هلع أمة : كشف النقاب عن الأساطير التي قيلت لنا عن الطعام والصحة

by Stanley Feldman, ستانلي فيلدمان, فينسنت ماركس

It seems as though every week there's another food or health scare. Whether it's British beef, the MMR vaccine, or just sunshine itself, there's always somebody to tell you that you are under threat from yet another everyday activity; or that the food we eat and the medicines we take are poisoning our bodies. However, this book reveals that we are all living longer, healthier lives, while science has advanced to the stage where medicines and surgical procedures are safer and more effective than ever before. So where does the truth lie? Who can we believe? How do we know whose advice is worth listening to? Panic Nation examines the truth behind the headlines, drawing together the country's leading experts in their field to examine these questions.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Sociology

352 pages, Unknown Binding

First published May 1, 2005

Reviews

[عمر الحمادي · Rating 4 out of 5]

إن انفجار المعلومات غير الصحيحة قد غمر الروايات الواقعية، فلو سألت الناس عن عدد قتلى حادثة مفاعل "تشيرنوبل"، فإن المعروف عند الناس أن عدد بالآلاف أو المئات بينما العدد الحقيقي حسب تقدير منظمة الصحة العالمية بعد مرور عشرين سنة من الحادثة هو أقل من أربعين شخص، ولم يكن هناك إلا تأثير محدود في عدد حالات سرطان الغدة الدرقية ولم يكن هناك تأثير ملحوظ على نسبة ظهور العيوب الخلقية أو إصابات مرض ابيضاض الدم...

سيصيبك الكتاب بالهلع ، فسيصدم بأغاليط المعلومات التي تحولت إلى بديهيات... فلا يوجد طعام ردىء يسبب اعتلال صحة، ووجبات المطاعم السريعة "الرديئة" تعادل في سعراتهت سعرات صحن سلطة "ولدروف" المكونة من دجاج وتفاح وكرفس وجوز، ودهن الجبن الحيواني هو نفس الدهن الحيواني في قطعة البرغر التي تعطي نفس البروتين الذي تعطيه شريحة لحم البقر "الأنقس"، ليس الدهن من يجعلك بديناً بل كمية الطعام المستمر التي تعطيك كميات كبيرة من السعرات الحرارية...

سيذهلك الكتاب حين يخبرك أن السكر غير مسؤول عن مرض السكر والبدانة وارتفاع ضغط الدم وأنه لا يعد خطراً على الصحة إلا في حالات مرض عدم تحمل الفركتوز الوراثي، فالسكر يجعل الأطعمة لذيذة المذاق وتبعاً لذلك يؤدي إلى البدانة بسبب كثرة الاستهلاك...

ثم يمر على الملح والكوليسترول والتدخين السلبي والمكملات الغذائية والفيتامينات ومبالغات الصحف الإنشائية ليحللها ويفككها حسب قواعد العلم...

[Bianca · Rating 2 out of 5]

I could only give it two stars because there are no references whatsoever, and this is a serious shortcoming (especially for a book giving health advice that contradicts the mainsteam). The book relies on 'expert' opinion from start to finish, with the experts quite clearly letting rip on their chosen subject and often, I felt, overstating the case whilst giving little detail.

I like the idea of the book as an antidote to the false health warnings of our time and also for it's 'myth-busting' agenda, however I found quite often that the advice was taken too far in the opposite direction - the health warnings go from one end of the spectrum to the other! In that sense it was contradicting it's own purpose of quelling the 'panic nation'. Ironic.

Still I did find many of the chapters interesting to read (they covered a vast array of issues) whilst taking everything with a pinch of salt and a healthy dose of scepticism along the way. This is very much needed especially as there are no references, so the discerning reader must search for the articles and studies they are ad-libbing about by yourself, from scratch.

