If the federal government’s influence over food choices were limited to releasing dense and unreadable Dietary Guidelines every five years, it wouldn’t be much to worry about. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Schools, the military, prisons and other government facilities are required to follow those guidelines.

And in case that’s not enough, they’re doing their best to harangue us into following the guidelines at home as well. Check out this video:

The Apps for Kids official website describes the competition:

The Apps for Healthy Kids competition is a part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign to end childhood obesity within a generation. Apps for Healthy Kids challenges software developers, game designers, students, and other innovators to develop fun and engaging software tools and games that drive children, especially “tweens” (ages 9-12) - directly or through their parents - to eat better and be more physically active.

Tools and games should be built using the USDA nutrition dataset recently made available to the public through the Open Government Initiative. The dataset provides information on total calories, calories from “extras” (solid fats and added sugars), and MyPyramid food groups for over 1,000 commonly eaten foods. We are seeking innovative and creative tools and games that use the USDA dataset to deliver nutrition and health concepts in a fun and engaging way.

Great … now kids can be brainwashed by the USDA while playing games. The only saving grace here is that the government officials in charge will probably select games no self-respecting kid would actually find interesting.

A few days ago, we decided we’d better do some summertime family activities before summer is gone, so we took the girls to play miniature golf and visit a children’s discovery center in a nearby town. It was a lovely drive through the hills and rolling countryside, where we saw several ranches with cows roaming around the pastures and eating grass … just like Mother Nature Intended.

The discovery center was actually pretty cool. Lots of interesting science, nature and technology exhibits for kids. Here’s my six-year-old getting up close and personal with some turtles:

Unfortunately, the USDA apparently rents a small section of the museum. An entire corner was dedicated to the wonders of the Food Pyramid and health advice based on it.

So this is what we’re up against. Dietary guidelines in the schools, dietary guidelines being programmed into educational games, dietary guidelines being quoted as gospel by health reporters in the media, dietary guidelines on display in museums, and of course dietary guidelines on your food packages. No wonder people give you a strange look if you tell them you avoid grains and eat lots of animal fats.  It’s been pounded into their heads over and over that a diet like that will kill you. 

Grains and soybean oil … lovely. Anyone out there really believe the U.S. Department of Agriculture is pushing those foods because they’re just soooooo good for you?

While I was pulling these pictures off my wife’s camera, I found a few others that are relevant. Apparently one of us wanted to remember breakfast one morning and took this one:

That’s a typical breakfast around here. Cheese and onion omelet (cooked in Kerrygold butter) with sour cream on top, bacon, avocado, a bit of fruit. No grains, and no godawful soybean oil to ruin it.

In the pictures above and below, you can see how a diet that rarely includes bread, pasta, cereal, or any of the foods at the base of the Food Pyramid has turned my six-year-old into a listless little weakling. These were taken at a fair in downtown Franklin. A bunch of other kids her age and older also tried to climb to the top of the wall, where they could push a buzzer to announce their success. Not one made it during the time we were watching.  But she did.

We also finally got around to finding a local dentist and all had our first checkups in over a year.  Four people, zero cavities.  So I think I’ll continue ignoring the USDA and their Dietary Guidelines.

On the way home from Chicago last week, we stopped in Indiana to visit a facility that’s a combination theme park and working dairy farm.  Outside the barns and other buildings, there were play areas where kids could run, slide, climb and jump … always a bonus for parents looking for ways to get the wiggles out before resuming a long car trip.

Inside the buildings, there were areas where tourists could see cows being milked and calves being born — several are born there each day.   I know humans are one of the few species whose babies are born helpless, but it still amazes me to see calves standing up and walking around mere hours after birth.

There were also exhibits and short films designed to impress viewers with the wonders of modern milk production.   One of the exhibits featured life-sized plastic models of a woman milking a cow in a barn — a representation of the old days.  A talking animatronic rooster explained how much he misses those good old days, when he was allowed to hang out in the barn and eat bugs while the farm wife milked the family cow.

(Bugs?!  You mean chickens like to eat bugs?  Go to a health-food store these days, and most cartons of eggs will proudly announce FROM HENS FED AN ALL-VEGETARIAN DIET.  Since chickens naturally prefer bugs, it’s highly unlikely that vegetarian hens are healthier … but they’re no doubt more self-righteous.)

