The Poison of Nanny McPhee

 A Disastrous Diet With Deadly Consequences

Never trust “official science”–that is, the science being pushed by government agencies.  If scepticism is the good oil of solid scientific research, once the science becomes “official” in the sense of being accepted by government programmes and enforced by government regulations, healthy scepticism withers on the vine.  At that point, science has become intermingled with, if not captured by, propaganda: the trustworthiness of science diminishes substantially.

To make matters worse, there are lots of vested interests vying for commercial advantage when science becomes “official”.  Engineer a government “tick” and millions can be made.  Achieve the promulgation of a government programme, and millions can be parlayed into billions of dollars.  It becomes, in the coarse words of US Vice President, Joe Biden, a “big . . . deal”–that is, a crude joke.

It is now becoming clear that generations of diet advice–official diet prescriptions–backed by scientific research, is wrong.  In fact, it has done enormous damage to human health.  A significant essay recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, by Nina Teicholz:

The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease

Are butter, cheese and steak really bad for you? The dubious science behind the anti-fat crusade

“Saturated fat does not cause heart disease”—or so concluded a big study published in March in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. How could this be? The very cornerstone of dietary advice for generations has been that the saturated fats in butter, cheese and red meat should be avoided because they clog our arteries. For many diet-conscious Americans, it is simply second nature to opt for chicken over sirloin, canola oil over butter.

The new study’s conclusion shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with modern nutritional science, however. The fact is, there has never been solid evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics and bias.

Bad science is bad enough.  But the remedy is always critical, sceptical peer review.  By such means, bad science is screened out through counter evidence and exposure.  But when bad science is coupled with “personal ambition, politics, and bias” the results always risk a much bigger harm.

Our distrust of saturated fat can be traced back to the 1950s, to a man named Ancel Benjamin Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Keys was formidably persuasive and, through sheer force of will, rose to the top of the nutrition world—even gracing the cover of Time magazine—for relentlessly championing the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and, as a result, cause heart attacks.

This idea fell on receptive ears because, at the time, Americans faced a fast-growing epidemic. Heart disease, a rarity only three decades earlier, had quickly become the nation’s No. 1 killer. Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955. Researchers were desperate for answers.  As the director of the largest nutrition study to date, Dr. Keys was in an excellent position to promote his idea. The “Seven Countries” study that he conducted on nearly 13,000 men in the U.S., Japan and Europe ostensibly demonstrated that heart disease wasn’t the inevitable result of aging but could be linked to poor nutrition.

But it turns out the research methodology deployed by Dr Keys was fundamentally flawed.  Lazy scientists and scientific establishments just went along for the ride.

Critics have pointed out that Dr. Keys violated several basic scientific norms in his study. For one, he didn’t choose countries randomly but instead selected only those likely to prove his beliefs, including Yugoslavia, Finland and Italy. Excluded were France, land of the famously healthy omelet eater, as well as other countries where people consumed a lot of fat yet didn’t suffer from high rates of heart disease, such as Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany. The study’s star subjects—upon whom much of our current understanding of the Mediterranean diet is based—were peasants from Crete, islanders who tilled their fields well into old age and who appeared to eat very little meat or cheese.

As it turns out, Dr. Keys visited Crete during an unrepresentative period of extreme hardship after World War II. Furthermore, he made the mistake of measuring the islanders’ diet partly during Lent, when they were forgoing meat and cheese. Dr. Keys therefore undercounted their consumption of saturated fat. Also, due to problems with the surveys, he ended up relying on data from just a few dozen men—far from the representative sample of 655 that he had initially selected. These flaws weren’t revealed until much later, in a 2002 paper by scientists investigating the work on Crete—but by then, the misimpression left by his erroneous data had become international dogma.

Enter the Heart Association and the US Department of Agriculture, a Harvard professor, and a Senate Committee.  They could not possible be wrong and they were going to save us from ourselves.

Critics have pointed out that Dr. Keys violated several basic scientific norms in his study. For one, he didn’t choose countries randomly but instead selected only those likely to prove his beliefs, including Yugoslavia, Finland and Italy. Excluded were France, land of the famously healthy omelet eater, as well as other countries where people consumed a lot of fat yet didn’t suffer from high rates of heart disease, such as Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany. The study’s star subjects—upon whom much of our current understanding of the Mediterranean diet is based—were peasants from Crete, islanders who tilled their fields well into old age and who appeared to eat very little meat or cheese.

As it turns out, Dr. Keys visited Crete during an unrepresentative period of extreme hardship after World War II. Furthermore, he made the mistake of measuring the islanders’ diet partly during Lent, when they were forgoing meat and cheese. Dr. Keys therefore undercounted their consumption of saturated fat. Also, due to problems with the surveys, he ended up relying on data from just a few dozen men—far from the representative sample of 655 that he had initially selected. These flaws weren’t revealed until much later, in a 2002 paper by scientists investigating the work on Crete—but by then, the misimpression left by his erroneous data had become international dogma.

But there was no turning back: Too much institutional energy and research money had already been spent trying to prove Dr. Keys’s hypothesis. A bias in its favor had grown so strong that the idea just started to seem like common sense. As Harvard nutrition professor Mark Hegsted said in 1977, after successfully persuading the U.S. Senate to recommend Dr. Keys’s diet for the entire nation, the question wasn’t whether Americans should change their diets, but why not? Important benefits could be expected, he argued. And the risks? “None can be identified,” he said.

No risks.  Really.  Trust a Harvard nutrition professor to come up with that kind of bunkum.  Actually, it is likely that the unintended consequences of this intrusive state-nannying are enormous, even deadly.

One consequence is that in cutting back on fats, we are now eating a lot more carbohydrates—at least 25% more since the early 1970s. Consumption of saturated fat, meanwhile, has dropped by 11%, according to the best available government data. Translation: Instead of meat, eggs and cheese, we’re eating more pasta, grains, fruit and starchy vegetables such as potatoes. Even seemingly healthy low-fat foods, such as yogurt, are stealth carb-delivery systems, since removing the fat often requires the addition of fillers to make up for lost texture—and these are usually carbohydrate-based.  

The problem is that carbohydrates break down into glucose, which causes the body to release insulin—a hormone that is fantastically efficient at storing fat. Meanwhile, fructose, the main sugar in fruit, causes the liver to generate triglycerides and other lipids in the blood that are altogether bad news. Excessive carbohydrates lead not only to obesity but also, over time, to Type 2 diabetes and, very likely, heart disease. 

The real surprise is that, according to the best science to date, people put themselves at higher risk for these conditions no matter what kind of carbohydrates they eat. Yes, even unrefined carbs. Too much whole-grain oatmeal for breakfast and whole-grain pasta for dinner, with fruit snacks in between, add up to a less healthy diet than one of eggs and bacon, followed by fish. The reality is that fat doesn’t make you fat or diabetic. Scientific investigations going back to the 1950s suggest that actually, carbs do.

Let’s repeat that: evidence now suggests that fat does not make you fat or diabetic . . . actually, carbs do!  Anyone suffering from diabetes want to sue the US Departments of Health, Agriculture, and just about every other “health” bureaucracy and government quango?  How about Michelle Obama, dietician-in-chief?  But what about all those beneficial vegetable oils which have replaced animal fats–as prescribed by officialdom?

The second big unintended consequence of our shift away from animal fats is that we’re now consuming more vegetable oils. Butter and lard had long been staples of the American pantry until Crisco, introduced in 1911, became the first vegetable-based fat to win wide acceptance in U.S. kitchens. Then came margarines made from vegetable oil and then just plain vegetable oil in bottles. 

