Over three years ago, Professor Sir Dieter Helm appeared on BBC Radio 4’s lunchtime programme “You and Yours”. I transcribed the interview, and you can read it here. In that interview, he laid bare the fact that it’s the drive to net zero that’s making energy bills so high, and that it will continue to do so (“going forward we are gonna have higher costs. We really do have to think through how people can pay, and who pays”).

He is, of course, Professor of Economic Policy at the University of Oxford and the author of an independent review published in 2017 in which he “put forward his proposals on how to reduce costs in the power system in the long-term whilst ensuring the UK meets its climate change targets.” He is certainly no climate sceptic (let alone a dreaded “denier”), and he believes that global “decarbonisation” is necessary. However, he is a realist, not a starry-eyed dreamer who thinks that the UK can successfully decarbonise in short order without causing itself economic harm, and he speaks his mind without fear or favour. Perhaps that’s why his 2017 report has pretty much being ignored both by the Conservative government that commissioned it and by the current Labour government, which is made up of starry-eyed dreamers with little understanding of reality. I assumed that the BBC wouldn’t repeat the exercise three years ago when he was allowed to broadcast a few home truths, but, thankfully, it appears I was wrong. My thanks go to Jit for drawing to our attention his interview on the BBC Radio 4 World at One programme earlier today, and for noting that his comments were not subject to push-back by the interviewer. I missed the interview at the time, but having caught up with it, I think it’s sufficiently important to be shared with Cliscep visitors. It seems it was deliberately positioned after a report about the Scunthorpe steel works, which is under threat of closure by its Chinese owners. Here it is:

Edward Stourton (ES): Sir Dieter Helm is a professor of energy policy at the University of Oxford. Good afternoon.

Sir Dieter Helm (DH): Good afternoon.

ES: What’s happened? Why?

DH: Well, the dependency on primary steel – blast furnace steel – remains. We are going to have to buy steel, particularly if we want to have a serious defence industry, rail and so on. What we have got in the UK is the highest industrial energy prices in the developed world, and that – together with the cost of labour and so on – makes it very hard to compete against other suppliers: China, other developed countries etc. And therefore the economics run out and we have the government in a position where if it wants to carry on producing the stuff – and after all, you know, this stuff is going to be produced, so the carbon emissions aren’t going to be avoided around the world – we either have to throw it a large subsidy or we have to give it competitively-priced energy, and look to some of the other economic costs that the plants have to make them world-competitive again.

ES: Before we explore those options and the significance of what’s happening, just briefly, why are our energy prices so far out of line with everyone else’s?

DH: Well there are lots of reasons for that. Everybody else is hit by the gas price, as we are, but we have a sprint towards net zero for electricity by 2 30 [sic – 2030], in about 58 months’ time, and we have about 25% of the bills being levies or charges for part of our transition, and we, with Germany, end up trying to go fast towards wind and solar, ending up with very high prices, and the consequence is that large-scale industry leaves. Grangemouth is another example, Port Talbot is another example, and we end up importing the stuff that we would have otherwise produced here.

ES: We heard one of the people in Scunthorpe there refer to “the best steel in the world”. Where does this leave us, in that case, in terms of a steel industry? Is this the end of such a thing?

DH: It effectively is, because – and we’ll, I think, be the only one of the G7 countries that doesn’t produce primary steel – I mean, the plan is to electrify this, but one has to be very careful here. When you think about electrifying, say, Port Talbot, you don’t produce primary steel like blast furnaces do – the high-grade, high-quality steel that’s required for defence as well – you produce lower-grade steel using recycled materials, and that’s quite good for the building industry. But, you know, in the end of the day, if you’re serious about building tanks and submarines etc., you need primary steel, and to be dependent on other countries to provide us this stuff seems to me to be at least inconsistent with the defence requirements, but also more generally a very questionable position to get to. And electrifying steel won’t solve that need for primary steel any time soon. You need blast furnaces for that.

ES: And as you suggest, there is an irony in this trend happening at exactly the moment when we are being told that we need to build more armaments, tanks, and so forth.