But, so as not to leave the audience feeling too sorry for him, the rooster then explained that when the farm wife milked a cow, the milk was only good for a day or two.  In today’s laboratory-clean environment, the milk is extracted, homogenized, pasteurized and fortified, and by gosh, it lasts for weeks.  Lovely.

For the record, I don’t believe milking machines and pasteurization are the worst things to happen to the American food supply.   We started drinking pasteurized milk long before the rise in obesity and diabetes began.  If you live in an area where you can buy raw milk from a local farmer, great.  It’s more nutritious.  But if you live in downtown Chicago and buy milk shipped from Wisconsin to your local grocery store, pasteurization may be a good idea. 

We buy cream from a local dairy farm, and they pasteurize their milk, albeit at the minimum temperature and duration allowed by law.  However — and this is what’s important, in my opinion — their cows are raised in pastures and eat grass, not corn.

That certainly isn’t the case on the dairy farm we toured.  The exhibits and films, in fact, brag about how much corn they ship in to feed the cows.  They’re proud of how their dairy business supports the Midwest’s corn farmers.  They didn’t mention supporting the producers of antibiotics and antacids.  Roughly half of all antacids produced are fed to cattle — to offset the effects of eating corn.

In the picture below, my wife and girls are learning about how important corn is to the dairy industry.  (Hey, maybe we should subsidize corn!)

These pictures are from the same exhibit, explaining what cows eat.  Add it up, and you’ll see that an American diary cow’s “nutritious” diet is mostly corn.  It’s a wonder that all those dairy farmers in New Zealand (grass-fed cows only) manage to produce any milk at all. 

After the tour, my wife and girls indulged in some fresh-from-the-farm ice cream.  I didn’t.  Good thing, too, since I was driving … within an hour after eating the ice cream, they all fell asleep in the car.

So far I’ve managed to slug through two sections of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans: the Executive Summary and a 62-page introduction titled Setting the Stage. It’s tough going, largely because the documents are written in that government-academia style that makes me want to rip my own head off.

I guess I should’ve expected as much. Early in his presidency, Jimmy Carter sent out a directive instructing government bureaucrats to write official documents “in plain English for a change.” Dream on, Jimmy. By the time the directive was edited and passed along, it probably called for “implementing a shift in publication protocols designed to facilitate and enhance the impactfulness of written communications by encouraging the frequent employment of commonly-used words and idiomatic expressions.”

One of the best books I’ve ever read on writing (Telling Writing, by Ken Macrorie) gave a name to that kind of language: Engfish … the dead-fish, stupefying form of prose that academics and bureaucrats often choose because they believe it makes them sound intelligent and important. Here’s one example from the Dietary Guidelines:

The first of these chapters considers the total diet and how to integrate all of the Report’s nutrient and energy recommendations into practical terms that encourage personal choice but result in an eating pattern that is nutrient dense and calorie balanced. The second chapter complements this total diet approach by integrating and translating the scientific conclusions reached at the individual level to encompass the broader environmental and societal aspects that are crucial to full adoption and successful implementation of these recommendations.

Hey, wake up!  There’s more.  Here’s their explanation of “total diet”:

The DGAC defines “total diet” as the combination of foods and beverages that provide energy and nutrients and constitute an individual’s complete dietary intake, on average, over time. This encompasses various foods and food groups, their recommended amounts and frequency, and the resulting eating pattern.

I see … so when you refer to the “total diet,” you’re actually talking about the total diet. Thanks for clearing that up.

Most of the Setting The Stage document is dedicating to explaining why the committee exists and how they’re going to save the American people from themselves. In plain, non-Engfish language, it could be summarized as a slight variation of the Mighty Mouse song:  “Here we come to save the daaaaaaaaaay!”

Since first published in 1980, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans have provided science-based advice to promote health and reduce risk of major chronic diseases through optimal diet and regular physical activity… Because of their focus on health promotion and risk reduction, the Dietary Guidelines form the basis of Federal food, nutrition education, and information programs.

