United Kingdom Magazines, popular culture, music journalism Oxford Opinion At Oxford in 1960-1961, Cannon was editor and owner, with
Stephan Feuchtwang, of
Oxford Opinion (OO). Regular contributors included
Richard Gott,
John Gittings, British historian
Timothy Mason,
JG Farrell,
Ian Hamilton, and
Kevin Crossley-Holland.
OO introduced the film commentary allied with
Cahiers du Cinéma by Ian Cameron,
Mark Shivas,
VF Perkins, and others, who later founded
Movie magazine.
OO was described in
The Times Literary Supplement as "incomparably the best produced of all Oxford magazines".
New Society, The Guardian Cannon's first published writings on
popular culture appeared in 1962 in
New Society, where he was a founder-member of the editorial staff. He worked in-house for the magazine, later becoming its design, art, production, and arts editor. From 1967, he began writing on popular culture for, and redesigned,
The Listener, under the editorship of
Karl Miller, and in 1968 began writing a weekly column on pop and rock music for
The Guardian. described the pair as seeking to "establish a critical apparatus" with which to evaluate contemporary popular music. Helped by his association with
The Guardian, Cannon was able to contribute more substantial articles to the
Los Angeles Times and the
Chicago Sun-Times, and to
underground magazines such as
Creem. He recalls that, together with
Rolling Stone journalists
David Dalton and
Jonathan Cott, he joined
Granada Television documentary-makers such as
Jo Durden-Smith, John Sheppard and
Michael Darlow in devising "prime-time networked shows designed as anthems of the revolution". Among these late-1960s projects, he says that the
Johnny Cash at San Quentin TV special was his idea, and he "share[s] credit" for the ideas behind the concert films
The Doors Are Open and
The Stones in the Park. Cannon says he was frustrated by
The Guardians habit of cutting down his submissions and stopped writing for the paper in 1972. In addition, he cites his lack of interest in contemporary musical trends – a perspective that was reflected in his being awarded "Pseud of the Year" by the satirical magazine
Private Eye for two consecutive years. Later in the 1970s, he wrote what he considers some of his "best pieces" for
Melody Maker and
Time Out, when they were edited by
Richard Williams. Elkan Allan, then editor of
The Sunday Times Guide for Viewers, criticised
Radio Times as containing “peripheral and tangential articles, frequently of a trivial nature”. In 1976,
Radio Times and Cannon won Design and Art Direction Gold Awards for editorial design. Cannon left the magazine in 1979.
Running Cannon wrote a monthly Fun Runner column for
Running magazine from 1979 to 1987. He organised a team, including himself, to run the 1980 New York marathon. He then created London 1982/50
, a group of 50 who trained for and ran the 1982 London marathon. As a result, four citizen running clubs were formed in different parts of London, including the
Serpentine Running Club, which he co-founded.
Health, nutrition, and fitness The Sunday Times, Dieting Makes you Fat After his ten-year editorship of
Radio Times, Cannon became an assistant editor of
The Sunday Times. His focus on fitness resulted in regular coverage of the 'Getting in Shape' citizen running project, which he developed from Fun Runner ‘82, and in the 1982 New Year issue of
The Sunday Times ran a feature by Cannon with the title ‘Dieting makes you fat’. With co-author Hetty Einzig, Cannon then wrote the book
Dieting Makes You Fat, which became a UK number one best seller. Cannon then discovered that an official report on the state of British nutrition and health had been delayed and allegedly suppressed, apparently because of its overall message, that the typical British diet was a main cause of many disabling or deadly conditions and diseases. Successive drafts of this report were leaked to him. The result was a
Sunday Times front page lead news story and a full-page inside feature article. These articles won the Van den Berghs reporting Award for 1983. Cannon left
The Sunday Times in 1983.
New Health In early 1984, he became editor of
New Health magazine, published by
Haymarket Press. From October 1984 until
New Health closed in October 1986, Cannon wrote monthly columns, winning
The Publisher’s 1986 best specialist columnist award. In 1985, he originated a six-part series on ‘Fat to Fit’, and in 1986 another five-part series on food additives, which won The Periodical Proprietors Association Award for best campaign of the year. Both series became books.
The Food Scandal In 1984, with
Caroline Walker, an English food campaigner and nutritionist who later became his second wife, Cannon wrote
The Food Scandal,
The Times ran three full-page features by Cannon derived from the book — "Food, treacherous food", "The cover-up that kills", and "So you think you eat healthily". Two chapters of
The Food Scandal dealt with salt and sugar, both identified in the NACNE report as being consumed excessively. Brands containing these were named, including
Bovril. In fact, it contained caramel, which in industrial form is not a variation of sugar.
Beecham, then the owner of Bovril, sued and was granted an injunction in the High Court against the authors and publishers. In 1985, an updated and expanded paperback version was published. Cannon subsequently authored
The Good Fight, a biography of Walker, who died from
colon cancer in 1988. only explored how the food product manufacturing industry, undeterred by government and expert advisors, manipulated the food supply and thus what was consumed in the UK in the 1980s. It received mixed reviews.
The Economist was sceptical, and Bernard Levin wrote in
The Times: "What we eat and how we eat it is the next target for those who will not rest until they have compelled us, under the threat of prosecution, to do what they wish… The undoubted leader of the new species of fanatic is Mr Geoffrey Cannon." The book was serialised in
The Independent, in 1987 winning the Argos Award for best newspaper feature, and in
She magazine, winning the Publisher Award for best magazine feature. In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Cannon worked with professional and public interest civil society organisations. These included the London Road Runners Club, where he and colleagues devised the STAR*RANK (standards, records and ranking) age-graded system used in accredited road running races, and the Caroline Walker Trust, of which he was co-founder and secretary. In 1985, he was a founder-member of the National Food Alliance (NFA), an umbrella group representing around 100 UK national bodies concerned with food, farming, and health, and its chair throughout the 1980s. The NFA subsequently turned into Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. As such, he was the civil society member of the UK government delegation to the
UN Food and Agriculture Organization/
World Health Organization 1992 International Conference on Nutrition, participating in preliminary meetings in
Copenhagen and
Geneva and the final meeting in December in
Rome.
