Another useless study

This time it's about reducing hypertension.
    Steven Chen from John Hopkins and a bunch of others put together a study not to figure out what kind of diet reduces hypertension, but looking for evidence to support the American Heart Association's sweetheart DASH diet.
    They had 459 subjects try one of three high-carb diets for 8 weeks (those numbers guarantee that chance has a big influence on the results). To no one's surprise, the DASH diet came in slightly ahead of the others. No one said anything about it being the best of a bad lot.
    Now the AHA can add another notch to DASH's headboard and heave a sigh of relief that the low-carb camel's nose remains outside the tent.
    Ref: Circulation online 31 August 2010

The Health Canada HiCarb Guide to Correct Living

I thought I'd see if Health Canada had learned anything over the years so I engaged archive.org's WayBack Machine to look at the Canada Food Guide.
    It turns out that since 1998 they've had only two versions of the Guide. Somewhere around 2002, they started an intensive study into the latest medical knowledge and by 2007 they made an evidence-based decision that they had been right all along except for total quantity and grains. They changed the Guide to what it still is today, leaving three of the food groups unchanged but reducing total intake by reducing grain servings per adult from 12 down to 8.
    This is not a trivial change. The Guide still recommends a hyperglycemic, pancreas-destroying, diabetigenic carb load, but it takes about 60 grams of carbs out of what was a 350 gram diet before dessert and drinks. Grains are where most of the starches and sugars come from, so any cut is significant. On the other hand, they count beans and peas as vegetables, so no cheering yet.
    It's interesting that their reduction is twice the total in a low-carb diet.

G8/G20

I suppose it's possible that Harper personally planned the G8/G20 conferences and personally approved the dozens of cost estimates and requisitions that added up to costing more than the gun registry.
    More likely, I think, that the federal bureaucracy, Liberal and NDP voters all, sandbagged their Ministers. Given the opportunity to divert non-trivial funds to a laundry list of pet rabbits and, at the same time, embarrass the Conservatives, they jumped on it.