By law (Public Law 101-445, Title III, 7 U.S.C. 5301 et seq.,) the most recent edition of the Dietary Guidelines is reviewed by a committee of experts, updated if necessary, and published every 5 years. The legislation also requires that the Secretaries of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) review all Federal publications for the general public containing dietary guidance information for consistency with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

So the USDA has been issuing dietary advice every five years since 1980, and they’re responsible for enforcing consistency in federal dietary guidance. As they explain elsewhere in the document, their mission is especially critical now because

The prevalence of overweight and obesity in the US has increased dramatically in the past three decades … The 2010 DGAC Report is unprecedented in addressing an American public, two-thirds of whom are overweight or obese.

A dramatic increase in obesity in the past three decades … hmmm, let me do some math here … that would mean we’ve gotten a lot fatter since 1980, otherwise known as the first year the DGAC provided science-based advice to promote health and reduce risk of major chronic diseases through optimal diet and regular physical activity.

Since the body of the full report suggests they’re big believers in drawing conclusions from correlations, I couldn’t help but notice an interesting correlation there. Let me put it into proper Engfish:  Moderately strong correlational evidence suggests a causative link between the DGAC s semi-decadal dietary guidelines and the observed rise in the prevalence of obesity over the same period.

Yup, we started getting fatter right around the time the USDA started telling us how to eat. Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe not. But I can guarantee you it would never occur to a government nutrition committee to even ask themselves the question. In fact, it’s clear from the rest of the Setting The Stage document that they already know why Americans have gotten fatter: We’re stupid.  (MeMe Roth is no doubt applauding.)

They didn’t come out say that, of course. That would be simple and direct. But various Engfish versions are all over the document:

Now, as in the past, a disconnect exists between dietary recommendations and what Americans actually consume.

Translation: those stupid fat @#$&s aren’t eating like we told them to!

The 2010 DGAC recognizes that substantial barriers make it difficult for Americans to accomplish these goals. Ensuring that all Americans consume a health-promoting dietary pattern and achieve and maintain energy balance requires far more than individual behavior change. A multi-sectoral strategy is imperative.

Translation: those stupid fat @#$&s are so stupid, they’re going to need a LOT of help to overcome their stupidity.

Ultimately, individuals choose the types and amount of food they eat and the amount of physical activity they perform, but the current environment significantly enhances the over-consumption of calories and discourages the expenditure of energy.

Translation: those stupid fat @#$&s are not only stupid; they’re also lazy and incapable of resisting temptation, probably because they’re stupid.

To achieve dietary goals and energy balance, Americans must become mindful, or “conscious,” eaters, that is, attentively choosing what and how much they eat.

Translation: the only way those stupid fat @#$&s will ever stop being stupid fat @#$&s is if they stop being stupid and start thinking more consciously about all the good advice we’ve been giving them for past 30 years before they run off and stuff their stupid faces.

As far as I can tell, the committee members never asked themselves how we all became so stupid in one generation, or what it was about our grandparents and great-grandparents that made them such mindful, conscious eaters. I seem to recall my grandparents pretty much just ate whenever they were hungry. Grandma whipped up plenty of food at mealtimes and there were usually leftovers put in the refrigerator, so they weren’t lean because they were starving themselves or running out of food to tempt them.

So what’s the cure for all that mindless, stupid eating? Well, since this document was written by a government committee, you can pretty much guess: a multi-sectored, multi-factorial, comprehensive strategy. In other words, mo’ better government!  (Here we come to save the daaaaaay!)  In Engfish:

A coordinated strategic plan that includes all sectors of society, including individuals, families, educators, communities, physicians and allied health professionals, public health advocates, policy makers, scientists, and small and large businesses (e.g., farmers, agricultural producers, food scientists, food manufacturers, and food retailers of all kinds), should be engaged in the development and ultimate implementation of a plan to help all Americans eat well, be physically active, and maintain good health and function. It is important that any strategic plan is evidence-informed, action-oriented, and focused on changes in systems in these sectors.

I’m sorry, but if it takes that kind of effort to prevent us from becoming fat and sick, we’re already dead. This isn’t World War Two, for Pete’s sake.

Change is needed in the overall food environment to support the efforts of all Americans to meet the key recommendations of the 2010 DGAC.

