Too True

How Little We Understand Our Food Chain

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

Letter From America (About Government Enforced Diets)

Michelle Obama’s Control-Freak Lunch Program

It can’t make kids actually eat what they’re served. 

By Michelle Malkin
May 21, 2014
National Review Online

Look out, everyone: The nation’s school-lunch lady, Michelle Obama, is mad. With her federal nutrition program under fire across the country and now on Capitol Hill, Mrs. Obama put out a “forceful” call to arms this week to “health activists,” according to the Washington Post.  She’s cracking the whip. Her orders are clear: There must be no escape. The East Wing and its sycophants zealously oppose any effort to alter, delay, or waive top-down school-meal rules. Big Lunch must be guarded at all costs.

Progressives blame kid-hating Republicans and greedy businesses for the revolt against Mrs. Obama’s failed policies. But the truth is right around the corner in our students’ cafeterias. Districts are losing money.   Discarded food is piling high. Kids are going off-campus to fill their tummies or just going hungry.

According to the School Nutrition Association, almost half of school meal programs reported declines in revenue in the 2012–13 school year, and 90 percent said food costs were up.
Local nutrition directors are demanding more flexibility and freedom. Look no further than school districts in Los Angeles and Chicago.
As I noted in 2011, the L.A. Unified School District pronounced the first lady’s federally subsidized initiative a “flop” and a “disaster.” Principals reported “massive waste, with unopened milk cartons and uneaten entrees being thrown away.” The problem has only worsened. The Los Angeles Times reported last month that the city’s students throw out “at least $100,000 worth of food a day — and probably far more,” which “amounts to $18 million a year.”

Draconian federal rules dictate calorie counts, whole-grain requirements, the number of items that children must put on their trays, and even the color of the fruits and vegetables they must choose. Asked for a solution, LAUSD food-service director David Binkle told the Times bluntly: “We can stop forcing children to take food they don’t like and throw in the garbage.”

Or you can do what Arlington Heights District 214 in Michelle Obama’s home state of Illinois just did: Vote yourselves out of the unsavory one-size-fits-all mandate. Last week, the state’s second largest school district decided to quit the national school-lunch program altogether. Officials pointed out that absurd federal guidelines prevented them from offering hard-boiled eggs, hummus, pretzels, some brands of yogurt, and nonfat milk in containers larger than 12 ounces.  The district will deliberately forgo $900,000 in federal aid and instead rely on its own nutritionist to devise healthy choices that students actually want. One local parent summed it up well: “The government can’t control everything.”

As more schools look to withdraw, you can bet on the White House to ramp up the Republican-bashing rhetoric. Mrs. Obama’s advocates have already taken to social media to complain about Big Business special interests. But let’s remember: Mrs. Obama has been working the food circuit since 2005, when the wife of newly elected senator Barack Obama was named to the corporate board of directors of Walmart processed-foods supplier TreeHouse Foods Inc. — collecting $45,000 in 2005, $51,200 in 2006, and 7,500 TreeHouse stock options worth more than $72,000 for each year.

Fact: The first lady has been the most insatiable crony at the center of the fed-food racket. Her nonprofit Partnership for a Healthier America has reported assets of $4.5 million from secret donors. It’s not just mean conservatives pointing out her Big Business ties. The left-wing documentary Fed Up made the same point before being edited under pressure. Hello, Chicago Way.

Mrs. Obama’s allies also have accused opponents of wanting to repeal “science-based” standards. But the first lady herself was caught spreading false claims that her program was responsible for reducing childhood obesity, when the decline began a decade ago.

And as I’ve reported previously, deep-pocketed Big Labor’s push to expand public-union payrolls with thousands more food-service workers is also driving Mrs. Obama’s agenda.

Waste, failure, lies, and special-interest ties. If federal food policy were really about the children, the East Wing would be embracing change. But this is not about protecting the kids. It’s about protecting Michelle Obama. Her thin-skinned response to criticism is telling: Hell hath no fury like a Nanny State control freak scorned.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies.

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?