All of these got a boost from the American Heart Association—which Procter & Gamble, the maker of Crisco oil, coincidentally helped launch as a national organization. . . . After the AHA advised the public to eat less saturated fat and switch to vegetable oils for a “healthy heart” in 1961, Americans changed their diets. Now these oils represent 7% to 8% of all calories in our diet, up from nearly zero in 1900, the biggest increase in consumption of any type of food over the past century.

This shift seemed like a good idea at the time, but it brought many potential health problems in its wake. In those early clinical trials, people on diets high in vegetable oil were found to suffer higher rates not only of cancer but also of gallstones. And, strikingly, they were more likely to die from violent accidents and suicides. Alarmed by these findings, the National Institutes of Health convened researchers several times in the early 1980s to try to explain these “side effects,” but they couldn’t. (Experts now speculate that certain psychological problems might be related to changes in brain chemistry caused by diet, such as fatty-acid imbalances or the depletion of cholesterol.)

We’ve also known since the 1940s that when heated, vegetable oils create oxidation products that, in experiments on animals, lead to cirrhosis of the liver and early death. For these reasons, some midcentury chemists warned against the consumption of these oils, but their concerns were allayed by a chemical fix: Oils could be rendered more stable through a process called hydrogenation, which used a catalyst to turn them from oils into solids. 

From the 1950s on, these hardened oils became the backbone of the entire food industry, used in cakes, cookies, chips, breads, frostings, fillings, and frozen and fried food. Unfortunately, hydrogenation also produced trans fats, which since the 1970s have been suspected of interfering with basic cellular functioning and were recently condemned by the Food and Drug Administration for their ability to raise our levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol.  . . . 

The past decade of research on these oxidation products has produced a sizable body of evidence showing their dramatic inflammatory and oxidative effects, which implicates them in heart disease and other illnesses such as Alzheimer’s. Other newly discovered potential toxins in vegetable oils, called monochloropropane diols and glycidol esters, are now causing concern among health authorities in Europe.

In short, the track record of vegetable oils is highly worrisome—and not remotely what Americans bargained for when they gave up butter and lard.

Some countries, including New Zealand, have seen alarming increases in asthma and allergies.  It is unclear at present whether this is related to the “official” dietary advice.  But there appear to be plenty of unintended and unexpected consequences:

Cutting back on saturated fat has had especially harmful consequences for women, who, due to hormonal differences, contract heart disease later in life and in a way that is distinct from men. If anything, high total cholesterol levels in women over 50 were found early on to be associated with longer life. This counterintuitive result was first discovered by the famous Framingham study on heart-disease risk factors in 1971 and has since been confirmed by other research. 

Since women under 50 rarely get heart disease, the implication is that women of all ages have been worrying about their cholesterol levels needlessly. Yet the Framingham study’s findings on women were omitted from the study’s conclusions. And less than a decade later, government health officials pushed their advice about fat and cholesterol on all Americans over age 2—based exclusively on data from middle-aged men.

Sticking to these guidelines has meant ignoring growing evidence that women on diets low in saturated fat actually increase their risk of having a heart attack. The “good” HDL cholesterol drops precipitously for women on this diet (it drops for men too, but less so). The sad irony is that women have been especially rigorous about ramping up on their fruits, vegetables and grains, but they now suffer from higher obesity rates than men, and their death rates from heart disease have reached parity.

Nanny McPhee’s official diet has not worked.  Obesity rates are sky-rocketing.  The general population grows sicker.  What’s to be done?  Nina Teicholz has some sane advice:

Our half-century effort to cut back on the consumption of meat, eggs and whole-fat dairy has a tragic quality. More than a billion dollars have been spent trying to prove Ancel Keys’s hypothesis, but evidence of its benefits has never been produced. It is time to put the saturated-fat hypothesis to bed and to move on to test other possible culprits for our nation’s health woes.

Post-script:  Let us not forget the slogans and slurs that have been the currency of this disaster: opponents, critics, and sceptics were allegeded to be practitioners of “junk-science”; the good-diet science was “settled”;  critics would have “blood on their hands”, etc.  Sound familiar?

Deadly Official Dietary Advice, Part II

Public Policy Demands Science Be “Settled and Certain”

Public Policy Requires Junk Science

In our previous post on this subject, we canvassed how much  “official” dietary and food advice of the past fifty years is turning out, not just to be counter productive, but actually harmful.  This advice has been delivered with emphatic certainty, as if those giving it were utterly convinced of the accuracy and truthfulness of what was being purported.  And they no doubt were.

The reason for such certainty turned upon the overwhelming veracity of  Science.  The discipline which exploded all myths, errors, and superstitions, replacing them with certainty and truth was Science.  That is an overwhelming presumption of our world.  “Science says” is tantamount to the word of a god in our  understanding–an understanding held in common by officials, governments, scientists, the Commentariat and even the common man.

Much of the research into diet and human health relies upon statistical research and analysis.  Much of the research and inferences there-from are flawed.
  Moreover, always lurking in the wings are suppressed assumptions–quasi-religious assumptions–informing, controlling, and shaping the “science”.  The first of these is the attempt to repudiate death itself. 

Achieving longevity is a driving goal of all health science and the resulting dietetic paradigms.  Death must be put off as long as possible.  Somewhere between the Epicurean “eat, drink, and be merry; for tomorrow we die” and the cryogenic freezing of mortal remains to achieve eternal life lies reality and sanity.  Death is a reality.  It is a reality Christians do not fear, but look forward to.  It is our last enemy, but it has already been defeated by the Lord Jesus Christ.  Therefore, Christians long to live, but not for life’s own sake.  We long to live “in the flesh” just as long as we can profitably serve God.

Hence, the inspired confession of Paul, to which all Christians subscribe:

For me to live is Christ and to die is gain.  If I am to live on in the flesh, that means fruitful labour for me.  Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell.  I am hard pressed between the two.  My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.  But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.  Convinced of this, I know that I will remain and continue with you all, for your progress and joy in the faith . . . (Philippians 1:21-25.)

The modern assumption is that death is always evil and must be put off as long as possible.  It is the last enemy which has not been abolished.  Official public health is bent to achieve longevity at almost all costs.  When this translates into dietary advice it is almost always of the type, “Don’t eat or drink this or that, so that disease will be prevented and you will live longer.”  Official dietetic policy seeks to impose this on the population through hectoring, lecturing, educating, and directed primary health care–all funded by taxing citizens, all for our own “good”.

But it turns out that every decision to eat or not to eat has trade-offs.  It is now emerging that many of those trade-offs do far more harm than good.  It appears that it would have been far more wise to follow the advice of the apostle Paul when it came to diet:

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons . . . who . . . require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.  For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. (I Timothy 3: 1-4).

We should be very wary, therefore, of people hectoring us with official advice about what foods are “good” for us, and what are not.  It is far better to welcome all foods created by God as good, and maintain a diversity and balance in diet.  Eating is a great joy and pleasure, for which we must be thankful.  Food is one of the greatest blessings of creation: preparing it, cooking it, and eating it together is a slice of heaven on earth.

But Science tells us otherwise.  In many cases, however, the science is junk.  In the food and health field so much of the “research” is based upon statistical analysis, which looks for correlations between food types, or food elements, on the one hand, and diseases, on the other.  Very, very quickly co-incidence morphs into fallacious inferences about causality, as in, “all people who die have spent their life breathing oxygen.  Therefore, oxygen causes death and must be avoided at all costs.”

Causality is a complex business, and proving it scientifically even more so.  See, for example, the entry  “Causal Inference and Statistical Fallacies” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, here to get a flavour for the complexity involved and the dangers of fallacious inferences of causality.  Despite this, public policy and advice require certainty.  When it is lacking, the science will be “framed” as if it were certain, which immediately turns it into junk science. 

