Yaxley replied, in a tone dripping with sarcasm, "Yes, I mean rules of engagement."

Prime ministers in the Westminster tradition have a duty to communicate (without dumbing down) a whole range of issues, especially the big ones, such as global warming. And that's where we have a problem with Chairman Kevin. Consider these gems from a joint press conference Rudd gave with European Commission president Jose Barroso in Brussels on April 2: "I'll reverse engineer and start at the third and move back to the first. On the question of security in the Asia-Pacific region, I think it's quite clear that if you look at the post-'45 history of East Asia that you see an absence of multilateral security mechanisms.

"What you saw even prior to the end of the Cold War here, of course, was the evolution of a series of confidence and security-building measures coming off the back of CSCE, OSCE and the Helsinki accords. There has to be a greater synergy between, let's call it our policy leadership in this, which has been focused so much, legitimately, on targets and global architecture, almost reverse-engineered back to the means by which you can quickly deliver outcomes, and on the demand side in our economy we're looking at potential advances in terms of 20 to 25 per cent range if you do this across the board. It all takes cost, but let me tell you it's probably the quickest lever you can pull given the challenges we face."

At a meeting of global heavies at the Grove Hotel in Hertfordshire three days later, Rudd repeated one of his rhetorical atrocities: the undefined acronym. The head-scratchers at the Grove were regaled with the EWS (early warning system), IFIs (international financial institutions), RTPs (rights to protect) and CCS (carbon capture and storage).

Now let's jump across the pond to Rudd's famous (or infamous) speech to the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, on April 20: "Seventh, it has timely deployed the ASEAN Regional Forum for the purpose of developing confidence and security-building measures across the region. The ARF has spent far too long as a regional talkfest. One practical area where we can begin building CSBMs is in the development under this ASEAN Regional Forum umbrella of a regional counter-disaster co-ordination authority, an Asia-Pacific disaster management organisation." (CSBMs, for you and me, are the aforementioned confidence and security-building measures.)

The Plain English Campaign in Britain each year awards a Foot in the Mouth award for the most baffling comment by a public figure and the Brookings speech of Chairman Kevin has been nominated, which must make all our hearts swell.

Rudd's other vices are nominalisations and the passive voice. In the jargon of linguistics, nominalisation means turning a verb into a verb plus noun combination, which makes for long sentences. Instead of saying "I discussed (verb)", the phrasing becomes "I undertook (verb) discussions (noun)". In the passive voice, a simple phrase such as "I love you" becomes "you are loved by me".

Consider the Prime Minister's interview with Chris Uhlmann on ABC radio's AM on June 27. Rudd averaged 21.7 words a sentence while Uhlmann used 14.4. (Tony Abbott has tracked Rudd speeches with sentences containing more than 30 words.) Rudd used passives 6 per cent of the time compared with Uhlmann's 4 per cent. On a readability index, Rudd clocked in at 10.1, Uhlmann at 7.1. Readability is a concept developed, primarily by US linguists, to determine the complexity of language. There are various versions: Flesch-Kincaid, FOG (frequency of gobbledegook), SMOG (simplified measure of gobbledegook). Most of them try to measure text difficulty in terms of how many years' education you need to understand it. The average reading age in the US is presumed to be seven or eight, with Australia not far behind. Also, recent research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development indicates that about one-fifth of adults in countries such as Australia have difficulty reading labels on medicine bottles and finding a plumber in a telephone directory. (The readability of the previous paragraph, by the way, was Flesch-Kincaid, 10.5; FOG, 15.5; and SMOG,13.6.)

So what? Well, even when we make allowances for the approximateness of such scores, Rudd's Brussels speech about synergy and architecture rates at Flesch-Kincaid, 18.5; FOG, 22.4; and SMOG, 15.2. That means that 50 per cent to 80 per cent of Australians would have difficulty understanding what their leader was saying.

To be fair, recent speeches by Rudd in parliament on mundane topics hit quite acceptable fours and eights. But therein lies the problem: Rudd's speech complexity varies with his audience and he seems to have difficulty in understanding just what an audience is. When Rudd speaks to select audiences in Brussels, he seems to think that he is operating under Chatham House rules, where what is said in the room stays in the room. Among chums in a think tank such as Brookings, he thinks everyone is conversant in dippospeak or tankese, and when he uses management buzzwords such as "low-hanging fruit" he does not realise that he has to speak to the electorate through the medium of journalists or, even worse, directly through cameras and microphones.

His prissy pedantry comes out when in interviews he uses words such as extant, disparate and trajectory. And his use of triplet phrases such as "responsible, clear, consultative", "calmly, coolly, methodically", and "it's difficult, it's hard, it's complex", does not have the climactic kick that was present in the speeches of Margaret Thatcher, who pioneered the technique (all quotes from the Uhlmann interview).

Rudd's non-verbal repertoire is too vast to canvass here, but there is a worrying consistency about it: the counting of arguments on the fingers; the hula-moving hands to emphasise a point, a gesture that often remains out of view on a bust camera shot; the crucifix of the two hands, especially the right one; the head tilt and the look down when making a point, a strange mix between a smarmy and unctuous vicar and a patronising and contemptuous lecturer.

As Barry Cohen has noted in these pages, Rudd is the logical culmination of a funnelling effect, a trend that began with Ben Chifley and John Curtin and continued through Bob Hawke. Once caucus had members from a wide range of professions. Now there is hardly one business person or farmer, but instead a plethora of apparatchiks, former research assistants and union bosses, all considerably younger.

Rudd has been a public servant for most of his career (with a short spell as a consultant on matters Chinese) and he speaks Chinese, bureaucratese and diplo-babble. If he is to cut through to the people, and not be a one-hit wonder or the victim of a Gillardista putsch, he must learn to talk to the people in language they understand.

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Teachers strike over decaying government houses

The Torres Strait is a long way from the State capital and most of the people there are black, so who cares? -- apparently

Teachers living in leaking, mouldy and flea-infested houses could be pulled out of their schools for their own safety if a strike in the Torres Strait, Cape and Gulf scheduled to take place over the next two weeks is unsuccessful. Around 500 teachers from 28 schools will be involved in the 24-hour stop-work action to protest against the State Government's chronic neglect of teacher housing in remote areas.

Hundreds of reports of leaking roofs, electrical faults and mouldy living conditions have reached the Queensland Teachers' Union and it is a problem which president Steve Ryan said must be addressed swiftly and properly. "We've literally got teachers living in houses that are falling down, where doors are missing and broken, termites are taking over and up to one third of air-conditioning units are broken," Mr Ryan said. "If we cannot get the funds required to fix these uninhabitable properties - which the Auditor-General estimated to be around $37.2million - then we will be forced to take more drastic action and withdraw teachers from their schools. "Obviously this will adversely affect students and our teachers do not take these actions lightly, so this shows how huge the problem is."

Mr Ryan said he had hoped one-hour stop-work meetings held in April would force the state government to take notice of the situation but that the 2008/2009 Budget announced in June failed to deliver the funding levels required to provide adequate housing, falling short by $20.2million. "We cannot wait until next year's budget to get this funding. There is such a backlog of work to be carried out that by then these houses will have fallen down," Mr Ryan said. "Our plan is that the government takes this strike seriously and sees some sense."

A report by the Auditor-General's found that the sub-standard living conditions directly resulted in difficulties securing and retaining staff, consequently "affecting the ability to provide services in remote and regional areas".

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