Saving your bacon: healthy-eating policy evolves

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1:12Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer.

1:22Today on the show, the plague that may or may not have been released from a Russian lab and remembering the inventor, the flat-screen display.

1:36First up, though.

1:43You are what you eat from your head down to your feet. Things like meat and eggs and fish you need to build up muscle tissue. For absolutely decades, governments have been trying to inform people about healthy diets.

1:59It's easy to see why. Obesity and infirmity on the rise means ever more pressure on health systems, particularly socialized ones, and lost productivity.

2:14Less cynically, governments are just doing their job of trying to protect citizens, in this case, from themselves.

2:26But here's the thing. That kind of public service messaging, it doesn't work. After many years of telling people to eat more healthily, governments are trying more radical measures. Slavia Chankova is The Economist's healthcare correspondent. Poor diets cost OECD countries around 3 % of their GDP each year. So the argument for taking a more meaningful action against unhealthy foods has moved from a moral argument to an economic argument. And when you say unhealthy foods, how are we defining them? Broadly, there are foods that are high in fats or saturated fats, which is the bad kind, sugar, salt, and also that they're calorie dense, so lots of calories per bite.

3:20And as you say, governments have been trying to tackle this even before now. Yeah, over the years, there've been all sorts of attempts to tell people how to eat more healthily. So dietary guidelines, various campaigns to get people to eat fruits and veggies and avoid fatty foods and so on. Here in Britain, for example, there have been close to 700 different policies proposed over the years. And for the most part, they're just about asking people to make individual changes, but they haven't really worked. Obesity rates here have doubled since the 90s. They're climbing everywhere. In America, 72 % of adults are either obese or overweight.

4:03All of that has led to a change of how people think about the problem too. They're becoming more open to government stepping in and even demanding it. So what kinds of things are governments trying now? There are generally three different types of interventions, labeling, restrictions on marketing, and location. For labeling, for example, that in some countries involves food crates that are posted in packaging, the NutriScore, which is used in Europe, which combines healthy and unhealthy ingredients and scores put on the alphabet between A and E. So you don't have to think about, is it fat? Is it sugar?

4:44Does it have fiber? That's all calculated for you. And then you have this new category that's growing in popularity, which is all over Latin America, which is black, very stark warning labels, like cigarette style. Canada adopted those earlier this year, and they seem to be like the most effective, as you might expect. You have marketing restrictions. So about a dozen countries now ban television ads for junk food when children are likely to be watching. And then you have bans, total bans on where foods can be sold. And that It ranges from they can't be displayed near the checkout or at the end of aisles or like prominent places where people do impulse purchases.

5:30So it's really all over the place, but it's really kind of snowballing now. But all of this sounds relatively interventionist. What evidence do we have that this stuff is working? We do have evidence from countries where this kind of stuff has been in place for some time. In Mexico, for example, the labeling laws led to a 15 % drop in calories sold, which is quite a bit. And most of that, in fact, came from products being reformulated. So manufacturers taking out some sugar or fats rather than just people changing which products they were buying. But of course, the problem with all these regulations is that they have loopholes.

6:12For example, when here in Britain, junk food had to be taken away from high traffic areas, such as near checkouts, supermarkets just put kind of racks with freshly baked sugary pastries right next to entrances where people would buy those because they were exempt from the regulations. So that, in turn, has led Britain to consider a different model. So basically every food has a score. And the idea is that it will be left to them to decide whether they want to sell fewer cookies or sell more broccoli or pressure their suppliers to make the products healthier in order for them to hit their target.

6:58But what seems to be going on here is taking the responsibility from the consumer and not putting it on the government, but shifting it to supermarkets. That's bound to not go very well. Of course it's not. I mean, if they wanted to sell us healthier food baskets, they could totally do that, right? And they're not because it's not as profitable for them. That's why there are other regulatory solutions, which experts think may be more straightforward and possibly with your loopholes. So primarily that would be going through taxing the foods that are bad for you and they work. But there, of course, worries that because people buy so many of those foods, they are such a big chunk of our diet, the overall cost of people's food baskets is going to go up.

7:41Generally, the majority of people are in favor of these taxes if the revenue is used for things like subsidies for school meals or purchases of fruits and vegetables. So kind of like redirecting them towards healthier diets. It's all well and good making things healthier, selling fewer of the nastier things and so on. But how big a difference will this make in real public health terms, do you think? This is such a massive, massive public health problem that any one of these solutions, labels or taxes or marketing restrictions on their own aren't expected to make massive differences. But each of them can make some difference.

8:20And public health experts think that when they're combined, the total defect would be bigger than the sum of its parts. There are already signs from Chile, for example, which has some of the strictest labeling and marketing restrictions. The probability of a child being overweight is starting to fall. It fell by 2-3 % in the first 18 months of the black labels policy. It's just a very short time period for just that one policy. But things are definitely moving in the right direction. In general, the expectation is that each of these things is going to have a relatively small effect, perhaps 2 % or 3 % reduction in obesity.