Here’s how you can change the overall food environment: stop subsidizing grains. There are many references in the full report to the evils of “grain-based desserts.” Maybe if our tax dollars weren’t making them dirt-cheap, the profit motive for producing them would go away.

To meet these challenges, the following sustainable changes must occur:

Improve nutrition literacy and cooking skills, including safe food handling skills, and empower and motivate the population, especially families with children, to prepare and consume healthy foods at home.

Increase comprehensive health, nutrition, and physical education programs and curricula in US schools and preschools, including food preparation, food safety, cooking, and physical education classes and improved quality of recess.

Translation: we need to start brainwashing the stupid fat @#$&s to follow our advice at an early age, before their taste buds develop.

For all Americans, especially those with low income, create greater financial incentives to purchase, prepare, and consume vegetables and fruit, whole grains, seafood, fat-free and low-fat milk and milk products, lean meats, and other healthy foods.

Improve the availability of affordable fresh produce through greater access to grocery stores, produce trucks, and farmers’ markets.

Ensure household food security through measures that provide access to adequate amounts of foods that are nutritious and safe to eat.

Translation: we need to start bribing the stupid fat @#$&s who also happen to be poor so they’ll start following our advice.

Encourage restaurants and the food industry to offer health-promoting foods that are low in sodium; limited in added sugars, refined grains, and solid fats; and served in smaller portions.

Thaaaaat’ll be interesting:

“Hello, this is the USDA calling. We’d like to encourage you to serve more tasteless, health-promoting foods in your restaurant, preferably in smaller portions.”

“Yeah, we tried that. Nobody bought the stuff, so we couldn’t make a profit on it. Sorry.”

“Ummm … I’m afraid you don’t understand. We’re encouraging you.”

“Uh-huh. Consider me encouraged. Now, if you’ll excuse, it’s busy here today, so–”

“Look, damnit! We’re ENCOURAGING you to do what we say!  Now take the encouragement, or we’ll have to regulate you!”

There’s more to it, of course. And after laying out their multi-factorial, multi-sectoral, comprehensive, coordinated, strategic, guaranteed-to-create-a-few-thousand-federal-jobs plans, the committee explains why their work is oh-so important:

The US Government uses the Dietary Guidelines as the basis of its food assistance programs, nutrition education efforts, and decisions about national health objectives. For example, the National School Lunch Program and the Elderly Nutrition Program incorporate the Dietary Guidelines in menu planning, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) applies the Dietary Guidelines in its educational materials, and the Healthy People 2010 objectives for the Nation include objectives based on the Dietary Guidelines.

As you may recall, when government inspectors visited my daughter’s school, we received an apologetic note from the principal reminding us that every lunch — even the ones we send from home — must meet federal guidelines when inspectors are on site. So we had to fill my daughter’s lunch bag with grain-based, low-fat garbage for a couple of days. Then we put her back on a good diet. Enforcing federal guidelines isn’t the solution. It’s part of the problem.

The evidence described here in the 2010 DGAC Report, which will be used to develop the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, will help policymakers, educators, clinicians, and others speak with one voice on nutrition and health and to reduce the confusion caused by mixed messages in the media.

As a libertarian with an interest in both science and nutrition, this sentence, perhaps more than any other, set my hair on fire. (And I don’t have much left.) Speaking “with one voice” may appeal to the government mentality, but it is absolutely, positively the opposite of what’s required for any kind of progress.  I don’t care what field you’re talking about — nutrition, climate science, physics, philosophy, economics, etc. — progress is not the result of manufactured consensus; it’s the result of individual thinking and robust debate. Allowing the so-called experts to control the discussion and speak “with one voice” is the prescription for intellectual paralysis and decay.

I’m not sure how they’ll “encourage” the media to stop sending mixed messages, but I’m pretty sure the last we thing we need is for the media to march even more in lockstep with the government’s nutrition guidelines. It’s good to be confused when you’re looking for answers. Believe me, I was confused when my low-fat and vegetarians diets didn’t produce results anything like I’d been promised. That confusion prompted me to keep investigating.

I’ve mentioned the wonderful book The Wisdom of Crowds before, but it’s worth stating the theme again here: the best answers rarely come from little groups of experts. You can empanel the 25 smartest people in the world, and they still don’t have as much accumulated knowledge and wisdom as any thousand people picked at random. That’s why the best answers usually come from somewhere out in the crowd — especially when people in the crowd start comparing notes.