The problem faced by hectoring public health authorities (that is, government funded officials) is that careful qualification does not a recommendation make.  A campaign for public health would never get out of the gate unless it were framed as dealing with a clear and certain danger.  No-one is going to take notice of a “campaign” which had a script reading, “It is possible that eggs, which contain cholesterol, cause higher cholesterol levels in humans, but it has not yet been proven.”  No, it has to be: “cholesterol in eggs causes high cholesterol in humans: therefore, reduce or stop eating eggs.”  That’s attention grabbing.  That demands action.  That overcomes inertia.  It is also junk science.

The longer term damage done by such short-sighted ignorant wowsering is not insignificant.  It builds over time a profound scepticism of governments and public officials, on the one hand, and a burgeoning incidence of conspiracy theories, on the other. 

Worse, when it comes to diet and health, the advice more often than not turns out to be harmful, festooned with unintended negative consequences. 

Deadly Official Dietary Advice, Part I

The Ministry of Food Propaganda

Almost everything the “authorities” have told you about bad food over the past forty years is wrong.  The assertion was made in The Guardian by  Joanna Blythman. There are at least two aspects to this story, equally important.  The first is to expose the errors, fallacies, and chicaneries for what they are.  The second is to expose the research methodologies, posing as scientific, for the sugar puffs they often are.

First, the exposure of the errors.

Could eating too much margarine be bad for your critical faculties? The “experts” who so confidently advised us to replace saturated fats, such as butter, with polyunsaturated spreads, people who presumably practise what they preach, have suddenly come over all uncertain and seem to be struggling through a mental fog to reformulate their script.

Last week it fell to a floundering professor, Jeremy Pearson, from the British Heart Foundation to explain why it still adheres to the nutrition establishment’s anti-saturated fat doctrine when evidence is stacking up to refute it. After examining 72 academic studies involving more than 600,000 participants, the study, funded by the foundation, found that saturated fat consumption was not associated with coronary disease risk. This assessment echoed a review in 2010 that concluded “there is no convincing evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease”.

No convincing evidence.  None.  Nada.
  What about all the headlines of this study or that study “proving” the very same–for example, that saturated fats, like butter, were very, very bad and must be banned?  It seems that it was all based on the fallacy of repetition: say something often enough and eventually everyone will come to believe it.  The fallacy of repetition is also known as propaganda.

Now Blythman is calling for a new script.  The choice of the word “script” is a hoot because it implies a work of fiction, of the theatre, or the playhouse–as, no doubt, deliberately intended by the author.

Neither could the foundation’s research team find any evidence for the familiar assertion that trips off the tongue of margarine manufacturers and apostles of government health advice, that eating polyunsaturated fat offers heart protection. In fact, lead researcher Dr Rajiv Chowdhury spoke of the need for an urgent health check on the standard healthy eating script. “These are interesting results that potentially stimulate new lines of scientific inquiry and encourage careful reappraisal of our current nutritional guidelines,” he said.

We have to eat something.  When saturated fats went out the window of “expert” approbation, something had to replace it to stop the growling hunger pangs.  Starchy foods have been the dietetic replacement darling of the day.  Ooops. 

Chowdhury went on to warn that replacing saturated fats with excess carbohydrates – such as white bread, white rice and potatoes – or with refined sugar and salts in processed foods, should be discouraged. Current healthy eating advice is to “base your meals on starchy foods”, so if you have been diligently following that dietetic gospel, then the professor’s advice is troubling.

There have been other reversals and recantations.  It has almost got to the stage of the truth being the exact opposite of what is being avowed by government run and funded science.  If the government orthodoxy, voiced by publicly funded health and diet experts, is to not eat “X” because its bad for you, then more should be consumed with gusto.  You will be better off.  No wonder Reagan once quipped that the utterance, “We are from the government and we are here to help you,” is one of the most terrifying sentences one could ever hear in a lifetime.

Of course, we have already had a bitter taste of how hopelessly misleading nutritional orthodoxy can be. It wasn’t so long ago that we were spoon-fed the unimpeachable “fact” that we should eat no more than two eggs a week because they contained heart-stopping cholesterol, but that gem of nutritional wisdom had to be quietly erased from history when research showing that cholesterol in eggs had almost no effect on blood cholesterol became too glaringly obvious to ignore.

The consequences of this egg restriction nostrum were wholly negative: egg producers went out of business and the population missed out on an affordable, natural, nutrient-packed food as it mounded up its breakfast bowl with industrially processed cereals sold in cardboard boxes. But this damage was certainly less grave than that caused by the guidance to abandon saturated fats such as butter, dripping and lard, and choose instead spreads and highly refined liquid oils.

Despite repeated challenges from health advocacy groups, it wasn’t until 2010, when US dietary guidelines were amended, that public health advisers on both sides of the Atlantic acknowledged that the chemical process for hardening polyunsaturated oils in margarines and spreads created artery-clogging trans-fats.  Manufacturers have now reformulated their spreads, hardening them by chemical methods which they assure us are more benign. But throughout the 20th century, as we were breezily encouraged to embrace supposedly heart-healthy spreads, the prescription was killing us. Those who dutifully swallowed the bitter pill, reluctantly replacing delicious butter with dreary marge, have yet to hear the nutrition establishment recanting. Government evangelists of duff diet advice aren’t keen on eating humble pie.

“Government evangelists of duff diet advice” indeed.  But it gets worse.  Sit up straight and pay attention now.  It turns out that what everyone needs more of is, wait for it, protein and fat.

But what lesson can we draw from the cautionary tales of eggs and trans fats? We would surely be slow learners if we didn’t approach other well-established, oft-repeated, endlessly recycled nuggets of nutritional correctness with a rather jaundiced eye. Let’s start with calories. After all, we’ve been told that counting them is the foundation for dietetic rectitude, but it’s beginning to look like a monumental waste of time. Slowly but surely, nutrition researchers are shifting their focus to the concept of “satiety”, that is, how well certain foods satisfy our appetites. In this regard, protein and fat are emerging as the two most useful macronutrients. The penny has dropped that starving yourself on a calorie-restricted diet of crackers and crudités isn’t any answer to the obesity epidemic.

Blythman goes on to speak about the “distended belly of government eating advice”–we are sure the pun is very much intended.   Traditional foods which have sustained generations have been portrayed as “natural born killers”, but have been replaced by the truly deadly.

As protein and fat bask in the glow of their recovering nutritional reputation, carbohydrates – the soft, distended belly of government eating advice – are looking decidedly peaky. Carbs are the largest bulk ingredient featured on the NHS’s visual depiction of its recommended diet, the Eat Well Plate. Zoë Harcombe, an independent nutrition expert, has pithily renamed it the Eat Badly Plate – and you can see why. After all, we feed starchy crops to animals to fatten them, so why won’t they have the same effect on us? This less favourable perception of carbohydrates is being fed by trials which show that low carb diets are more effective than low fat and low protein diets in maintaining a healthy body weight.

When fat was the nutrition establishment’s Wicker Man, the health-wrecking effects of sugar on the nation’s health sneaked in under the radar. Stick “low fat” on the label and you can sell people any old rubbish. Low fat religion spawned legions of processed foods, products with ramped up levels of sugar, and equally dubious sweet substitutes, to compensate for the inevitable loss of taste when fat is removed. The anti-saturated fat dogma gave manufacturers the perfect excuse to wean us off real foods that had sustained us for centuries, now portrayed as natural born killers, on to more lucrative, nutrient-light processed products, stiff with additives and cheap fillers.

But, we move on.  It is not just fat and protein which are “back on the menu, boys”.  It’s red meat!  Gimli would be pleased. 

