Ah i thought you would take that get out, ok this is how it  works..
there will be certain parts of the world that have low, sometimes very low levels
of cancer. This may be related to diet of course but it is also possible that it
is simply how statistics work. Indeed if we were not to find these areas either
within a country or throughout the world then a mistake would have been made.

There will always be clusters of high and low cancer purely because of how maths works.

Thank you lfc for this wonderful insight into statistics. Here was I using Chi squared test and P ratios when really its much simpler than that. I can see now that Okinawa simply is too small and is bound to have fewer cancer incidents because there just fewer people on the island, why did I not think of that.

No Brendan, 'its how maths works'

Far more dangerous than not knowing something is not knowing that you dont know something

lfc, you keep saying it's how numbers work or how maths works - what do you actually mean by that?

pumphol.  • July 11, 2014 10:37 AM BST
Macmillan nurses do a wonderful job, I will leave it at that.

I agree pumphol

I think the OP is wrong...all life involves some risk
if we cannot enjoy a cake in aid of a good cause...life is probably not worth living

just my own opinion

I think we should be grateful we have a regular supply of food at all myself

and I regret to say, however healthy our diet.... we still die anyway

live dangerously, live life to the full, eat a cake

If one was to take this seriously:
One would have to ban Christmas(Oliver Cromwell tried that), Birthdays, Anniversaries,etc
and all types of celebrations involving conspicuous consumption

In fact all sensible diets do allow a cake or a bun now and again, one only has to have less of
these at other times to balance, or just add an extra bit of exercise to burn it off

It is when people eat cakes all the time the problems arise, such as high blood sugar, too much fat, high cholesterol,
etc...I do not see MacMillan advocating this?

please keep a sense of proportion here

By the way the food industry love this moderation message as they know that the foods they pedal are addictive and thus once tried moderation becomes impossible for many

It is when people eat cakes all the time the problems arise

They do in the sense that the sugars in the cakes are in all the other food they eat all the time, our diet (and it didn’t used to be this way) raises insulin many times a day in the succession of large and small meals that we consume. The ‘healthy’ lunch that is brown bread, with chicken and some dressing, an apple or banana or grapes. A couple of hours later you are moody, tired and want something to eat – like a biscuit or two. People are on an insulin rollercoaster all day that is damaging and completely unnatural. Nearly all the food we eat that is not whole food contains wheat and/or high fructose corn syrup. The former causes all sorts of problems to which I can attest and is addictive, the latter doesn’t budge insulin and so your brain never receives the “I’m full” signals that Leptin sends it when you eat fat. It’s put in our food in place of fat and no one asked us if we minded or even told us. One minute it wasn’t there, the next minute it was. Foods that you bought that didn’t contain HFCS last week did this week. No wonder people are fat, the industry made them fat. Even when we are told to eat healthily we think fruit and below-ground vegetables - full of sugar.

If the cake were the naughty treat in the otherwise sensible day that’d be fine, but everyone’s diet is crammed full of rubbish that is additive and driving a diabetes epidemic.  The ad makers should just have been more sensitive, that's all – you’d raise an eyebrow if the publicity shots for the coffee mornings included a couple of women smoking and an old soak having another gin. These would be unacceptable even though they are probably closer to reality than not. So why should an advert for fighting a disease this serious include the kinds of food that themselves are part of the problem, too much sugar – the blue touch paper, in effect, of cancer?

and I regret to say, however healthy our diet.... we still die anyway … live dangerously, live life to the full, eat a cake

I know you are kidding to an extent, it does seem silly when you may say "It's only a cake or two we are talking about", I quite appreciate the apparent absurdity. But it is part of a bigger picture. No one is expecting to live forever. The point is that we want to live for as long as we can as well as we can. What’s the point of a prolonged decline at the mercy of a brain disease caused by a devil-may-care attitude to carbs?  Wouldn’t anyone prefer an autumn and winter of well being, followed by a rapid kicking of the bucket over a confused and painful long (expensive) decline? This whole health campaign going back has been exactly about that, about taking responsibility for your health in your 40s, 50s and 60s so that you are not a pain in the arse for a large part of those years and beyond and so you can actually enjoy those years in better health.

I think they didn't know that wheat and HFCS encouraged eating to start with, I believe they didn't want to lose sales because the fat and flavour had been taken out, I seem to remember trials in the USA where people said they didn't like the foods without the fat.So they simply wanted things to return to normal. But at some point it must have shown up in the sales that things were selling more. If you are not satiated (whether you've eaten enough or not) you are in a real sense starving, even though you have all the nutrition you need. I think they must have quickly realised that was a gold mine. I don't know either, but I think that's why there's wheat in things like soups and sausages that if you were making them at home you'd never include - same goes for high fructose corn syrup.

The solution is to return to fat, which does not raise insulin, cause inflammation or make you fat and does satiate you. However people are utterly afraid of it because of all the bad things they've been told.

Flower is spot on here. If there was one thing you should rule out of your life in addition to sugar it would be wheat. What the pro argument people on this thread are probably saying is that we do not expect legislation against cakes, what we expect is information from people who the public, sadly, tend to take notice. Macmillan are one of those sets of people who can exert influence and yet they are exerting influence in the opposite direction to the one they should be leading us. When big business exerts an adverse influence on our health in order to protect profit something is wrong in our society. When doctors know nothing about nutrition and everything about pharmacology, something again is wrong. I do not believe that we should back off from establishments because they employ well minded people but are run on a basis that is not likely to solve or help the problem.

Human beings, in facts all mammals, seek tasty food.
You are blaming food manufacturers for giving us what we want, in fact they have to, if they produce
food that tastes like crud, nobody would buy it.

I accept it is probably bad for us. In fact we should eat a healthy and balanced diet.
But I still think this is personal choice.

It is more difficult with children, but part of a parents responsibility is to teach a child
to eat a healthy and balanced diet......but adults must make their own choice.

I still you are being unfair to MacMillan
just my opinion

feel free to differ

ta lfc1971

lets a a smokathon for cancer research then, cant argue with that, or a pub crawl

I would say that average person going to an event endorsed by MacMillan Cancer, would assume that the event would be healthy for them or at least free from things that might cause ill health

One cream bun will not kill you on the spot, but it's not part of a healthy diet.

So was Mafeking

Probably  but who knows what really goes on at the House Of Commons

I meant, is the average viewer of this ad that dim?

No, the average viewer is no more dim than the average Renaissance man was who hadn’t heard of Copernicus yet and had ‘common sense’ and ‘reason’ to tell him the Sun obviously went around the Earth. It’s a shift in thinking that will seem obvious later that hasn’t happened yet and that’s what we should want. In 50 years people will say how bizarre it was to not notice that the thing they want to cure is caused by the thing they are encouraging people to do to stop it. Just as those ads where doctors stated they only smoked Camels or Marlboro cigarettes were taken in their stride by most people at the time, but would be outrageous today.

We should want people to question the sanity of eating tons of sugar to help prevent the illnesses sugar causes. Perhaps the cake makers of Britain will then wake up to the fact that you can make virtually any cake without the damaging ingredients - like substituting coconut flour for wheat, for instance. That’s the pity of it, you can do it all with alternative ingredients, but all the time ads like this are made it perpetuates the status quo.