Little groups of experts speaking with one voice told us to avoid animal fats and eat more grains. If we’ve done anything stupid in the past 30 years, it was listening to their advice. You can see the results on any public street. Let’s not do it again.

More in the next post.

I started reading the USDA’s 2010 Dietary Guidelines this week.  For those of you who hoped the federal government would finally wise up and dump the high-carb/low-fat nonsense … come on, you didn’t really expect that, did you? 

Did you honestly believe the government would put together a panel of so-called experts who would announce that the government has been wrong for the past 40 years?  That the food pyramid was a disaster?  That billions of taxpayer dollars are subsidizing the same foods that are making us fat and diabetic?

Of course not.  The new guidelines are, if anything, a perfect example of something I’ve said in previous posts (which I believe I may have borrowed from Milton Friedman):  when a government program produces disastrous results, those results are offered as proof that we need to do the same thing again … only bigger!

That’s mostly what the new guidelines are:  the same old $#@%, only bigger.  Bigger reductions in saturated fat, bigger reductions in salt, bigger reductions in cholesterol, and of course (this is a government committee, after all) lots of “calls to action” … otherwise known as BIG federal programs to convince us poor fools in the public to finally start heeding their advice.

Yup, these folks know who’s spreading the polyunsaturated margarine on their whole-wheat bread.  Nothing pleases the high-ups in government quite like being told that the only way we’ll stop runaway diabetes and obesity is to expand the role of government.  It would never occur to these doofuses to wonder how our grandparents and great-grandparents managed to stay lean and (mostly) free of diabetes without a bunch of federal programs guiding their dietary choices.  I’m not sure how I would track this, but I’d be curious to see how many of the committee members, after telling the government exactly what it wanted to hear, end up with juicy government grants for their future research.

There are hundreds of pages (this is a government committee, after all), and I probably won’t read them all for fear of putting a fist through my monitor.  But so far, I’ve read the summary and several key sections … including the “methodology” section that explained how rigorously they collected, examined, and considered all the relevant science before writing their recommendations. 

That’s hogwash.  They cherry-picked the research.  I’ve already seen a dozen or  sentences that begin with “Studies show a moderate association between …” and end with a recommendation based on those moderate associations.  If you read this blog regularly, you know what I think of association studies. 

These people had their minds made up before they began.  I knew that would happen when the committee was populated with nothing but the same old anti-fat, anti-salt hysterics, even though some top-notch researchers who’ve studied the benefits of carbohydrate restriction were nominated. 

In a nutshell, here are the key conclusions:

• We’re getting fatter because we eat too much and don’t exercise enough, so we need to eat less and exercise more.
• Heart disease and Type II diabetes are caused by saturated fat, so the recommended intake of saturated fat should be reduced from 10% of total calories to 7%.
• Cholesterol also causes heart disease, so the daily limit should be lowered from 300 mg to 200 mg for people at risk for heart disease or diabetes. 
• Salt also causes heart disease by raising blood pressure, so we need to severely restrict our salt intake.
• Carbohydrates are fabulous as long as they come from fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and they’re essential for energy, so they should make up 45-65% of our diets.
• We consume too much sugar and need to cut way back.  (Hey, they got one right!)

See anything new there?  Any shift in thinking?  Any recognition that our obesity and diabetes rates began going up around the same time we were told to go on lowfat diets?  Any indication that the committee, in their efforts to examine all the relevant science, read anything by Gary Taubes or Richard Feinman?  Any indication that they even examined the diets of Americans 100 years ago, when diabetes and heart disease were rare?

Nope. 

There’s far more nonsense in the official report than I can or should try to tackle in a single post, so I’ll keep reading and start writing posts on the topic next week.

You may recall that in my wrapup of the low-carb cruise, I mentioned Dr. Mary Vernon’s presentation about the effects of different breakfasts on kids:  the kids who ate eggs maintained steady blood sugar for the next several hours, while the kids who ate instant oatmeal experienced a blood sugar spike, then a dip, then a return to normal blood sugar levels — but only because their bodies pumped out plenty of epinephrine, the “fight or flight” hormone.