In line with the contention that foods containing animal fats are harmful, we have also been instructed to restrict our intake of red meat. But crucial facts have been lost in this simplistic red-hazed debate. The weak epidemiological evidence that appears to implicate red meat does not separate well-reared, unprocessed meat from the factory farmed, heavily processed equivalent that contains a cocktail of chemical additives, preservatives and so on. Meanwhile, no government authority has bothered to tell us that lamb, beef and game from free-range, grass-fed animals is a top source of conjugated linoleic acid, the micronutrient that reduces our risk of cancer, obesity and diabetes.

The good, old fashioned advice of a balanced diet, with proteins, fats, and lots of fresh veggies is about all we need to know.  But that would do all sorts of bad to an entire industry dedicated to Victorian wowsering.  Worse, this industry is locked into government propaganda and the medical bureaucracy, which needs a crisis in order to justify its procession of bloated salaried “experts” hectoring, lecturing, puffing and pontificating. 

The crucial phrase “avoid processed food” appears nowhere in government nutritional guidelines, yet this is the most concise way to sum up in practical terms what is wholesome and healthy to eat. Until this awareness shapes dietetic advice, all government dietary guidance should come with a tobacco-style caution: Following this advice could seriously damage your health.

Joanna Blythman is the author of Bad Food Britain and What to Eat

It’s science, Jim but not as we know it. 

Doug Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

God’s Bistro

Posted on Tuesday, February 4, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog

What is the balance to be kept when it comes to saying that God “doesn’t care what you eat,” which He doesn’t, and saying that we are to exercise dominion in all that we do? If there is no neutrality anywhere, and there isn’t, then how does this fit with statements like “God doesn’t care”?

The answer is that God cares about everything, but He doesn’t care about things the same way we do. Our job is to learn how to care the way He does, instead of invoking His name to make it seem like He cares the same way we do. There is a way that seems right to a man, but the dead end of that cul de sac is death (Prov. 14:12). Men have a way of esteeming things that God considers below dumpster scrapings. “And he said unto them, Ye are they which justify yourselves before men; but God knoweth your hearts: for that which is highly esteemed among men is abomination in the sight of God” (Luke 16:15).

So there no neutrality anywhere, but this is not the same thing as saying that everything matters in the way we want it to.
For example, say that somebody started saying that a particular brand of white tee-shirt was guaranteed to make you holier, wiser, and healthier than you are now. I would be willing to say that God doesn’t care about whether you wear that tee-shirt or not because His Word leaves that kind of decision up to us and our preferences. But this doesn’t make us “tee-shirt neutral.” God cares if those who made it were doing the best job they could given their resources, He cares if we cheat people or not when we sell it, He cares if it was shoplifted, He cares whether it is folded in a drawer or dumped on the bed all the time, and He cares if we make spurious claims about how holy, wise, and healthy it might make us. If someone claims that this tee-shirt he is selling can cure my cancer, and I dispute it, it is not an adequate comeback for him to say, “I thought you believed there is no neutrality!” There is no neutrality, but “no neutrality” doesn’t mean any thing can do everything.

So bring it down to food. It is not remembered often enough that the Pharisees were pushing, in part, a pure foods movement. But the problem was not with their food — it was the leaven that they insisted on putting into everything. Jesus warned us about that leaven, and not about the food per se. Jesus had no problem going to a Pharisee’s house for a Pharisee dinner, and when you do that you are going to get Pharisee food (Luke 7:44). But Jesus was strict in his warning to His disciples — watch out for the leaven of the Pharisees (Matt. 16:11-12). Beware of their teaching concerning food, not the food as such.

We know from Scripture what food tastes like without that leaven. The Bible tells us plainly. “For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Rom. 14:17). “For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: For it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer” (1 Tim. 4:4-5). The world is God’s bistro, and the menu is enormous. The bottles in the middle of every table at God’s bistro are full of righteousness, peace, joy, and thanksgiving. It is a special sauce, and it goes on anything.

So why do I say that God doesn’t care what you eat? Well, because, you know, because of the verses that say the same thing. And why do I also say that the glory of God is involved down to the last caramelized onion? Because the Bible says that whatever you eat, it should be to the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31). But this concerns the way we come to food, not what food we come to. Jesus declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19). When He declared all foods clean, He was not declaring all food fussery clean. Just the opposite. 
Declaring all foods clean means that every attempt to make the foods unclean again is a vain form of uncleanness. It won’t work — the food cannot be defiled by this teaching, but the hearts can be.

So — righteousness, peace, joy, and thanksgiving, all of them in green bottles. By way of contrast, the foodie movement as it exists in its natural state, at its point of origin out in the world, consists of fear, anxiety, self-righteousness, timidity, guilt, ingratitude, and pride. It is a warehouse of fifty gallon drums full of Pharisaical leaven. Anybody who cannot see that reality is simply not paying attention. So when Christians go over there to get some food, I don’t care — because God doesn’t care what’s in your food. He cares what is in your heart. So I don’t care if you get your food at Safeway or at the Coop. You have to buy it somewhere. Just make sure you get some, and make sure you thank God for it.

God doesn’t care what is in your food, but He cares very much what is in your food-thoughts. So what a pastor must care about is whether Christians are picking up any of the leaven — the fear, anxiety, self-righteousness, and so forth. And the answer is that they are, and in many cases, in terrible, debilitating ways. One of the ways I know this is the case is the inability of some to grasp these very simple distinctions. All foods are clean. Not all hearts are. Everything else follows.

I am afraid I can’t really make this point as I would like to without bragging a bit about Nancy, but (truth be told) I don’t mind doing that. Anybody who frequents this blog for a while might easily gather that I take a dim view of food righteousness. That would be right. And they may have read me saying that “God doesn’t care what you eat.” But does this mean that God doesn’t care how we eat, or why we eat? Or with whom? Of course not. The world is God’s bistro, remember, and the production and consumption of food is necessarily a big part of all our schedules.

So food is a big deal at our house, not a little deal. Every Saturday night we have our Sabbath dinner, where Nancy spends her Saturdays preparing a thanksgiving meal for twenty-nine people, and that is if there is no company — and there is frequently company. And she uses cloth napkins. One time she was ironing the cloth napkins, which are not just for sabbath dinner, incidentally, and I asked why she was doing that. She said, putting it all in a nutshell, “it’s reformational.”

So meals are about loving people with something hot for the plate. Meals are about loving people with pressed cloth napkins. Meals are about joy and laughter across the table. Meals are about the pandemonium of clean-up. Meals are a big deal. We should love them more than we do, and this means receiving God’s permission slip to eat absolutely anything, and then with equal joy and grace to receive His commandment to love the person sitting across from you.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Eating the Bag Itself

Posted on Tuesday, July 9, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

This morning I sent out a link to what I called an edifying food rant, which you can read here. Having done so, I thought it might be good for me to summarize a few basic observations about food and the modern Christian. This is by no means exhaustive, but it should give the lay of the land. This is why this subject is of such major concern to me.

The basic food law for Christians is love. The basic food law for Christians is that of reducing friction to table fellowship. Adding diet barriers increases potential points of friction. Whenever diet barriers are necessary for medical reasons (as they often are), we should work with them, of course. But we should all recognize what our shared goal should be — free table fellowship, for all Christians, in every direction. Two Christians, with completely different brown bag lunches, should be able to laugh and talk together over those lunches, even though one bag is filled with food that is full of pure thoughts and the healthiest thing to do with the other lunch would be to eat the bag itself.

