Diet Facism

As everyone knows, the constitution mandates that every five years our government tells us what to eat.  So it is that we have a new directive from the Obama administration - the people who have done such an amazing job of making our entire federal government as efficient, trustworthy, and customer oriented as... The IRS.

Here is an executive summary of the 2015 dietary guidelines: link

Some of the key brilliance found within:

• Saturated fats (natural) and trans fats (manmade) are treated as equally bad.  This defies logic and has been debunked thoroughly.
• Unsaturated vegetable fats (many of which are highly processed) are the recommended fats. This also defies logic.    
• Grains, half of which should be "whole grains", yet all of which are highly processed in the modern world, are still being encouraged as a staple.  This would be great advice in the old days when a farmer grew wheat and then had it ground locally and made into food soon thereafter. But in todays world of modern grain processing this makes no sense.   Grains labelled "whole grains" today are usually refined flours to which they have added back the germ and the bran in proportions unrelated to actual complete grains.  Consumers will be hard pressed to know whether they are buying complete grains or reconstituted "whole grains". 

• According to the bureaucrats - who would never take the advice of sugar lobbyists - a healthy diet can include up to 10% of total calories as added sugars.  That's added sugar, not total! Total carbohydrates would be much higher given the recommendation to drink skim milk, eat lots of fruity things, and load up on pasta and bread.   

And we wonder why we have an ongoing obesity epidemic!

The fact is, governments don't do science.  Individuals do science.  Governments do consensus. Consensus is not science.  No one said this better than the late author Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, etc.):

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

Crichton was not referring to diet science here but it applies.  Governments are always telling us, "the science is settled".  They've been saying that about diet since 1977.  And yet, obesity rates in the U.S. have skyrocketed since then.   The original "Food Pyramid" that helped put the obesity epidemic on steroids in the 1990s is at the top of this page.

What are the odds these same consensus followers are right about any scientific matter?

If only our government would get back to the business of constitutionally limited government and leave the science to the few gifted scientists who can actually prove their theories.  We'd all be better off and much healthier.      

*If the subject of diet and science interests you, please check out my review of the diet documentary "Fed Up".  Link

Happy Earth Day!

First off, let me say I'm an environmentalist.  I have seen pristine coral reefs ruined by careless humans.  I've choked on the air in places like Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.  I've seen unmentionable things washing up on beaches, and surfed through things I'd rather forget.  I was in the water treatment business, and invented a cheaper way for industries to treat their own wastewater.  Currently, I'm working on an after-market automobile exhaust filter.  I even once dabbled in selling retail carbon credits!

That said, I'm a global warming agnostic.  Allow me to explain:  Unless I've done the "science" myself, as in the above examples, all I have to go by is secondhand science.  To rely on that, I need to be convinced that what I'm reading is in fact science.  So far, what I've seen on the subject of global warming does not amount to science, but is rather  consensus.

Here's what author Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain, etc) had to say about the difference between science and consensus:        

I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.

We've seen this movie before.  The exact same thing happened in the medical field with heart disease and diet.  Just like the global warming debate today, there was a time during the heart disease debate when the problem was believed to be so serious that there wasn't sufficient time to do real science.  Instead, we were given a consensus opinion and  told that the science was settled.  It turned out that was a disaster.

We were told, for instance, that fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol were causing heart disease.  The science was settled they said.  The federal government began issuing reports and official recommendations in 1977 based on this consensus opinion.  They have stuck to their guns on this all the way to today.  Only one problem; the science on fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol disagrees with the consensus.  (If you’re interested in reading about this, a good place to start is Gary Taubes' “Good Calories, Bad Calories”)

Is the consensus also wrong about man-made global warming?  Time will tell.  All I know is the global warming consensus advocates are behaving exactly like the diet consensus advocates, and that speaks volumes.