I can rarely fall asleep before midnight, and it was probably 2:30 AM before my brain finally shut down last night, so I slept in this morning and missed the Great Easter Basket Hunt of 2010.  But according to my wife, my daughters and my neice found their baskets, indulged in chocolate and jelly beans, then spent a good part of the morning snapping and occasionally screaming at each other.  Glad I missed it.

We also got to witness the apparent wonders of vitamin D again this weekend.  My four-year-old woke up crying last night with a runny nose, a cough, and an earache.  Along with a small dose of children’s Tylenol for the pain, we gave her 20,000 IU of vitamin D.   She has no symptoms whatsoever today … although we’ll see if the morning sugar-fest brings them back. We keep the girls on a good diet, but we don’t want to be food Nazis, so my wife elected not to take away the Easter candy.

It’s only anecdotal evidence, but this is the third or fourth time this year one of us has experienced symptoms of an infection, then quickly recovered after a punch-out dose of vitamin D.  Sure beats relying on drugs.

Since I’ve spent the last two posts bagging on MeMe Roth and the other food cops, I may as well continue, but along a different line.  This time, I want to explain why they’re not just annoying, but profoundly mistaken.  Their prescriptions for “helping” people lose weight don’t work, have never worked, and will never work.  Here’s why:

They still believe gaining or losing weight works like a simple savings account.  Take in too many calorie deposits and your account — your fat tissue — grows.  So to shrink your account — why, heck, it’s easy! — just make smaller deposits by eating less, or make bigger withdrawals by exercising.

This theory is a classic of example of the famous H.L. Mencken quote:  “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”  It’s so wrong, even Kelly Brownell — the morbidly obese expert on obesity who thinks the rest of us are suffering from a lack of calorie-count laws –  can’t keep his weight down in spite of all his supposed knowledge.

To understand why the bank-account analogy wrong, we need to revisit what is perhaps the single most enlightening concept Gary Taubes put forth in Good Calories, Bad Calories:  homeostasis.  In biology, homeostasis refers to a condition of balance, one that your body insists on maintaining.  Blood sugar is a good example.  Eat a candy bar, your blood sugar rises, so your pancreas produces insulin to bring it down.  Skip the carbs entirely, your blood sugar falls, so your body produces glucose from protein to raise it again.  The body insists on keeping blood sugar within a very narrow range.

When we’re talking about body fat, homeostasis is the amount of fat we need to provide our bodies with a reliable source of energy.  If you haven’t already seen it, watch this YouTube clip from Fat Head, which explains how body fat feeds our cells:

Now, here are some quotes from Good Calories, Bad Calories to expand the idea a bit further:

Clinicians who treat obese patients invariably assume that the energy or caloric requirements of these individuals is the amount of calories they can consume without gaining weight.  They then treat this number as though it were fixed by some innate facet of the patient’s metabolism.  Pennington explained that this wasn’t the case.  As long as obese individuals have this metabolic defect and their cells are not receiving the full benefit of the calories they consume, their tissues will always be conserving energy and so expending less than they otherwise might.  The cells will be semi-starved even if the person does not appear to be.  Indeed, if these individuals are restraining their desire to curb, if possible, still further weight gain, the inhibition of energy expenditure will be exacerbated.

Pennington suggested that as the adipose tissue accumulates fat, its expansion will increase the rate at which fat calories are released back into the bloodstream … and this could eventually compensate for the defect itself.  We will continue to accumulate fat - and so continue to be in positive energy balance - until we reach a new equilibrium and the flow of fat calories out of the adipose tissue once again matches the flow of calories in.

In other words, people whose hormones have put them in fat-accumulation mode aren’t in a state of energy balance unless they’re eating more and getting fatter.  And once they’re fat, they can’t remain in a state of energy balance — homeostasis — unless they remain fat.   With that in mind, let’s take the bank-account analogy promoted by the MeMe Roths of the world and make some adjustments so it actually resembles biological reality.  (I’m using simple numbers here for clarity.)