Whenever I write about food, which I am constrained pastorally to do, one of the standard dismissive responses that I see in comments and web chatter is that I am not educated on the subject, that I have not read the right studies, etc.
But I am not making these observations as a food expert (though I am reasonably well-read on the subject). I am making these observations as someone who has been studying people in depth for four decades or so. I couldn’t recognize gluten under a microscope to save my soul, but I can recognize monkey-see-monkey-do when I see it. I do know how to identify a young woman with daddy issues that are all heaped up on her nearly empty plate. I know what food wowserism looks like. I can recognize a green produce pecksniffian. I know what a moralistic crusade looks like.

For those whose food choices are different from mine, and who are not doing these weird people things, then I am quite prepared to bless God for every one of their menu choices. Honestly. But to appeal to that great Seinfeld line — “People! They’re the worst!”

So the issue is the people, never the food. Jesus declared all food, as such, clean. He didn’t just declare what I like clean. He declared the following clean — sun-dried raisins, bacon, clam chowder, tofu, GMOs, Wonder bread, Grape-Nuts, and the yogurt, strawberries and granola I just had for breakfast. When the food is just food, and God is thanked for it, and there are no hidden ideological agendas, I couldn’t care less what my brother eats. I wouldn’t dream of taking him to a restaurant and ordering for him. And when he orders, I wouldn’t dream of turning up my nose at his choice, saying, “You know, studies have shown . . .” Okay, I might say something if he ordered grits with shrimp, but only in a jolly, comradery way.

As one sage has said, knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in the fruit salad. This principle of knowledge and wisdom applies to more than just tomatoes.

Selling Our Souls Down the River

State Control of Stools and Urine

The electronic communication zone is running hot over some inane comments by some “researchers in public health”.  These illuminati were interviewed on national radio and had the temerity to utter the following inanity:

Obesity, she said, was “not a problem with individual choice and self-discipline, which we’ve proved successfully doesn’t work”.  Instead it’s the fault of “big institutions and the market”.

Most of the criticism rightly points out that for 99 percent of the obese population their condition is caused by three things–what they ingest, how much, and what is not done to burn the calories off.  It is a completely self-inflicted condition.  Quite right.
  Naturally, the “researchers in public health”  have alternative predictable solutions: more rules, regulations, restriction, and government controls over what you eat.  In the end, the government will have to ration our food and ban lots of nasty things.  We will end up clinging to Mother’s skirts in a perpetual, malingering second childhood. 

Naturally enough this sort of nannying (incidentally, both researchers are females) is offensive.  At this point in history most New Zealanders resent a government telling them how to act, what to think, and above all, what to eat.  Sadly almost no-one amongst the objectors is prepared to acknowledge that the fight was lost almost eighty years ago. 

When our forebears, in their myopic wisdom, decided that government had a duty to provide state funded health-care, and voted for politicians who would give them their lusts,  it was all over, rover.  For, as a perceptive sage pointed out, if you cede to government the duty and responsibility to take care of your health, you have implicitly given over total control of  your physical being.  A government that is responsible for your healthcare, is responsible for your health, period; such a government will inevitably extend its reach to control what you eat and what is allowed to come out the rear end–and how often. 

It will all be done under the cloak of cost containment, of course.  We have got to control what people eat, because if we don’t the rampant costs of treating the obesity epidemic will squash us all flat.  It’s a matter of survival of our species as we know it.  Toss in a dose of guilt and another generous helping of pious pity and who can resist–with principled consistency, that is?

Most of those railing against the two nannies who “research” public health do so with a fair dose of inconsistent hypocrisy.  We do not doubt that these objectors would at the same time argue for the reasonableness of a publicly funded health system per se.  Getting rid of the entire nannying edifice would be as offensive to them as the stupid observations of our elite health researchers.

We repeat: if you are going to look to government to fund your doctors’ visits, health procedures, subsidize your medicine, and provide you with hospitals you have already, in principle, ceded to the state control over your body.  Such a Leviathan will eventually move to control the food you ingest, the air that you breathe, the hours you must sleep, the length and temperature of your showers, and the “quality” of your stools and urine.

Whilst we remain gratified that there are still people in this country who will stand up to intrusive government controls, another part of us want to say, “Stop your whining.  You sold your souls to the Devil a long, long time ago.  Now Old Nick has come to collect.”   

Deadly Vegetarianism

Ordering the vegetarian meal? There’s more animal blood on your hands

Mike Archer argues that vegetarianism kills more animals than a diet of meat eating.

The ethics of eating red meat have been grilled recently by critics who question its consequences for environmental health and animal welfare. But if you want to minimise animal suffering and promote more sustainable agriculture, adopting a vegetarian diet might  be the worst possible thing you could do.

Renowned ethicist Peter Singer says if there is a range of ways of feeding ourselves, we should choose the way that causes the least unnecessary harm to animals. Most animal rights advocates say this means we should eat plants rather than animals.

It takes somewhere between two to ten kilos of plants, depending on the type of plants involved, to produce one kilo of animal. Given the limited amount of productive land in the world, it would seem to some to make more sense to focus our culinary attentions on plants, because we would arguably get more energy per hectare for human consumption. Theoretically this should also mean fewer sentient animals would be killed to feed the ravenous appetites of ever more humans.

But before scratching rangelands-produced red meat off the “good to eat” list for ethical or environmental reasons, let’s test these presumptions.

Published figures suggest that, in Australia, producing wheat and other grains results in:

*  at least 25 times more sentient animals being killed per kilogram of useable protein
*  more environmental damage, and
*  a great deal more animal cruelty than does farming red meat.

How is this possible?

Agriculture to produce wheat, rice and pulses requires clear-felling native vegetation. That act alone results in the deaths of thousands of Australian animals and plants per hectare. Since Europeans arrived on this continent we have lost more than half of Australia’s unique native vegetation, mostly to increase production of monocultures of introduced species for human consumption.

Most of Australia’s arable land is already in use. If more Australians want their nutritional needs to be met by plants, our arable land will need to be even more intensely farmed. This will require a net increase in the use of fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides and other threats to biodiversity and environmental health. Or, if existing laws are changed, more native vegetation could be cleared for agriculture (an area the size of Victoria plus Tasmania would be needed to produce the additional amount of plant-based food required).

Most cattle slaughtered in Australia feed solely on pasture. This is usually rangelands, which constitute about 70% of the continent.

Grazing occurs on primarily native ecosystems. These have and maintain far higher levels of native biodiversity than croplands. The rangelands can’t be used to produce crops, so production of meat here doesn’t limit production of plant foods. Grazing is the only way humans can get substantial nutrients from 70% of the continent.

In some cases rangelands have been substantially altered to increase the percentage of stock-friendly plants. Grazing can also cause significant damage such as soil loss and erosion. But it doesn’t result in the native ecosystem “blitzkrieg” required to grow crops.

This environmental damage is causing some well-known environmentalists to question their own preconceptions. British environmental advocate George Monbiot, for example, publically converted from vegan to omnivore after reading Simon Fairlie’s expose about meat’s sustainability. And environmental activist Lierre Keith documented the awesome damage to global environments involved in producing plant foods for human consumption.

In Australia we can also meet part of our protein needs using sustainably wild-harvested kangaroo meat. Unlike introduced meat animals, they don’t damage native biodiversity. They are soft-footed, low methane-producing and have relatively low water requirements. They also produce an exceptionally healthy low-fat meat.

In Australia 70% of the beef produced for human consumption comes from animals raised on grazing lands with very little or no grain supplements. At any time, only 2% of Australia’s national herd of cattle are eating grains in feed lots; the other 98% are raised on and feeding on grass. Two-thirds of cattle slaughtered in Australia feed solely on pasture.

To produce protein from grazing beef, cattle are killed. One death delivers (on average, across Australia’s grazing lands) a carcass of about 288 kilograms. This is approximately 68% boneless meat which, at 23% protein equals 45kg of protein per animal killed. This means 2.2 animals killed for each 100kg of useable animal protein produced.