Superbug While writing
Caroline Walker's biography, Cannon discovered that in 1976 his late wife and co-author had been prescribed what would now be seen as a gross overdose of the toxic antibacterial drug
co-trimoxazole. He became interested in antibacterial drugs in general and in 1991, supported by a Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship, he interviewed various authorities. His resulting book
Superbug was published in 1995. He concluded that the overuse and abuse of antibacterial drugs in human and animal medicine and rearing was evolving drug-resistant bacteria and already amounted to a catastrophe. The book had low sales. Its arguments are now backed by far more generally accepted evidence.
World Cancer Research Fund In 1993, Cannon joined the
World Cancer Research Fund, becoming head of science and head and director of the secretariat on behalf of WCRF of the 670-page report
Food, Nutrition and the Prevention of Cancer: a Global Perspective, published in 1997. The method devised by the secretariat of assessing evidence as convincing, probable, possible, or insufficient was adopted by the World Health Organization.
Brazil Cannon moved to
Brazil in 2000 and is now resident there.
Federal Ministry of Health In
Brasília, he worked with Denise Costa Coitinho as consultant to the Coordenação Geral de Alimentação e Nutrição (CGAN, the department of food and nutrition) at the federal Ministry of Health. He compiled a report on
Alimentos Regionais Brasileiros (regional Brazilian foods), issued in 2002. This describes and analyses many indigenous plant foods suited to Brazilian climate and terrain that are. not listed in food composition tables compiled in the temperate global North. Cannon was a member of the official Brazilian government delegation to the 107th
World Health Organization Executive Board meeting held in
Geneva between 15 and 22 January 2001. From 2001, he drafted the first official national Brazilian dietary guidelines, the
Guia Alimentar, the final version of which was published in 2006. This included recommendations for government, industry, health professionals, and the public. It stressed Brazilian food culture, foods of plant origin, and freshly prepared meals. The draft was cited by the
World Health Organization as "giving equal priority to the prevention and control of nutritional deficiency, food-related infectious diseases, and chronic diseases".
The New World Map, The Fate of Nations Cannon wrote two linked papers, developed from lectures given in
Australia and
New Zealand in April 2002. He proposed a return to the originally ancient natural philosophy of dietetics as the good life well led, of which food and eating is one part. He then wrote
The Fate of Nations, subtitled "Food and Nutrition Policy in the New World", in which he proposed that the pressing need now was to conserve resources and the biosphere.
Out of the Box From 2003 to 2009, he wrote a monthly column, "Out of the Box", for the journal
Public Health Nutrition on topics of current interest and continued as a
Public Health Nutrition deputy editor until early 2010.
The New Nutrition In 2004, Claus Leitzmann and Cannon developed what became known as the "New Nutrition". They organised a workshop at the
University of Giessen,
Germany, where Cannon drafted, and the 23 members of the meeting agreed, The Giessen Declaration. This established ‘a set of agreed principles, definitions and dimensions for this new paradigm’. The Declaration defines nutrition as a social and environmental as well as a biological science. The workshop proceedings were published in a special issue of
Public Health Nutrition in September 2005.
Public health for the 21st century Cannon was invited by the
Public Health Foundation of India to give the opening plenary lecture at an international conference in Hyderabad in August 2008 on the future of public health. Here he drafted the Hyderabad Declaration on Public Health in the 21st Century. Brazil held the presidency of the World Federation of Public Health Associations (WFPHA) in 2009, and Cannon was a member of the Brazilian delegation to the 12th meeting in Istanbul. He drafted the WFPHA Istanbul Declaration: Health, the First Human Right. Cannon continued working for the World Cancer Research Fund after moving to Brazil, mainly as chief editor of its second report, published in 2007, and of a separate policy report published in 2009. His work for WCRF ceased in 2012.
World Nutrition In 2010, the World Public Health Nutrition Association launched a monthly online journal,
World Nutrition. Cannon designed, edited, and wrote a monthly column and editorial for the journal, ceasing as editor in 2016.
NOVA, ultra-processing and the new Guia In early 2009, Cannon as a deputy editor of
Public Health Nutrition, invited Carlos Monteiro of the
University of São Paulo to write a commentary whose title was ‘Nutrition and health. The issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing’. In the
USA, the thesis was immediately supported by
Michael Pollan and by
Marion Nestle. By 2012, the team led by Monteiro and now including Cannon, in consultation with investigators in other countries, developed the thesis into what became known as the NOVA classification. This divides all foods into four groups, according to the nature, extent and purpose of processing; unprocessed and minimally processed; processed culinary ingredients; processed foods; and ultra-processed foods.
Uruguay,
Peru and
Ecuador have also published national official dietary guidelines using the NOVA food classification, and they feature in a 2019
French official government report. Monteiro, Cannon and many other authors have published extensively on the NOVA system and its implications for nutrition, public health, society, economics and the environment. In 2020, Cannon was among the most cited 1% of more than 600,000 investigators in 23 science disciplines throughout the world, based on
Web of Science research engine findings. He was one of the 19 working in Brazil, four of whom came from Carlos Monteiro's department. ==Personal life==