DH: Yes. Well, we’ve been flattered by, you know, the perception or story that our emissions are falling very sharply. I mean, what we’re doing in decarbonising is decarbonising territorial emisions in the UK. And one of the ways you get your emissions down really quickly is to close your heavy industrial energy-intensive and carbon-intensive industries and import the stuff instead. It makes absolutely no difference to climate change – the emissions happen somewhere else, like China, as opposed to here – but our numbers get flattered. So every time you hear how wonderfully we’re doing, look at what’s happened to aluminium, fertilisers, petrochemicals, steel, and then imagine a world in which you suddenly decide “Well actually, you know what, we need quite a lot of that stuff, how are we going to build the tanks, who’s gonna send us the steel to make these things?” Are we going to ask China to do that?

ES: So it’s not just a climate change question, as you were talking about earlier. It is also, if you’re right, a national security issue.

DH: Oh, it’s definitely a national security issue. I mean, if you want to stop causing emissions through the process of, you know, closing steel, then stop buying steel. But, you know, it’s not as if we’re going to consume less steel as a result of closing these plants. We’re not gonna use less petrochemicals because Grangemouth gets closed, and we’re definitely not using less fertilisers because we closed our fertiliser factories. You know, if you want to genuinely cut these emissions, at least in the short- to medium-term, you’ve just got to stop using them. And we have a policy to go in the opposite direction. And defence is about the most energy-intensive and carbon-intensive industry you can think about. And steel, and blast furnaces are part and parcel of that frame. So nobody else I know as a primary military world power would dream of not having their own blast furnace steel at home.

ES: Sir Dieter Helm, thank you very much for joining us this lunchtime.

As Jit commented: “I’m sure it ruffled a few feathers among some listeners.” But is anybody listening in the Government?

Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 29 March 2025 — 1100 words

Dr. Kevin Hall, at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), has  recently been conducting “randomized clinical trials to study how diets high in ultra-processed food may cause obesity and other chronic diseases”, and was the lead author of a study,  Hall et al. (2019)  titled “Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake”.

That study is almost always cited in other studies about Ultra-processed Foods (UPFs) as being  “…the first and only to show us how ultra-processed diets drive people to consume about 500 extra calories per day, without even realizing it.”   As published in Cell Metabolism the results of the study were summarized as:

“Highlights

•  20 inpatient adults received ultra-processed and unprocessed diets for 14 days each

•  Diets were matched for presented calories, sugar, fat, fiber, and macronutrients

•  Ad libitum intake was ∼500 kcal/day more on the ultra-processed versus unprocessed diet

•  Body weight changes were highly correlated with diet differences in energy intake”

This was a very small study – 20 participants – and it showed that over  a two-week period participants, who were restricted to the hospital,  those eating the so-called UPF diet gained an average of about 2 lbs (1 kg) in the first six days, then their weight held steady (no further increase).  Those on the unprocessed menu immediately began to lose weight and continued to do so throughout the 2 week period. (Photographs of the foods actually served are included in the full study report supplement – pdf download here. )

The papers title is false.  “ Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake”  – ‘Ultra-processed diets’ are not a cause in and of themselves – so this is mis-stated at best.  It does appear that the participants preferred the UPF offerings and ate a bit more of them taking in “extra” calories, but notice that the weight gain halted after day six after which their weights remained level.  However, for the unprocessed diet, weight loss continued in a linear fashion.

I emailed Dr. Hall and asked him if he thought this weight loss was a problem.  Most hospitalists (the doctors generally responsible for patients in a hospital) would be concerned by continued weight loss of their patients.  Dr. Hall replied:  “Body weight loss on the minimally processed diet was not a concern, especially given that the average body mass index of the study participants was 27 kg/m^2 which is in the overweight range.” 

I have issues with the study conclusions – but we will let that go for now.  The point being that Dr. Kevin Hall is an anti-UPF advocate.  So much so, that he decided to prove that UPFs were addictive.

That meme – “UPFs are addictive” – is ubiquitous in the literature on so-called UPFs.  So much so that there are published studies claiming that “14% of adults and 15% of youths” are addicted to UPFs.  The mechanism suggested for this “addiction” is :  “UPFs triggers addiction-like biological (e.g., dopaminergic sensitization) and behavioral (e.g., withdrawal, use despite consequences) responses”

Dr. Kevin Hall and a group at the National Institutes of Health set out to prove that addictiveness of UPFs by showing that feeding subjects a UPF would produce a dopamine spike, just like additive drugs do.

The study is “Brain dopamine responses to ultra-processed milkshakes are highly variable and not significantly related to adiposity in humans”.  Dr. Hall is the lead contact for the paper.