The Futility of Taxing Foods to Achieve Social Change

Lazy Intellects and Food Zealots

We have endured the monstrous regime of the feminazis.  We continue to labour under the monstrous regime of the foodnazis.  There are those who wish to command and control all that we put in our mouths–for our own good–and, of course, society’s good, since the state pays for health care.  And we are facing a plague of illnesses, about to descend with more deadly intent than the Bubonic Plague.  Obesity, diabetes, heart disease: this evil triumvirate must be combated with taxes, rules, regulations, controls, bans and government sponsored cotton-wool. 

One biggie is the cost of fast food–you know, that fatty stuff sold in burger bars and fish ‘n chip shops.  What’s wrong here, you ask.  Well, it’s too cheap the foodnazis tell us.  It is being bought and consumed by the truckloads because it is cheaper than decent food.  Coke is cheaper than milk.  So, let’s force the price upwards. Let’s tax it.  The new-left command and control economists tell us that if you tax something, you get less of it.  Let’s put a tax on sugar saturated drinks.

Such moves would hit the poor obese, forcing them to consume something better, argue the zealots
.  It would force them to be righteous and holy and eat better.  Actually, it would do nothing of the sort.  True, the poor obese would find it harder to pay for their daily food.  They would show up in income statistics as being increasingly unable to feed themselves.  The poor in New Zealand would get poorer; more people would be classified as below the “breadline”, unable to afford food.  Pressures would, therefore,  mount on the government of the day to increase the minimum wage and welfare payments so that the poor could afford the now more expensive food.  Governments would legislate Canute-like for higher wages and welfare payouts.  And so the cycle of descent into national recession would commence once again. 

As is so often the case, the poor obese (we generalise) are arguably recipients and earners of too much money as it is.  They spend it unwisely.  They like the taste and the convenience of fast foods and fizzy drinks. If they were poorer, necessity, being the mother of invention, might force them to eat more healthy food, instead of junk stuff. 

It turns out that healthy food and eating is much less expensive than fast food junk.  The latter is a luxury that only the relatively wealthy can afford.  Richard Meadows does the sums in an article in Stuff:

It’s not our fault we’re obese. Potato chips are cheaper than apples. Coke is cheaper than milk. Fruit and veggies are unaffordable. The Government must act! That’s the tone of a slew of opinion pieces which have popped up in recent weeks, calling for everything from subsidies for fruit and veggies to taxes on sugar and fat.

But the underlying premise – that it’s cheaper to stuff your face with fizzy drink and KFC than to cook healthy meals – is simply wrong. Takeaway food is convenient, delicious – and generally very expensive. With a bit of knowhow and a dash of common sense, you can spend at least two to three times less with a frugal but healthy diet. . . .

Breakfast
There’s a reason they feed oats to horses – they’re incredibly affordable, and packed with energy.  “Oats with some low fat milk is a perfectly great breakfast – it doesn’t have to be an expensive breakfast cereal,” says Healthy Food Guide nutritionist Claire Turnbull.  A big bag of oatmeal costs 15c per serving, while a cup of milk is another 35c. All up, that’s breakfast sorted for 50c.

Want to splash out on a cooked meal? It’ll still cost you less than a dollar.  Eggs, which are a great protein source, are roughly 30c each, while wholemeal bread is about 15c a slice. Two eggs plus two slices equals 90c.  How does fast food stack up? The cheapest possible pie – with roughly the same protein, but more fat and calories – is $2. . . .

Lunch
The midday meal should contain some protein, but that doesn’t necessarily mean meat.  “Things like lentils, kidney beans and chickpeas, which are a great source of protein and fibre, are really cheap,” says Turnbull.  You need to eat a range of vegetable-based proteins to get the goodies you need, but that’s simple enough.  Mix a grain with a legume – say, a wholemeal peanut butter sandwich – and you’re set.

One hundred grams of lentils contains a whopping 26 grams of protein, along with at least 12 micronutrients – and costs just 70c. Add some brown rice – also insanely cheap at about 10c per serve – and you’re on track for a filling meal.. . .

Healthy lunch: $2
Fast food lunch: $7 (Big Mac and fries)

Dinner
According to [AUT professor of nutrition Elaine] Rush, dinner should be a quarter carbohydrates, a quarter protein, and half different-coloured vegetables. ”That’s the ideal for the proportions of your plate, and your shopping basket,” she says.