8:59But when you do several of them, you have a bigger effect. The costs of poorer diets are so massive that even small changes are going to be quite important for public health. Slovea, thanks very much for your time. Thank you, Jason.

9:21Thank you.

9:49panel of experts to talk about regulating AI. Until now, America has taken a pretty hands-off approach, hoping market forces will do their good work and keep the country at the front of the race. That is becoming unsustainable. Anxiety is growing, rogue AI agents just keep escaping into the world, and the catastrophizing is reaching fever pitch. So what is the right balance between safety and speed? Well, it ain't easy, but come watch us thrash it out. If you're a digital subscriber, Insider is already included in your subscription. And if you're listening for free, you can watch extended clips via the link in the show notes.

10:41It sounded like the opening of a pulp thriller. A young woman working in a Siberian research lab supposedly breaks a test tube containing a lethal pathogen, the plague. Within 48 hours, she is dead. Authorities race to contain the situation. There are many, many more questions than answers. Conspiratorial thinking takes hold and understandable fear. So what did happen? There's one fact which is not in dispute, and that's that a 28-year-old researcher called Daria Shepilova died at Russia's Yakutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute. Alex Turner is the Economist's defence editor. We know also that Ms Shepilova worked at that institute on the plague.

11:28Beyond that, it rolls into conjecture. The Russian health watchdog has stated that there's no evidence of microorganisms related to her professional activities and that she died essentially of pneumonia. But the origin of that pneumonia, they cannot confirm. And so around this, you can see there's an awful lot of conjecture. Well, let's start with what we know about her workplace, about this facility. So the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Facility was founded in 1934. It's a long-standing entity and it studies these pathogens, particularly plague, because East Asia, that region, is one of the few places left in the world where the plague still is experienced.

12:16There are still confirmed cases of the plague. And so it's a long-standing organization set up originally in Soviet times to improve the Soviet Union's defenses against these types of condition. I note the use of the word defensive. This is research for defensive purposes. To protect the population against the prevalence of this disease in that particular region. It's just that there have been some long-standing suggestions that Russia is still engaged in bioweapons research. And this is something which was confirmed at the tail end of the Soviet era by President Yeltsin. despite Russia having signed the Biological Weapons Convention in 1975.

12:59So they maintained secret programs through the Cold War. This was admitted at the end of the Cold War. And there are now strong suggestions that Russia is still maintaining a biological weapons program. Do we have any evidence of the Russian government sort of owning up to any of this kind of research? In 2012, President Vladimir Putin, in a communication about Russia's strategic diagnosis and their strategy facing the world, Putin admitted to the fact that Russia was developing so-called genetic weapons. And when one looks at the Russian translation and when one looks at previous references using that terminology, it is understood by a lot of analysts that that was a direct reference to the development of biological weapons.

13:45So Russia maintains essentially three known facilities for bioweapons research. These are military facilities. And just as research facilities of this nature are elsewhere in the world, they're protected and secret. And Russia assures the world that these facilities are used purely for defensive research. But since the Ukraine invasion, one of these facilities in particular, just outside Moscow, has been seen under commercial satellite imagery to be expanding very significantly. And in 2023, the US State Department, in a report judging Russian treaty compliance in a range of areas, assessed that Russia is still maintaining an offensive biological weapons program.

14:31And someone that we spoke to, who shall we say is familiar with US intelligence, described their program as fully fledged and full on. So it's really clear that Russia cannot always be taking its assurances. And it's noteworthy that just prior to the Skripal poisoning with chemical weapon in 2018 in the United Kingdom, Russia, only the year before that, had made some very strident assurances that they maintained no active chemical weapons programs and conducted only defensive research. So coming back to the case of Ms. Shipilova, what do you reckon in terms of what we will learn, or is this the last we're going to hear directly, officially from Russia about her death?

15:17So what connects these things is really Russia's lack of transparency. And there is no evidence that the IKUK's facility is linked to Russian military bioweapons programs, though there are suggestions that during the Cold War it was, but there's no evidence of that now. And it's just a question of the secrecy surrounding their responses to this incident, which despite the simple facts, does indicate there is concern about a pathogen outbreak. Some 200 people have been placed in quarantine. There are local movement restrictions. Ms. Shapilova's flat was disinfected, we understand from local residents in the area, immediately after she died.

16:02So, despite their assurances that she didn't die from an infectious disease, there are plenty of evidence that they're taking significant precautions to that effect, but not sharing any information with the world. And the director of the World Health Organization has only decried the absence of confirmation about a rumoured second fatality. And the experts in this area essentially say that if a second or subsequent death is attributed to this, that then raises the risk of an outbreak. And it's Russia's lack of transparency that concerns people, and it's Russia's lack of transparency that inevitably invites references to the analysis of their ongoing biological weapons programs.