Producing protein from wheat means ploughing pasture land and planting it with seed. Anyone who has sat on a ploughing tractor knows the predatory birds that follow you all day are not there because they have nothing better to do. Ploughing and harvesting kill small mammals, snakes, lizards and other animals in vast numbers. In addition, millions of mice are poisoned in grain storage facilities every year. . . .

Some of this grain is used to “finish” beef cattle in feed lots (some is food for dairy cattle, pigs and poultry), but it is still the case that many more sentient lives are sacrificed to produce useable protein from grains than from rangelands cattle. . . .

Replacing red meat with grain products leads to many more sentient animal deaths, far greater animal suffering and significantly more environmental degradation. Protein obtained from grazing livestock costs far fewer lives per kilogram: it is a more humane, ethical and environmentally-friendly dietary option.
So, what does a hungry human do? Our teeth and digestive system are adapted for omnivory. But we are now challenged to think about philosophical issues. We worry about the ethics involved in killing grazing animals and wonder if there are other more humane ways of obtaining adequate nutrients.

Relying on grains and pulses brings destruction of native ecosystems, significant threats to native species and at least 25 times more deaths of sentient animals per kilogram of food. . . .

The challenge for the ethical eater is to choose the diet that causes the least deaths and environmental damage. There would appear to be far more ethical support for an omnivorous diet that includes rangeland-grown red meat and even more support for one that includes sustainably wild-harvested kangaroo.

Thanks to many colleagues including Rosie Cooney, Peter Ampt, Grahame Webb, Bob Beale, Gordon Grigg, John Kelly, Suzanne Hand, Greg Miles, Alex Baumber, George Wilson, Peter Banks, Michael Cermak, Barry Cohen, Dan Lunney, Ernie Lundelius Jr and anonymous referees of the Australian Zoologist paper who provided helpful critiques.

>Evolution, Science, and Urban Legends

>Superstitions of the Age

The current age thinks itself the best and the brightest. This is an effect, in part, of the reigning paradigm of the current scientific community: evolutionism. This scientific meta-theory propounds that things develop by natural order and law: that is, they evolve to higher and higher planes of existence, from the simple to the more complex and advanced.  

Under the influence of evolutionism, each generation tends to consider itself superior and more advanced than those that have gone before. One upshot is the denigration of history to irrelevance. Why study primitives–except to set a backdrop for our comparatively advanced and sophisticated state?

One manifestation of this self-claimed superiority is medical science. Pop-medicine regales us with accounts of how superstitious and primitive the medical knowledge and treatments of former generations was. Implication: we are so much better and smarter now. One example of a medical procedure once widely practised in the West is bleeding. There are many others.  “How stupid and ignorant those doctors and medical scientists were,” is the overriding discourse.

Conveniently, we overlook the embarrassing implication that generations to come will look back at us and likewise chortle with amusement at the ignorance and stupidity of the medical profession at the “turn of the century”. This is not to deny that knowledge via the hard sciences does increase and grow. There is a very important sense in which we now know far more than the “bleeders”. The Christian attributes this to the coming of the Kingdom of God upon earth, as man fulfils the commands of subduing the earth and making it bring forth and bud, on the one hand, and makes disciples of Christ of every nation, on the other. This is gradual, developmental process is the fruit of God’s unfolding human history for His glory and the blessing of His people. It is not the result of the “law” of randomness, as the evolutionist propounds.

The Christian also knows through rigorous historical research that cultures and ages do not necessarily retain the knowledge they acquire. Things known now can be lost to future generations, through wars, famines, plagues, earthquakes and other calamities. It can also result from civilisations crumbling from with–partially at times as a result of scientific and technological error. The Roman’s proclivity to use lead pipes almost certainly contributed to the decline of that civilisation.

This raises the possibility that current prevailing medical consensuses may turn out to be profoundly ignorant and damaging to society. Take for example diet. We are threatened, we are told, by a plague of obesity. A new term has entered the lexicon: morbidly obese. Nutritionists, funded by the state, lecture us on what we should eat, and not eat–to escape the scourge. But obesity is just the latest food-related plague. Prior to that it was heart disease.

But what if the dietary preventatives for heart disease (high carb, low-fat diets) actually helped produce an epidemic of obesity? One gets an inkling that future generations will look back at us and conclude that we really were an ignorant lot.

One risk we are very clear about: when science gets married to government campaigns or programmes, the first thing to fly out the window is scientific rigour. The thing is that rigorous scientific research, particularly when dealing with human beings, is inevitably tenuous. It has to end up talking about probabilities and possibilities. Moreover, much current research is statistically based, trying to establish correlations and, from there, causality. For instance: 62% of people with bigger than average eye teeth contract gangrene in rest homes. Ergo, eye teeth size is a likely causal factor for gangrene.

Such research methodology, unless rigorously constrained, is readily subject to fallacious reasoning. But governments require certainty for public health programmes. “Large eye teeth are a danger: get your dentist to reduce their size.”  Actually, this rapidly translates into state funding of eye-teeth reduction procedures.  This food is “bad”; that food is “good”. Don’t do this; do that. When government, who pay, require emphatic certainty, scientists readily comply. But rigour and integrity have long since flown out the window. The upshot: urban myths substitute for effective cures.

When all this takes place within the prevailing discourse of evolutionism, flattering the age with the idea that we are the best and the brightest thus far, superstition and easy credulity can rapidly become the order of the day.

>Crocodile Tears and False Pity

>Personal Accountability and Constructive Compassion

There is a long standing Christian civil tradition not to speak ill of the dead. A corollary is that one should not seek to make political capital out of them either.

Over recent days we have been treated to the unedifying spectacle of a public inquiry into the death of Folole Muliaga in South Auckland. Mrs Muliaga, you recall, died when electric power was cut off to her home due to the unpaid electricity bills, since she was apparently dependant on an oxygen respirator.

The unfortunate case proved to be a gift for those wanting to engage in pure political theatre. Rich capitalists were portrayed as preying upon the vulnerable. Dirty profit was being put ahead of human beings. Mrs Muliaga was Polynesian, so the incident had racial-overtones. Public socialised healthcare was implicated as partially responsible because the lady should have been receiving professional medical care.

Particularly repugnant was the media manipulation (the media, were apparently willingly and credulously co-opted into the scam) by a politically ambitious union official, who happened to be related to the family by marriage. He played every one of the above themes to perfection. The man had a talent of sorts. He subsequently became the Labour Party candidate for the area in the forthcoming election. The funeral of the poor lady was attended by no less a personage than the Prime Minister herself. Political theatre at its best.

The overwhelming themes in the entire tawdry episode were carried along upon a wailing emotional aria of pity, coupled with its inevitable doppelganger, a swelling chorus of guilt. Someone, some institution, some influence, something was to blame. Our job was to find out, and sheet home the blame. Then our guilt would be assuaged and atoned.

The politics of guilt and pity—ever the whipsaw of Athenian liberalism—marched up front and centre. The conductor was the unscrupulous, ambitious brother-in-law. The musical performers were the sensationalist media. And so the band played on.

Now we have been confronted with the facts and evidence of the public inquiry. The best thing to say about this—which is really a waste of public money—guilt and pity money—is that the reality is finally emerging. As so often is the case, the reality is far from the sensationalist melodrama of political theatre.

A brief summary of the facts (hat tip Halfdone) which testimony has elicited to date is:

1. Mrs Muliaga was near death, being morbidly obese, and the respirator was “window dressing.”

2. Her doctors had decided that Mrs Muliaga was not to be resuscitated if she collapsed in hospital.

3. Her case nurse repeatedly warned her about her diet, which overused fatty foods, and of her lack of exercise. She warned her that if she did not radically change her lifestyle, she would die within twelve months. Mrs Muliaga said that she found it very difficult to change.

