Marc Palmer

I bought The Ecologist magazine for the first time the other day. There’s an excellent piece on what a truly nasty history there is behind the sweetener Aspartame (AKA Nutrasweet, Canderel etc). Not only does it have a terrible lack of safety trials, definite problems with reactions in a lot of people, and causes holes in the brains of some animals (may not translate to humans) – it has been approved by the FDA but what can farily be described as extremely dubious means. 

I quote:

"Because it contains no calories, aspartame is considered a boon to health-conscious individuals everywhere; and most of us, if we think about it at all, think it is safe. But independent scientists say aspartame can produce a range of disturbing adverse effects in humans, including headaches, memory loss, mood swings, seizures, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s-like symptoms, tumours and even death."

The full article is available in the print version of the magazine, and includes a timeline since 1965 covering the development of the chemical through to today, including the various tactics used to gain FDA approval including fraudulent trials and hiring FDA staff after approval. Oh, and "all-round good guy" Donald Rumsfeld is implicated – appointed as CEO to Searle (the company behind Nutrasweet) and later when the Reagan administration begins, magically the product gets FDA approval within a year after languishing unapproved for 15 years.

It always makes me hungry! I updated the Demuths restaurant site’s menu pages to bring it up to date with the current menu. There’s some wonderful stuff on there, including the white chocolate and rosewater cheesecake which I only wish I could eat. They have self-published a great professionally produced cookery book available called Green World Cookbook – printed with eco-friendly inks and paper to boot and soon to enter its second edition after selling 5000 copies.

My wife and I were very pleased to find frozen pizzas from the company Dietary Specials in our local Waitrose supermarket on Friday. This is big news for us, as our daughter responds very badly to gluten based foods.

While we don’t go for convenience foods normally it is very nice to be able to have something like this for times like parties at other peoples’ houses where it is often very difficult to provide foods that are vegetarian and gluten free and similar to what other children are eating. It’s the kind of thing that will become more of a problem as she gets older.

These pizzas are absolutely amazing for gluten-free pizza bases though – of course nowhere near a gourment extra-thin true Italian-style wood fired pizza, more like your average cheap "tomato and mozzarella with spongey base" fare. However to achieve that at all without gluten is simply amazing. It’s just a shame they have to use cow’s milk and eggs in them or I’d be eating them myself occasionally (yes, gluten avoidance can lower your good taste barriers).

Score 1 for Dietary Specials though, as unlike some of their other products (such as their croissants), and a lot of the dreaded Tru-free stuff, there’s no hydrogenated fats in the pizzas. 

I’ve long been uncomfortable with putting standard beans into the model used to render a view in a web application. It’s fine when I know it’s me editing the view templates (typically WebMacro), however in other situations – especially if there might be concurrency issues – you shouldn’t really be putting mutable objects into the view model just in case somebody decides to get clever and change some properties of your beans.

After playing with several solutions over the last few years, I came up with a quick and simple solution the other day. Using  CGLIB and a custom interceptor, it is relatively trivial to create dynamic "proxy" classes of any data bean that cache all the readable property values and throw an exception if any setter or other method is called.

The beauty of this is that the proxy class does not have to implement an interface – which is usually a good idea but not always practical in legacy code – and it does not need to retain a reference to the original mutable bean. Java 1.3+ dynamic proxies will only proxy interfaces, but CGLIB allows you to proxy concrete classes.

One of my least favourite things about mankind is the apparent inability of people to change what they do in order to protect themselves.

The WHO and other organisations are getting rather anxious about a potentially massive outbreak of blird flu in humans. It is truly terrifying.

We’re talking tens of millions of people dying, and the response is along the lines of… "let’s wait until it gets here and then contain the birds and people it infects, and give out millions of vaccines".

As far as I can gather these bird flu cases are arising from intensive breeding of poultry for meat. It is not clear whether past flu epidemics were caused by this, although I’m sure some or all weren’t. After all such intensive rearing of animals is a relatively recent development.

However, given the close link with the outbreaks in the last few years it would seem complete madness for humans to keep breeding animals in these conditions, given the huge number of lives at risk.

So this is yet another reason to stop eating meat – and world leaders should be working to reduce the levels of poultry farming globally, as it’s always better to tackle the cause of a problem rather than the symptom. This should also help to mitigate a whole slew of other health and social problems.

I also heard on the radio that a major pharmaceutical company has donated millions of doses of a flu drug to the WHO to help control any outbreaks. Call me a cynic but I hope the drug has been sufficiently tested already and that people in less-developed countries will not be used as live trials when an outbreak does occur.

Don’t get me started on the huge amounts of Amazon forest being destroyed primarily to grow soya beans for cattle feed.