For this study, the journal Cell Metabolism again summarizes:

“Highlights

•  PET scans found no significant mean dopamine response to ultra-processed milkshakes

•  Individual brain dopamine responses were not significantly related to adiposity

•  Greater brain dopamine responses were correlated with fasting hunger levels

•  Ad libitum cookie intake was correlated with brain dopamine responses”

Try not to be confused by the reference to “Ad libitum cookie intake”, I’ll explain later.

The study abstract states this more clearly:

“Surprisingly, milkshake consumption did not result in significant postingestive dopamine response in the striatum (p=0.62) nor any striatal subregion (p>0.33) and the highly variable interindividual responses were not significantly related to adiposity (BMI: r=0.076, p=0.51; %body fat: r=0.16, p=0.28). Thus, postingestive striatal dopamine responses to an ultra-processed milkshake were likely substantially smaller than many addictive drugs and below the limits of detection using standard PET methods.”

As an image:

Let’s see if we can put this a little more bluntly:

Paraphrasing editorially:  “Dang, our super-duper, purpose-made exemplar of a UPF didn’t produce any  dopamine response that we could see. “

But, afterwards, when subjects were offered snacks as part of their post-study lunch, the subjects whose test showed those that liked sweets ate a few more delicious  Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies.

In a more detailed discussion later in the paper, the authors say:

“In other words, despite expecting the high fat and sugar formulation of the ultra-processed milkshake to produce a synergistic effect on striatal dopaminergic activity (DiFeliceantonio, Coppin et al. 2018, McDougle, de Araujo et al. 2024), our data suggest that any extracellular dopamine responses following milkshake consumption were smaller than those following ingestion of drugs of abuse. Thus, the narrative that ultra-processed foods high in fat and sugar can be as addictive as drugs of abuse based on their potential to elicit an outsized dopamine response in brain reward regions was not supported by our data.”

Bottom Line:

UPFs are not addictive  — they do not produce dopamine spikes that consumers seek to repeat  as seen with addictive drugs.

(but they may be delicious!)

# # # # #

Author’s Comment:

Kudos to Dr. Hall and his group for publishing a “negative result” paper.  They expected and desired to show the UPFs were just addictive as opioids and other drugs of abuse, but found that they were not.  In fact, they did not produce measurable amounts of dopamine.

I extend these kudos even if the paper was published as a matter of policy – registered NIH studies completed must be written up and published – I’m pretty sure of this (not positive).

I suspect that the War on Food will not end now despite that fact that the battle against “addictive UPFs produced by nasty evil international corporations” has been dealt an death blow by real science.

This is not to say that some foods are not “habit forming” – humans like pleasant experiences – they like things that taste good and can form unhealthy repetitive eating habits.    Think of those eating giant bags of chips, guzzling orange soda,  while binge watching years of old Star Trek episodes. (no, I don’t mean you.)

Thanks for reading.