4. Mrs Muliaga admitted to her charge nurse that she was erratic in taking her medication, despite being shown an x-ray of her enlarged heart, and being warned that it would not cope if placed under stress.

5. As a result of the one time that she complained about power costs, the hospital helped arranged an emergency payment to cover the bills.

6. She was told that for the respirator to be effective it had to be used 16 hours per day. Mrs Muliaga admitted that she was irregular in the use of the oxygen machine. Her medical advisers testified that she could have died at any time even if she were on the respirator at the time.

7. The Muliaga’s had been sent 50 overdue power bill requests in seven years, including eight urgent disconnection letters and four final disconnection notices. It was once disconnected, then reconnected the next day.

What is Jerusalem’s perspective on this? Clearly, every death is part of the tragedy of the human condition, ever since the Fall. Mrs Muliaga’s passing from the sight of mortal men is no exception. But the salutary note which modern Athens is morally incapable of acknowledging, but which must be duly regarded, is personal responsibility. Human beings are in God’s image: therefore, everyone is accountable and responsible for their own actions. Unbelieving Athens is a society built upon the opposite proposition: that we are without guilt, but that someone else is to blame.

Christian society insists that the buck stops with each one of us. You are accountable! You are responsible! In the Christian world-view, it is as if the pointing finger of Lord Kitchener is constantly before us. You cannot absolve yourself by devolving responsibility on to someone else.

It is part of the complex of sin to seek to blame someone or something else. Modern Athens has made blame-shifting into an art form. It has successively and comprehensively institutionalised the eliding of personal accountability and the transfer of blame to others or something else. Adam said, “the woman Thou gavest to be with me,” is the reason I sinned. Eve said, “the serpent deceived me,” so she claimed that she was exploited. The Lord, of course, did not accept these excuses for a moment. The death of Mrs Muliaga, and indeed the death of every human being since the Fall, proves it.

By contrast, in the culture and ethic of Jerusalem, Mrs Muliaga was primarily responsible and accountable for her own well-being and health. Is she not in God’s image? Was she not bound by the sixth commandment (“thou shalt not kill”) with respect to her own life during her days upon earth. She was not well served by family, friends, church, or the socialised health system to the extent that they individually and collectively they did not sheet home this truth to her and confront her with it. We rather think they did not, since it would be such an unPC thing to do in modern Athens. But, whether they did or not, she was still responsible.

Her family, her husband in particular, but also her adult children, had God-given duties and responsibilities to her. They had a duty to sheet home her responsibility toward herself, and her family, but above all, to her God. Was not her husband duty bound to love his own wife as if she were his own body? They had a duty to command, cajole, and assist. If she struggled with the self-discipline of exercise (and when one has become so morbidly obese, such a failing is easily understandable), they had a duty to do everything possible to encourage and assist her, exercising with her, providing both an example and encouragement.

If she struggled with getting her diet right, reducing her intake of fatty foods, the other family members should have banned her from the kitchen and the shops, taken over the cooking, and controlled her (and their) diet. They should have said, “We love you too much not to do this,” and acted accordingly.

Sadly, in the “blame-seeking” exercise of the inquiry, the family—both immediate and extended—do not appear to acknowledge any responsibility at all.

It is an abiding sadness that so many Pacific island families, migrating to New Zealand, being professing Christians, have been first seduced then captured by the ethics and values of Athenian socialism. Possibly, it has been an easy capture since they have just transferred tribal corporate ethical systems to New Zealand socialism and its institutions.

In tribal cultures, the One (the tribe) is usually more important than the Many (the individual, followed by the nuclear family). The Tribe is the ultimate provider and protector. Few tribal cultures insist upon personal responsibility and individual accountability. Few tribal cultures have reckoned properly with the original command that a man is to “leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife”—which establishes a new locus of social authority, over which the One, the Tribe, cannot be overlord.

Such tribal cultures are easy pickings for Athenian socialists who, themselves, have imbibed deeply the ethics and values of tribalism—albeit in a far worse and more degenerate form.

In Jerusalem the One and the Many are equally ultimate, each having their respective spheres of duty and responsibility. Jerusalem will, therefore, have nothing to do with the politics of guilt and pity. In Jerusalem, the One (the Church, the State) as commanded by her Lord, insists upon the politics of personal accountability and constructive compassion (otherwise known in the vernacular as “tough love”) of the Many.

Likewise, in Jerusalem the Many resist any attempts by the One to remove responsibility and accountability from them. They remain faithfully independent, insisting upon the duties and responsibilities placed upon them by the Lord.

Of these things, Gollum-like Athens knows nothing, preferring instead slyly to pass off responsibility at every opportunity. From “the Devil made me do it” to “I was not breast fed as a baby” the panoply of excuses rains down incessantly.

In the meantime, may all who have sought to create and bank political capital from the death of this unfortunate lady find their just desserts. And for the one who has passed beyond the sight of mortal men, Mrs Muliaga, may she indeed Rest in Peace.

For the rest of us, may we reflect and learn appropriate lessons, taking up our individual and familial responsibilities, even as the Living God has laid them upon us.

>The S-Files

>Dr Robyn Toomath: The Sinister Undertones of an Egregious Appeal to Pity.

Contra Celsum has nominated Dr Robyn Toomath, spokesperson for Fight the Obesity Trust for an S-Award.

Citation:

Dr Robyn Toomath has appeared before the parliamentary committee considering the galactically stupid Public Health Bill. She is quoted as arguing: “People are desperate for Nanny State’s help. Parents are desperate for help to get their children to eat healthily.”

She also endeavoured to get everyone’s heart to bleed by telling us that she keeps a notebook detailing the patients who were admitted to her hospital ward, suffering severe problems because they were overweight. “I know from my day to day experience how big this problem is.” (We are sure no pun was intended)

She claimed that her patients “were intelligent people who knew they needed to regulate their diet and lose weight, but were overwhelmed by a nutritional environment which promoted high-energy, unhealthy foods.” (NZ Herald, 24th April, 2008)

So, laying aside the unconscionable and completely irrelevant appeal to pity, let us analyse what Toomath is actually saying:

1. People are enslaved and cannot control their own lives.
2. People are fundamentally irresponsible.
3. Parents cannot train and teach their children to eat appropriate foods.
4. People know what is right, but lack the will power to do it.
5. People are conditioned by the (nutritional) environment so completely they are “overwhelmed”.

Her solution? Nanny state (yes, she actually used the term) needs to step in to help them.

According to Toomath’s world-view liberty, freedom, responsibility, and accountability do not exist. Since everyone is enslaved already, the best thing to do is increase the intrusive powers of the state and make our slavery both overt and official.

Now, laying aside the ethical and philosophical and religious problems with Toomath’s world-view, let us just address it on a pragmatic basis. Let’s just be clear that Toomath’s solution will actually make obesity worse. If enslavement has caused the obesity problem, more enslavement will not arrest it; it will make it worse. If people are unable to control their appetites now, when the state makes itself responsible for what they eat, peoples’ appetites will enslave them even more. It will then becomes the government’s problem that I desire and eat such things.

Secondly, one never ceases to be amazed at the inconsistency of those who argue, on the one hand, that citizens are morally incompetent, yet, in the same breath, argue the moral competence of government and government officials. There is a universal suppressed premise amongst such people that once someone is either elected or goes to work for the state they become morally perfected or escape the moral imperfections of those whom they are required to govern.