In our system, the fat tissue is still a savings account of sorts, but we can only pay our energy bills by making automatic debits from a checking account — the calories that flow through our bloodstream or are easily accessible in the form of glycogen.  To get through the day, we need to make hourly payments of 100 calories or so, depending on our metabolisms.  Meanwhile, the bank wants us to keep the checking-account balance as close as possible to, say, 500 calories.  When the checking account runs low, our system is designed to automatically transfer calories from savings into checking.

Still with me?  Good.  Now here’s the catch:   The bank will only let us transfer a small percentage of our savings into checking each hour.  The exact percentage allowed is determined by a mix of hormones, with insulin acting as the primary account manager. With that in mind, let’s check on the account status for two women:  Skinny Minnie and Fatty Patty. 

Skinny Minnie (who has long, straight, blonde hair and wears glasses) has a pretty good deal going.  At 120 pounds, she only keeps about 52,500 calories (15 pounds) in savings, and her bank allows her to transfer 0.30% of the balance into checking every hour — about 157 calories, which is more than enough to pay her hourly energy bill when she hasn’t eaten in awhile.

As a result, Minnie’s body is perfectly happy with the small savings account.  When she eats, calories go into both checking and savings, but then begin flowing from savings back into checking pretty quickly.  So she feels satisfied on small meals, and if she does overeat a bit, her body senses the high balance and starts spending energy like crazy … it turns up the heat, and she feels compelled to go run for four miles.  Soon her checking account is back down to 500 calories, and the savings account remains right around 52,500.  Minnie can even decide she wants to lose five pounds before her high-school reunion and accomplish that goal by eating less for awhile — at 115 pounds, she can still transfer 105 calories per hour into savings.  She doesn’t even feel hungry.

Patty’s deal isn’t quite as good.  At 140 pounds, she keeps 105,000 calories (30 pounds) in savings.  She doesn’t want the large account, but she needs it … the bank only allows her to transfer 0.10% of the balance to checking each hour — 105 calories, just enough to pay the bills.  While she considers herself overweight, she’s just barely in a state of energy balance as far as the bank is concerned.

A few years later, Patty’s situation gets a little worse.  Thanks to genetics, menopause, frankenfats, stress, too many refined carbohydrates, or a combination of factors, her hormonal mix changes.  She becomes insulin-resistant, and the bank is compelled to change the rules.  A higher proportion of what she eats must go into savings …and worse, she can only transfer 0.075% of those savings to checking each hour — 79 calories. 

So Patty eats a little more.  But when she’s not eating — and especially during the 12 hours or so between dinner and breakfast — her checking account is being debited faster than it’s being replenished.  The bank sends a not-so-polite message to Patty’s body:  YOU MUST INCREASE YOUR SAVINGS ACCOUNT TO 140,000 CALORIES TO MEET YOUR HOURLY ENERGY WITHDRAWALS.

Patty’s body heeds the warning.  It ramps up her appetite.  It lowers the thermostat a bit and orders her to sit still more often by making her feel tired.  Thanks to these measures Patty soon finds herself at 150 pounds.  Minnie looks on in disgust, thinking to herself (or saying aloud on Fox News), “Come on, Lady, eat a little less and take up jogging, would you?”

Unfortunately, Patty’s well-meaning doctor is also concerned and orders her to cut back on fat and eat more fruits and grains.  She does, and as a result her body is even more conditioned to burn glucose instead of fat.  She craves carbohydrates.  Her hormonal balance goes off again, she becomes more insulin-resistant, and soon she can only transfer 0.06% from savings into checking each hour.  Her body receives another warning from the bank:  YOU MUST INCREASE YOUR SAVINGS ACCOUNT TO 175,000 CALORIES TO MEET YOUR HOURLY ENERGY WITHDRAWALS.  A few months later, Patty weighs 160 pounds.  She’s now at 31% body fat and clinically obese.

Patty becomes disgusted with her larger figure and goes on Weight Watchers.  She feels okay on the low-calorie meals for a few days, but as soon as she loses four pounds, her savings account is once again unable to replenish her checking account at the necessary hourly rate.  The bank sends another message:  WHAT THE HECK DID I JUST TELL YOU?!  GET YOUR SAVINGS ACCOUNT BACK UP TO 175,000 CALORIES IMMEDIATELY OR WE’LL BE FORCED TO REPOSSESS THE FREE TOASTER.

