© The Irish TimesCardiovascular disease kills some 10,000 people in Ireland each year, the equivalent of the capacity of Hill 16 in Croke Park.
Donal O'Neill's father, Kevin, had hardly put on any weight since the 1960s when he won two All-Ireland football medals with Down.
He was always fit and never drank alcohol but in January 2010 he had a heart attack. Though he pulled through, Donal, who founded the Gaelic Players' Association in 1999, was perplexed.
"I got angry," he says. "I come from a marketing background. I've worked with the big food companies. I know what they do. The more I found out how far removed we are from what works in maintaining health, the more annoyed I got.
"I started to think it was a little bit strange for a man who had been so fit and healthy - he had sailed through these stress tests for checking heart issues.
"That was my starting point and then I thought, 'Am I next?' When they moved to look at my father's brother, my uncle Seán O'Neill, who was the more famous footballer, they discovered he had type 2 diabetes; again - not a man who had abused himself in any way. The research fascinated me."
His craving led to a documentary entitled
Cereal Killers, which has just been released by Yekra, the same American company that distributed Oliver Stone's movie,
Looking for Fidel. It investigates cardiovascular disease, which kills 10,000 people in Ireland a year, the equivalent of the capacity of Hill 16 in Croke Park, remarks O'Neill.
Despite not having any film-making experience, O'Neill produced
Cereal Killers with sports physiologist Prof Tim Noakes. O'Neill is also the focus of the film, as he undertakes a 28-day, high-fat diet monitored by Noakes and his colleagues in Cape Town, South Africa, where O'Neill lives.
Comment: Not complicated enough, if one is to spend time educating oneself on this topic.
Here's what is known to us so far: The surface of the planet was, for a period of time (as reported in numerous stories back some 5/6 years ago) actually warming. There were reports of many hot-spots in various places, in some cases, hot enough to ignite. This is now being countered by surface cooling due to other factors, like global dimming/induction of colder air, etc. This heating of the lithosphere is probably due to the slowing of rotation which generates internal heat between the lithosphere and the mantle, and leads to increased volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, sinkholes, etc, and is probably also responsible for many of the strange sounds.
It is the upper atmosphere - the stratosphere - that is cooling and that is the reason for sun pillars, rings around the sun, double/triple/quadruple images of the sun, contrails, etc.
Volcanic dust does not heat the upper atmosphere by "trapping heat" in the stratosphere. That the stratosphere is colder and has dropped lower has been reported by scientists, though that information gets sidelined. The AGW folks would LOVE people to believe that nonsense.
Then, there is the comet dust/smoke in the upper atmosphere that further contributes to the cooling as you can see from the dramatic increase in noctilucent clouds.
At the same time that is going on, the quiescent sun and the earth's weakened magnetic field allow more cosmic radiation to reach the troposphere where it forms cloud nuclei and increases precipitation from the increased evaporation from the oceans caused by the increasing heat within the earth caused by the slowing of rotation.
These are all the conditions for the initiation of an ICE AGE: heat at the lower levels, troposphere where "weather" takes place, extreme cold at the upper levels of the atmosphere, which can then create interesting effects including polar vortices.