# # # # #

Guest
Essay by Kip Hansen — 29 March 2025 — 1100 words Dr. Kevin Hall, at
the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), has  recently been conducting “randomized clinical
trials to study how diets high in ultra-processed food may cause obesity and
other chronic diseases”, and was the lead author of a study,  Hall et al. (2019)  titled “Ultra-Processed Diets Cause
Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial
of Ad Libitum Food Intake”.That
study is almost always cited in other studies about Ultra-processed Foods (UPFs)
as being  “…the first and only to show us how ultra-processed diets drive people to consume about 500
extra calories per day, without even realizing it.”   As published in Cell Metabolism the results
of the study were summarized as:“Highlights•  20 inpatient adults received ultra-processed
and unprocessed diets for 14 days each•  Diets were matched for presented calories,
sugar, fat, fiber, and macronutrients•  Ad libitum intake was ∼500 kcal/day more on the ultra-processed versus
unprocessed diet•  Body weight changes were highly correlated
with diet differences in energy intake”This was a very small study – 20 participants – and it
showed that over  a two-week period participants,
who were restricted to the hospital,  those
eating the so-called UPF diet gained an average of about 2 lbs (1 kg) in the
first six days, then their weight held steady (no further increase).  Those on the unprocessed menu immediately
began to lose weight and continued to do so throughout the 2 week period. (Photographs
of the foods actually served are included in the full study report supplement –
pdf download here. )The
papers title is false.  “ Ultra-Processed
Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake”  – ‘Ultra-processed
diets’ are not a cause in and of themselves – so this is mis-stated at
best.  It does appear that the
participants preferred the UPF offerings and ate a bit more of them taking in “extra”
calories, but notice that the weight gain halted after day six after which their
weights remained level.  However, for the
unprocessed diet, weight loss continued in a linear fashion.I
emailed Dr. Hall and asked him if he thought this weight loss was a
problem.  Most hospitalists (the
doctors generally responsible for patients in a hospital) would be concerned by
continued weight loss of their patients. 
Dr. Hall replied:  “Body
weight loss on the minimally processed diet was not a concern, especially given
that the average body mass index of the study participants was 27 kg/m^2 which
is in the overweight range.”  I
have issues with the study conclusions – but we will let that go for now.  The point being that Dr. Kevin Hall is an
anti-UPF advocate.  So much so, that he decided to prove that UPFs were
addictive.That
meme – “UPFs are addictive” – is ubiquitous in the literature on so-called
UPFs.  So much so that there are published studies claiming
that “14% of
adults and 15% of youths” are addicted to UPFs. 
The mechanism suggested for this “addiction” is :  “UPFs triggers addiction-like biological
(e.g., dopaminergic sensitization) and behavioral (e.g., withdrawal, use
despite consequences) responses”Dr.
Kevin Hall and a group at the National Institutes of Health
set out to prove that addictiveness of UPFs by showing that feeding subjects a
UPF would produce a dopamine spike, just like additive drugs do.The study
is “Brain dopamine responses to
ultra-processed milkshakes are highly variable and not significantly related to
adiposity in humans”.  Dr. Hall is the lead contact for the paper. For this study, the journal Cell
Metabolism again summarizes:“Highlights•  PET scans found no significant mean dopamine
response to ultra-processed milkshakes•  Individual brain dopamine responses were not
significantly related to adiposity•  Greater brain dopamine responses were correlated
with fasting hunger levels•  Ad libitum cookie intake was
correlated with brain dopamine responses” Try not to be confused by the reference to “Ad
libitum cookie intake”, I’ll explain later.

The study abstract
states this more clearly:

 “Surprisingly, milkshake
consumption did not result in significant postingestive dopamine response in
the striatum (p=0.62) nor any striatal subregion (p>0.33) and the highly
variable interindividual responses were not significantly related to adiposity
(BMI: r=0.076, p=0.51; %body fat: r=0.16, p=0.28). Thus, postingestive striatal
dopamine responses to an ultra-processed milkshake were likely substantially
smaller than many addictive drugs and below the limits of detection using
standard PET methods.”As an
image: Let’s
see if we can put this a little more bluntly:Paraphrasing
editorially:  “Dang, our super-duper, purpose-made exemplar of a UPF didn’t produce
any  dopamine response that we could see.
“But, afterwards,
when subjects were offered snacks as part of their post-study lunch, the subjects
whose test showed they liked sweets ate a few more delicious  Chips
Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies.In a
more detailed discussion later in the paper, the authors say:“In
other words, despite expecting the high fat and sugar formulation of the
ultra-processed milkshake to produce a synergistic effect on striatal dopaminergic
activity (DiFeliceantonio, Coppin et al. 2018, McDougle, de Araujo et al.
2024), our data suggest that any extracellular dopamine responses following
milkshake consumption were smaller than those following ingestion of drugs of
abuse. Thus, the narrative that
ultra-processed foods high in fat and sugar can be as addictive as drugs of
abuse based on their potential to elicit an outsized dopamine response in brain
reward regions was not supported by our data.” Bottom Line:UPFs are not addictive  — they do not produce dopamine spikes that
consumers seek to repeat  as seen with
addictive drugs. (but
they may be delicious!)# # # # # Author’s Comment:Kudos
to Dr. Hall and his group for publishing a “negative result” paper.  They expected and desired to show the UPFs were
just addictive as opioids and other drugs of abuse, but found that they were
not.  In fact, they did not produce
measurable amounts of dopamine. is even if it is just I
extend these kudos even if the paper was published as a matter of policy – registered
NIH studies completed must be written up and published – I’m pretty sure of
this (not positive).I
suspect that the War on Food will not end now despite that fact that the battle
against “addictive UPFs produced by nasty evil international corporations” that
been dealt an death blow by real science.This
is not to say that some foods are not “habit forming” – humans like pleasant
experiences – they like things that taste good and can form unhealthy repetitive
eating habits.    Thinks of those eating giant bags of chips,
guzzling orange soda,  while binge watching
years of old Star Trek episodes. (no, I don’t mean you.)Thanks
for reading.# # # # #