[عطاء · Rating 4 out of 5]

تلك الحياة الرغيدة والعافية التي يتمتع بها الغربيون حاليًا، ربما هي الحالة المُثلى التي طالما سعى البشر إليها طوال حياتهم، زادت معدلات أعمارنا بشكل كبير، واليوم نبدو أوفر صحة من أجدادنا على عكس الشائع، إذًا لما الشكوى؟ فعلى حسب الخبراء نحن دائمًا عرضة للهجوم من وباء ما أو خطر يهدد بفناء جنسنا، لدرجة أن قائمة المواد التي يُحتمل كونها خطرًا على صحتنا توشك أن تشمل كل شيء، لقد أصبح مجرد كوننا على قيد الحياة نذيرًا بالموت، لماذا في هذا العصر التي تُخبرنا فيه البيانات أننا في حال جيدة، نشعر بخوف أكبر ناحية كل ما يحيط بنا؟ في هذا الكتاب وعبر التعرض لأشهر الأساطير الشعبية حول الصحة والطعام، يحاول المؤلفون البحث وراء الأرقام والجداول التي يستند إليها الخبراء حينما ينادون فينا بما نعرفه، لكن بطريقة خادعة: ستموتون جميعًا، لا شك في ذلك، لكن عرافو العصر الحديث يريدون أن يجنوا المال مقابل تضليلنا بأنصاف الحقائق.

[Will Lyons · Rating 4 out of 5]

Informative science is presented in an entertaining and accessible way, debunking (or at least challenging) many of the factually-meagre paradigms hoisted on us by the media. This book goes the whole range through food scares, diet, exercise and medicine, all the way to statistical data and epidemiology. I finish this book with a better understanding of scientific hypothesis and experiment, and a greater reluctance to take shocking facts and figures at face value. An ode to common sense and level-headedness in a world whipped up into frenzy and fear. Historically relevant to understand the BSE virus and MMR vaccine scares of yesteryear, before my lifetime.

[Khaled · Rating 5 out of 5]

الغالبية العظمى تتعرض لحملات الجماعات الخضراء والتي أحياناً تكون شرسة والتي تهاجم المعلبات والمأكولات سريعة التحضير والمجمدات.. إلخ ولكن ما حقيقة الأمر؟ هل كلامهم صحيح أو مبالغ فيه أو له أهداف معينة؟ وفي هذا الكتاب إجابات بالأدلة العلمية والاحصائيات عن كل ذلك.

[Adam Higgitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Public health scares probably cause more anxiety than terrorism. From GMOs to MMR, from BSE to RSI, we are now all conversant in a language of three letter acronyms, each spelling another reason not to eat or do anything, lest it kill or contaminate us.

Sitting above all this is a big, bloated meta-anxiety; the latent belief that we can no longer trust those charged with keeping us safe from poison food, hazardous medicine, toxic air and harmful work practices. The authorities either lack the wherewithal to get to the facts, or the will to confront the big businesses responsible for our plight. We are adrift in a sea of accusation and counter-accusation, with nobody to steer us safely to the hard shores.

Enter Stanley Feldman and Vincent Marks, two noted medical experts whose book Panic Nation aims to set the record straight and confront the dodgy science behind recent high profile scares. Between them and their contributors they take on many of the old chestnuts we all fret about - obesity, pesticides, food labelling, pollution, GMOs, stress, mad cows, the MMR vaccine, passive smoking and many more.

There is much here that is very good. The opening section of the book deals brutally with the shortcomings of epidemiology and the abuse of statistics by pressure groups. The process of Chinese whispers, by which sober scientific research study becomes lurid red top splash is dealt with unsparingly. It makes me realise that, far from my conceit as an informed member of the public, I am in fact receiving my truth fourth hand at best, once it's been sifted through any number of agenda.

After that we are delivered in short order a series of arguments as to why we can after all eat chips, drink booze, ignore organic food and vitamin supplements, put our feet up (in the sun, without any sun screen), get The Jab, enjoy beef and pretty much ignore everything we read in the papers.

Chapters on things like sugar and pesticides are excellent. While the authors show how the dangers of sugar have been exaggerated largely by ignorance down the years, the supposed perils of pesticides, it is argued, have their roots in something far more pernicious; a belief that science itself is bad for you, a view aided enthusiastically by a culture of new age mumbo jumbo and a host of latter day snake oil merchants.

It is this lot who really rile Panic Nation's contributors. One cannot help feeling however that in their zeal to deliver a good kicking to the hippy dippies, panic mongers and single-issue propagandists that the authors have scythed through rather too much orthodoxy. In so doing, they sometimes lapse into the kind of strident, opinion-heavy, fact-light propaganda they have set out to nail.