But let us be clear. If Toomath is to be taken seriously she must also argue that we entrust our lives in this matter to state officials, legislators, institutions and bureaucrats who:

1. Are enslaved and cannot control their lives.
2. Who are fundamentally irresponsible.
3. Who will be utterly incompetent and unable to teach us and train us to eat the right foods
4. Who will know what should be done to overcome the problem, but will be completely unable to carry it out.
5. Who will themselves be conditioned by the nutritional environment so that they won’t be able to do anything about it.

Someone needs to send Dr Toomath a “please explain” notice.

Remember the adage—when governments step in to prevent or lessen a deemed social evil, the inevitable outcome is that the social evil multiplies and becomes worse. Toomath’s “ultimate solution” will actually throw petrol on the obesity fire—or, to use a more apt metaphor, will sweeten and enrich the obesity pie.

At Contra Celsum, we suggest a far more Christian solution to this social problem.

1. Let the government declare that “You are what you eat”, that everyone is responsible, and will be made to face the consequences of their behaviour. If you become obese it is highly probable that a short and painful life awaits you.
2. The government to allocate an obesity public health voucher to every New Zealander which will entitle them to limited treatment for a range of notified obesity related health problems.
3. If a person is admitted to a public hospital for treatment for a notified obesity related health problem, and is obese, the cost of treatment will be born by their voucher.
4. Once the voucher is used up, no further publicly funded treatment for obesity related illnesses will be available. The cost will have to be met by the patient or his/her extended family, charity, insurance, or social networks.

Our solution assumes that people are not slaves, they are accountable and they are responsible. Our solution presupposes that people are thereby treated with respect. Our solution dignifies man, rather than degrades him. Our solution represents principled tough love. Moreover, our solution will radically reduce obesity over time.

Dr Robyn Toomath—S-Award Class II for behaviour that is Stupid, Short Sighted and Stupefied.

>Become Obese–Your Government Needs You

>

Obesity: A Pseudo-Epidemic and Its False Cure

It’s official. We have a new epidemic. It’s called obesity. The threat is dire. The consequences unspeakable.

Athenian politicians and governments love apocalyptic epidemics. They allow them to take on the patina of being “Great Redeemers”. They are saving us from ourselves.

Recently, the NZ Government introduced an “anti-obesity” bill into Parliament. Yes, the government is going to ban fatness. The Public Health Bill claims to provide new ways for the Cabinet or the Director General of Health to act against the suspected causes of obesity. First it was tobacco. We didn’t say anything because, well, tobacco is dirty. Then it was alcohol. That hurt a bit more, but, what can you do? We still did not say anything. The government knows best—and let’s not forget all those super educated health professionals (aka highly paid bureaucrat—consultants.) We placidly and supinely let the government restrict, ban, control, and propagandize. We let politicians tell us what to think.

Now it is food. It’s too late to do anything now. We have already let them in. The doors are wide open now, and they cannot be shut.

What will happen? Well, we will have taxes on obesity-causing food. We will have restrictions on advertising food and drink that cause fatness. We will have endless sermons and lectures and pontifications from politicians, governments, bureaucrats, and other go-gooders. The fast-food industry as we know it will be black-balled. Subsidies will be given to “Tofu Take Out” joints.

Why? It is a simple question. Why is the government engaging in this new evangelical campaign—apart from its own moral self-righteousness? Money. Western governments are concerned about all the collateral diseases that accompany obesity, for which the taxpayer will have to fund treatment. Billions will have to be found for treatment of heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and other diseases that result from obesity.

Enter the fly-in-the-ointment. A recent authoritative, scholarly paper produced in Holland, published in the journal PloS Medicine (“Lifetime Medical Costs of Obesity: Prevention No Cure for Increasing Health Expenditure”) has demonstrated that obese people cost the health system less in the long run. We could also add heavy drinkers and smokers to this list.

Why is this? Obese people live shorter lives. Healthy, gym addicted, diet conscious people live longer, but tend to die from longer term degenerative diseases. It turns out that total lifetime health spending is greatest for healthy people. In other words, if the government is successful in making us more healthy in its attempt to reduce the socialised medicine spend, the more the costs of socialised medicine will rise. The government has been, and increasingly will, waste millions of your dollars trying to make you healthy. If it is successful, it will end up spending even more than it otherwise would have.

Ban fit people. Tax gyms. Subsidize fatty foods. Run tobacco education classes in schools to teach children the pleasures of the delightful weed. Become obese. Your government needs you, fat. The taxpayer needs you. Love those rolls. Let’s have beautyflab competitions. I can just see the new TV reality shows now.

So, the economics don’t stack up. Public health care costs are ballooning because we are living longer and more illnesses and diseases are treatable with increasingly sophisticated procedures. It turns out that trying to make us less obese by controlling what people eat will only make the problem worse.

Athens is stupid. Stupid in the extreme. But some will object. Should not Christians be concerned when people are in poor health? Surely the command, “Thou shalt not kill” requires us to do all we can to assist others to be healthy? Yes and yes. Surely, then, Christians should support socialised medicine and regard the anti-obesity campaign as laudable and do all they can to support it. No and no and no.

There is just a tiny, small matter of responsibility—personal and familial responsibility. Bluntly put, if you eat the wrong food and become obese you will likely die prematurely. Those are the consequences of your decision. If you feed your children garbage, they too are likely to have all sorts of severe health problems. You are responsible. You are accountable. If you want your children to die early, feed them rubbish. You will be allowed to face the consequences of your stupidity and folly. That is the truth. That is the authentic Christian position. The loving thing to do is to work within the rubric of personal accountability and responsibility because people are better off for it.

I can just hear the “tut tutting” Athenian liberals as they take another sip of pinot gris. “There are many who don’t know how to take responsibility for themselves. They are victims. They are oppressed. We have to take responsibility for them.”

This is none other than the twenty first century version of the “white man’s burden.” It was arrogant paternalism that led western nations into the reckless colonial era. The consequences are still with us today. But taking over control of countries and territories was justified as having a duty to “help them.”

A similar arrogant paternalism of western liberals has lead to a host of institutionalised evils, socialised medicine amongst them. The consequence is that it has encouraged virtually entire generations not to take responsibility for themselves and their dependants. It’s always someone else’s fault. Parents are now whining about food companies advertising on TV—wanting the government to “do something about it.” That will help solve our children’s eating problems.

Try turning the TV off if its that much of a problem. Take responsibility. Take ownership. Be a real parent for a change. Try putting a decent meal on the table and if the kids won’t eat it, take it away and tell them the next meal will be in five hours time. Lock the fridge in the meantime.

For too long successive generations have recited daily the modern Athenian liturgy:

High Priest of Athens: “We will fix it. Don’t you worry. Just vote for us.”

People: “Right-oh. You fix it then. How much will you fix, by the way?”

High Priest: “Cradle to the grave, mate. Don’t you worry. Cradle to the grave.”

Only it never can be sustained. It never works. It only creates bigger and larger problems on a nation wide scale. And they are here now.

The so-called national obesity epidemic is an outward physical manifestation of a widespread spiritual malaise of self-indulgence, irresponsibility, and a hand-to-mouth gratification. It is a vivid picture of the best that Athens can do. Generations have been taught to believe that others are going to run around them and their children, making things right for them. Cradle to the grave. Omni-competent, infinitely resourced governments will do the trick. We will love you. We will care for you. Just vote for us.

But Jerusalem says, that way may seem right to you, but its end is death. Stop it—now—for your own sake, and the sake of your children. You—yes, you—own the problem. Take ownership. Fix it. Be a real parent, for a change, not just a playactor. If you and your children are going to survive there are some things that are going to have to happen on your watch—and one of them is that you and your children are going to have to eat decent food—that is, if you want them to survive.

Who loves more? Jerusalem or Athens?