16:45It's this absence of openness which creates mistrust. But for this specific case now, I suppose what I'm asking, what a lot of people might be asking, is how worried should I be? it's very important to stress that even if there is an outbreak of this bubonic plague the health risk is judged to be low it's a disease which can be treated if caught early with basic antibiotics even if untreated it has a 30 to 60 percent fatality rate but once untreated it can morph into pneumonic forms which are much more lethal especially if untreated this obviously create some concern. So the real issue here isn't the presence of the disease.

17:30It's a very well understood disease. It's a capable institute hitherto. It's this general lack of transparency, which creates a suggestion of what are they trying to hide. And with past evidence of them not being truthful about chemical weapons and biological weapons programs, it just undermines the international community's faith in their responses and their motivations. Alex, thanks very much for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you very much.

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19:22Ann Wroe: In Cyril Hilsen's house in northwest London, you couldn't really find the kitchen. Anne Rowe is The Economist's obituaries editor. There was one, but the kitchen, like the scullery and the garage, had been entirely taken over with scientific equipment. so it contained everything he needed spread about over the worktops, grinders and faulted breakers, an oscilloscope, waveform generators, jars of mysterious powder, all of them being busily used. What there wasn't room for was any kitchen stuff, but he didn't care about that because he was living by then on red wine, chocolate and ready meals. In fact, that had been his diet most of his life.

20:14Ann Wroe: His working habits, right until he was 100, were so assiduous, were so lively, that he had more than 70 patents in his name by the end. And the last one he filed was at the age of 97, which was for an ink that had sensors in it to conduct electricity. His biggest achievement, though, and one that is all around us in televisions and cockpit displays and in our phones and calculators, any electronic device you can think of, was the liquid crystal display panel.

21:04Ann Wroe: Before his time, televisions were terrible clunky cuboid things that sat in the corners of rooms. They used bulky cathodray tubes, which had to be kept in a special vacuum chamber because they heated up so much. Britain realised that in the 1970s when it wanted to get ahead in tech it would have to find something different to focus on and that became a flat screen, slim display panel and Sir Rob Hilsom took this away and ran with it Liquid crystals indeed behaved like liquids because they flowed But the trouble with them was that their molecules moved all over the place. So how could you work with these things?

21:59Ann Wroe: He joined up with two colleagues, George Gray and Peter Raines, who were the only men in the country who knew anything about liquid crystals. And between them, in two years, they had managed to stabilise liquid crystals so that they could be used in all these applications. It was a most extraordinary achievement for all of them. Then his second biggest achievement was the semiconductor laser, which sounds rather obscure. But in fact, it meant that rather than having a huge, energy-greedy laser, you could have a slimline one. It was compact enough that it could fit into your hand and run on batteries.

22:47Ann Wroe: So immediately there were all kinds of applications for this. Things like safety devices on trains, burglar alarms, police speeding cameras.

23:02Ann Wroe: As devices and speed cameras, he found himself getting trapped because he was a very keen, fast driver. And he was speeding down the motorway once when a policeman pulled him over. When the policeman came to the window, Cyril Hilsom said, can I see that device? And when he saw it, he said, oh, I invented that, and that one's been wrongly calibrated. And he got away with it. He usually got away with arguments because he was usually right.

23:38Ann Wroe: His parents, though, were just struggling street traders. He was not in an academic household at all. His father had stalls on Petticoat Lane and in the Portobello Road and there they sold chamois leather and flat caps When he went to school, he was aware that he'd got to work hard in order to break out of the East End and he in fact had such a quick mind that he was put up several classes and was allowed in the end to work with one of his friends in the back row at his own pace, which was an extremely fast pace. And as soon as he got into the proper world of science, he was endlessly promoted and favoured and sought after for all the ideas that he had.

24:33Ann Wroe: But in the end, he became rather frustrated with the way that the government never really made much use of the discoveries that scientists made. That was one of the reasons why he was so keen to have more women in science. He was a very good promoter of women, and all the projects he ran, he tried to run on the basis of complete gender equality. It seemed to him that men were just interested in learning more about the fundamentals, but that women wanted to find the practical uses of anything they discovered. And this was certainly something he'd done all his life.

25:24Anne Rowe on Cyril Hilsom, who's died aged 101.

25:45The End

26:03and our senior development producer is Rory Galloway. Our producer is Anne Hanna and assistant producer, Kanael Patel, with extra production help this week from Eleanor Sly and Katie Peterson. We'll all see you back here tomorrow for the weekend intelligence. This week, we return to the curious case of the gay penguins. It's banned books week in America, and fresh data are in about which dangerous and subversive works are being pulled from library and school shelves. One of the more notorious cases about a perfectly happy penguin family is still rolling through the courts. We check in on this culture war casualty and look at how it came to be emblematic of the ever-narrowing freedom to read.

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