Patty doesn’t care about the toaster and refuses to listen.  But her body is afraid of the bank manager and undermines her efforts to shrink the savings account any further.  It turns down the thermostat again.  It feeds Patty some depressants so she’ll sit around even more.  It begins siphoning off an even higher proportion of what she eats into savings.  Soon she’s back in state of energy balance, but just barely. 

Patty’s weight loss stalls at seven pounds, and she gives up.  Sitting on the sofa for hours each day, she eventually watches Oprah and learns from Dr. Oz that she can’t lose weight because she’s depressed and needs to learn to love herself so she’ll stop punishing herself with food.

Like I said, this is a simplified and somewhat silly analogy, but it’s a lot closer to biological reality than the simple bank-account theory that has inspired all those brilliant solutions promoted by Meme Roth, Kelly Brownell, CSPI and the other food cops.  Let’s see how their ideas would work out in our banking system:

Force restaurants to list the calorie counts of every food item on the menu.

The calorie counts are already easy to find, and anyone who wants to know them will find them.  (At McDonald’s, all you have to do is look at the back of the paper placemat.)  These laws aren’t about providing information; they’re about confronting people:  look how many calories you’re about to consume, Fatty Patty!  Don’t do it!

Great … so Patty orders a smaller meal at McDonald’s when she stops for lunch.  But in order to stay in a state of energy balance and avoid starving at the cellular level, she needs all the calories she’s been consuming, because she needs to stay at 160 pounds.  So after that smaller lunch, she eats a bigger dinner — or a normal dinner plus a dish of ice cream while watching the Tonight Show.  The point is, her body is going to order her to eat enough to keep the savings account as high as it needs to be.

Ban fast-food restaurants in poor neighborhoods.

Riiiiiiight.  So instead of getting their nice, cheap carbohydrates from McDonald’s, poor people will get them from snacks at the convenience store or junk food from the grocery store.  As long as the account manager has set a small transfer rate, people have to keep the savings account high — so they do.  Where exactly they obtain the deposits doesn’t matter.

Force communities to build more bike paths and walking trails.

This is one of Kelly Brownell’s big fat ideas.  (If people would just exercise more, they wouldn’t look like me, you see …)

Fine, so Patty takes up walking.  Nothing wrong with that — exercise is good for your health — but as far Patty’s weight it concerned, the extra walking just means she’s depleting the checking account a little faster.  As long as that transfer rate remains small, she’ll just have to eat more to keep the savings-account balance where it needs to be.  If she doesn’t, her body will ramp up her appetite until she can’t ignore it any longer.  That’s why, as Gary Taubes pointed out, overweight people have trained for and run marathons without losing a pound.

Declare all obesity-related diseases “elective” and make fat people pay for them out of pocket so they don’t burden the rest of us.

That’s one of MeMe’s hair-brained (long, straight, blonde hair-brained and glasses that make me look smart) ideas.

Yes, that would certainly work, you see, because Patty is simply choosing to eat too much and be fat.  If she just ate less and moved more, she would magically alter her hormonal balance so she’s in a state of homeostasis at 120 pounds, just like Skinny Minnie … I mean, Skinny MeMe.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.  That would be about as easy for Patty to do as it would be for Skinny MeMe to voluntarily starve herself down to 85 pounds.

The only way to make your body happy with a smaller savings account is to change the hormonal mix and increase the transfer rate.  Some people who decide to go on low-calorie diets stumble onto it by accident … they give up desserts, sodas, potato chips and other junk and bring their insulin levels down in the process.  Kind of like the pope who managed to avoid the plague because his doctor told him to sit in a huge ring of fire to ward off the bad humors.  It worked … but bad humors had nothing to do with it.  The fire warded off the fleas and the rats.

Unfortunately, MeMe Roth and the goofs she works with at CSPI have no clue about homeostasis or the connection between hormones and weight gain.  They tell people to avoid sugar — that’s good — but they also promote low-fat diets with lots of fruits, potatoes and grains.  That might work just fine for Skinny MeMe, but it’s a disaster for people with insulin problems.

So she’s not just annoying, she’s not just a busybody, and she’s not just wrong.  She’s part of the problem.  The sooner she shuts up, the better off we’ll be.