Protein is the most expensive, so we’ll tackle that first. Whether it’s chicken breast on special, cheap fish, mince, BBQ steak, or stewing cuts of meat, you should be able to pick something up for about $10 a kilo.  Rush did an analysis on the cost per gram of protein a few years ago. ”Mince actually came out on top – it beat Kentucky Fried,” she says.

Eating meat is affordable, says Dale Folland, a nutritionist and director of Newlives Nutrition.
”The problem is, we overeat,” he says. ”You may have your average male eating 200g, 250g of protein [in a meal]. That’s when it gets expensive, when you’re eating more than you need to.” He says 100g to 130g of meat or other protein is about right for a woman’s evening meal, while men should take in 100g to 170g, depending on size.

That’s a cost of about $1 to $1.70 per meal.  Add another 50c or so for veggies, and another 50c for a serving of carbs, like  potatoes or pasta. All up we’re talking less than $3 – or $4 if you allow wriggle room for a bit of flavour and variety.
Healthy dinner: $3-$4
Fast food dinner: $9.90 (KFC quarter pack). . . .

MYTH BUSTED
If you add up the three meals, snacks, and drinks, the artery-clogging convenience diet costs $20 at the bare minimum – and probably a whole lot more.  A bare-basics healthy diet with a bit of leeway costs more like $7 to $9, roughly two to three times cheaper.  No matter how you nitpick the numbers, it’s hard to keep arguing that healthy food is prohibitively expensive. . . .

Soup Nazis

Ubiquitous Food Police

One of the most famous episodes in Seinfeld is the Soup Nazi. It has probably been watched more than any other.  (In case you have missed it, there is a YouTube highlights version below.) 

As life once again imitates art, years later we find ourselves beset by food Nazis of all kinds, telling us what to eat and, more importantly, what not to eat.  But the matter does not stop at nagging and hectoring.  It is ironic that Seinfeld, which was such an acute insightful commentary upon New York City and New Yorkers, has ended up parodying-in-advance the actual charge by Nanny Mayor Bloomberg to rule and regulate what New Yorkers can and cannot eat.  Bloomberg became the actual incarnation of the Soup Nazi, aspiring to control every part of the human anatomy–for our own good, naturally.  And so it has come to pass that Food Police are now everywhere–yearning and lusting for the reins of power–passing rules, regulating, and controlling, all to protect us from ourselves. Bovine New Yorkers love it.  The rest of us?  Not so much.

We read and hear this sort of thing almost daily:

Imposing a 20 per cent tax on Coke and other fizzy soft drinks could save 67 lives a year by reducing ill-health, a New Zealand study has found.  A high sugar intake is linked to obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. [NZ Herald]

Then comes the fine print:

The study by Auckland and Otago University researchers said the tax would avert or postpone between 60 and 73 deaths a year from cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes – or about 0.2 per cent of deaths from all causes.  Based on economic survey data showing the effect of varying food prices on household buying, they calculated the tax would reduce daily energy consumption by 0.2 per cent.

Oh, so the proposed tax–designed as an implicit penalty for designated evil doing–would only avert or postpone about 0.2 percent of deaths in this country.  Not prevent.  Not grant the gift of eternal life.  Only delay the inevitable–and then only 0.2 percent of deaths in any year. And the ultimate insult to this injury to common sense?  We, the taxpayers, are funding this kind of inanity.  They are taking our money to facilitate their swaddling us into a state of perpetual infancy. 

It is a fundamental principle of civil liberty that everyone has a freedom right to go either to hell in their own way, regardless of how horrific hell may be.  There is no statute of limitations on folly and stupidity.  Folk have a freedom right to be foolish and stupid.  If they don’t, the concept of freedom has no meaning.  We do not object to disclosure when it comes to food and drink–in fact, honesty and integrity and good faith are compelling reasons for its employment.  We do not object to health warnings–provided they are honest, accurate, truthful and not alarmist.  We all have to die of something at the end of the day. 

What we absolutely object to is the Soup Nazi attitude whereby elites and self-appointed authorities  rule, regulate, and attempt to ration what one shall have, when, how, and in what quantities, all for our own good.  Such despotism is an anathema to a human being born free. 

The Soup Nazi is comedy.  The real Food Nazi’s are not so funny.  But, probably the best defence we have is to mock and ridicule them.  If you want to get into training for the grand liberation, watch this episode of Seinfeld a few times.  It is positively, nefariously seditious.