For example, under the Exercise and Sports chapter they have confronted the myth 'we should exercise as much as possible' with the fact 'excessive exercise can cause more harm than good'. No kidding. Of course excessive exercise is a bad thing - that is why it is excessive, it's beyond what is needed. As evidence they cite 'joggers dropping dead' when in reality the number of joggers who have indeed died unexpectedly is insignificant as a proportion of the population who jog, and is probably consistent with sudden, unexpected deaths among the wider population. The authors really should have been alive to this kind of sloppy writing, since they criticise it in the opening section. More than that though, they just shouldn't be suggesting that the advice in favour of regular exercise is faddy or fake.

I'm glad this book was written and published. It is timely and there is a need to counter the ill founded fears that often pervade our thinking about food, health, medicine and our environment. I just wish the authors had kept their tempers, stuck more rigorously to fact and confined their riposte to those areas where reason and science have long been abandoned in favour of ignorance and panic. As it is, they have been just too trenchant to make a difference and redress things. They could have got even with their targets. Instead, they just got mad.

[Gary · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are no shortage of individuals 'out there' who are keen to tell us things are harmful for us or this lifestyle choice is the key to health and happiness. Some are scientists of a sort and some are even respectable scientists. But whether through sheer assumption, insufficient evidence or deliberately-skewed figures the public today are bombarded with false theories and reasons to be afraid (and but some product!) Big business has not been slow to capitalise on such fears and many of the companies that claim to be oh-so-homely are in fact part of a multinational operation.

This book, written by experts in the various fields, sets out the evidence for a number of health scares and modern gospel-certain beliefs about our food. In doing so it exposes just how evidence-lacking and irrational are the fears over non-'organic' food, GM crops, 'chemical' medication, food additives, salt, sugar, cholesterol (which is particularly unscientific), the MMR vaccine, passive smoking, air quality and much more.

The articles are learned, balanced and cautious. They expose how self-appointed gurus and calculated politicians ignore genuine science, either out of new-pagan belief or a desire for easy votes. Modern science has its problems (as science always will) but the greatest fear is that modern societies will largely reject belief in Christian science and hope for the a vague, neo-pagan 'nature knows best' pessimism that ought only to have a footing among radical lefties.

Loved it.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do agree with the previous reviewer that the authors are somewhat undone in many of the essays by a lack of data and facts, and seem to rely heavily on opinion. But what refreshing opinions they are, to see it stated that people are fat because they eat too much, pure and simple. Want to lose weight? Eat less and get some exercise, full stop. And it also made me think about the Jamie Oliver campaign against school dinners - can these five meals a week out of the twenty one that kids have across seven days really be the cause of the obesity and lack of concentration, or is it the snacking between meals and sitting in front of the TV outside of school that's the real problem?
There just are nowhere near enough mainstream journals that challenge popular trends and trendy media views. When was the last time you read that global warming might not be happening after all? Or that it's virtually impossible to make and detonate a bomb in an aircraft toilet with chemicals bought in Tesco? Or that the war in Iraq actually had some upsides? No. These would obviously be thinly disguised right wing rants, wouldn't they? If you want to get a grip and challenge your own trendy, liberal, media bolstered opinions, this book is a good place to start.

[Bayansa · Rating 3 out of 5]

غير أفكاري بشكل كبير ! حاجات انصدمت منها .. وماتوقعت في يوم من الأيام حأسمع أنها مو صحيحة ..
كتاب يتكلم عن الغذاء والأمراض وأفكار شائعة بين الناس معظمها مبنية على اساس علمي ضعيف ...
.. ابحاث علمية مبنية على هراء وتخمين ..
ارقام يتم التلاعب فيها من قِبل الاعلام لنشر الــخوف بين الناس ..
مو كل حاجه مكتوب عليها ... مبني على دراسة علمية .. لازم نصدقه .
لانهم استغلو العلم في ان الناس تصدق كلامهم وللتلاعب بالمشاعر.. الكتاب مقدم بأسلوب علمي ومفصل كل حاجه بشكل مبسط .. للتوصل الى الحقيقة !

[Amanda Webb · Rating 2 out of 5]

Can't be bothered to finish reading this it's way too annoying. It does offer a good alternative view I suppose but if you know anyone who should be watching their diet it's maybe not a good idea for them to read it.

[Sara Alhooti · Rating 3 out of 5]

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