I received a record number of emails alerting me to Denmark’s new tax on fatty foods. In case you haven’t heard about it, here are some quotes from one of the many news articles:
Denmark is to impose the world’s first “fat tax” in a drive to slim its population and cut heart disease. The move may increase pressure for a similar tax in the UK, which suffers from the highest levels of obesity in Europe.
Starting from this Saturday, Danes will pay an extra 30p on each pack of butter, 8p on a pack of crisps, and an extra 13p on a pound of mince, as a result of the tax.
If the U.S. government ever starts taxing my mince, I’m going to start a revolution.
The tax is expected to raise about 2.2bn Danish Krone (£140m), and cut consumption of saturated fat by close to 10 percent, and butter consumption by 15 percent.
Which means it will raise the consumption of crappy industrial food products by around 25 percent.
“It’s the first ever fat-tax,” said Mike Rayner, Director of Oxford University’s Health Promotion Research Group, who has long campaigned for taxes on unhealthy foods.
Unhealthy foods? I thought the tax was on saturated fat and butter.
“It’s very interesting. We haven’t had any practical examples before. Now we will be able to see the effects for real.”
So let me get this straight: you have no practical examples – which means you have no evidence that taxing fatty foods is a good idea – but you favor imposing those taxes anyway? Mr. Rayner, are you by any chance related to The Guy From CSPI?
I read some rah-rah comments by journalists who love the nanny state, but at least one news article raised an important issue:
Butter, milk, cheese, pizza, meat, oil and processed food are now subject to the tax if they contain more than 2.3% saturated fat. Danish officials say they hope the new tax will help limit the population’s intake of fatty foods.
However, some scientists think saturated fat may be the wrong target. They say salt, sugar and refined carbohydrates are more detrimental to health and should be tackled instead.
Those scientists are two-thirds right: sugar and refined carbohydrates are more detrimental to health. But as for “should be tackled first” – ummm … why? Why should governments be tackling any of our food choices? Or as Jacob Sullum (who appeared in Fat Head) aptly put it in one of his essays, When the did the size of your butt become the government’s business?
Whenever the nanny-statists set out to provide another real-life example of the punchline We’re from the government, and we’re here to help, they never pause to ask themselves two crucial questions:
Is this an appropriate task for government, and therefore an appropriate application of government force?
Do government officials have the knowledge and expertise to make the correct decisions on this matter and therefore apply force in a beneficial way?
One of the many reasons I love living in Tennessee is that a surprising number of politicians here actually ask themselves question #1 before acting. I stood up and cheered when I heard that our mayor warned an alderman that he would veto the alderman’s proposed bill to outlaw hurricane fences. The alderman insisted hurricane fences are ugly. The mayor agreed … but said telling property owners what kind of fence they can install on their own land isn’t a proper function of government. What a concept.
Nanny-statists, of course, believe that restricting our freedom in order to bring about whatever benefits they imagine will follow is just fine and dandy. New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg recently spoke at a WHO conference dedicated to creating new policies to battle obesity, diabetes and other “non-communicable” diseases – in other words, diseases you can’t transmit to anyone else. We’re not talking about stopping someone from spreading polio to unwitting victims here; we’re talking about governments attempting to protect people from their own free choices. Here’s part of what Bloomberg had to say:
While government action is not sufficient alone, it is nevertheless absolutely essential. There are powers only governments can exercise.
True … only government can legally threaten to commit violence against you and toss you in jail if you don’t do what you’re told.
Policies only governments can mandate and enforce. And results only government can achieve.
True again … I don’t think private organizations alone could have foisted so much bad dietary advice on us that we’d end up with record numbers of adolescents developing type 2 diabetes.
I’ve been watching (in small chunks) the excellent Ken Burns documentary on Prohibition – the most famous example of our government trying to protect people from themselves. In one of the opening sequences, several historians wondered how Prohibition ever could’ve passed in America. As one of them noted, the Constitution was designed to guarantee individual freedom – but then we passed a constitutional amendment that specifically restricted individual freedom. It was, one of them noted, quite un-American, quite contrary to our national character.
Yes, it was … or at least it used to be. Have you ever wondered why Prohibition required a constitutional amendment to become law? If Congress wanted to ban the sale and manufacture of alcohol, why didn’t they pass a federal law and start enforcing it?
The answer is that Congress knew the law would be struck down as unconstitutional faster than you can open a bottle of beer. It would’ve clearly violated the Constitution’s limits on federal power, and back in those days most judges had this wild notion that the Constitution actually means what it says.
(Warning: sidebar political rant …)
Then along came a bull@#$% theory promoted by “progressives” that the Constitution is a “living, breathing document” – which means judges can just interpret it pretty much any ol’ way they choose. A “living, breathing” Constitution is nearly worthless. Any part of it can be lived and breathed out of existence by some nanny-state judge, as we’ve seen countless times now.
A couple of you have commented previously that you support the idea of a “living, breathing” Constitution because you don’t believe today’s government should be restricted by words written on a piece of paper more than 200 years ago. Before you swoop in to repeat those comments now, I want you to answer a question:
Suppose as part of the “war on terror,” Congress made it a crime to publicly criticize the commander-in-chief or the military … you know, because the founders couldn’t have anticipated world-wide terror networks, ya see, so they couldn’t possibly have understood that someday an American citizen’s anti-war comments could show up the next day on YouTube or Al Jazeera and provide comfort and inspiration to people who want to kill American soldiers, so we have to re-interpret the Constitution to fit today’s circumstances.
Now … are you okay with that law? Do you buy the “living, breathing” Constitution theory in this example? Or would you still expect the First Amendment to protect your freedom of speech? If so, why? Why should the Constitution be interpreted literally when it places limits on government that you hold sacred, but become all fuzzy and living and breathing when it places limits on government that I hold sacred? You can’t have it both ways.
(End of sidebar political rant … sort of.)
Obviously, since I believe the legitimate purpose of government is to protect our freedom, I don’t believe mandating health habits is a proper function of government. I don’t believe governments should be telling us what to eat, where to eat, how much we should pay for what we eat, or how much salt can be included in the packaged foods we buy. I don’t believe governments have any business requiring restaurants to post calorie counts on menus or to serve low-fat or low-sugar foods.
And I certainly don’t believe governments have any business telling citizens that they can’t buy raw milk, as happened recently in Wisconsin. (That judge explained to the citizen that we have no right to consume the foods we prefer, because we only have the rights the government grants us … which means the judge is a @#$%ing nanny-state idiot who would benefit from having a copy of the Declaration of Independence forcibly inserted in his colon – raw and un-pasteurized, of course.)
On to question #2 – If government is going mandate health habits, does government have the knowledge and expertise to make the correct decisions?
Thanks, after the political rant, I needed a good laugh. Bloomberg is the genius who thinks government should force food manufacturers to reduce the salt content in their products, despite no evidence whatsoever that restricting salt would do diddly for our health. Meanwhile, here’s what the World Health Organization is proposing:
Among the items included in the declaration are having governments intervene with the advertising of foods deemed unhealthy to “Promote the implementation of the WHO (World Health Organization) set of recommendations on the marketing of foods and non-alcoholic beverages to children, including foods that are high in saturated fats, trans-fatty acids, free sugars, or salt,” according to the document.
See the problem here? You and I may agree that trans fats and sugar are bad for us, but some people still insist they’re harmless. I believe saturated fat is good for us and grains are bad for us. Other people believe it’s exactly the opposite. You can cite evidence either way if you’re clever about it. The difference is that I’m not interested in forcing my beliefs and my food choices on anyone else. The nanny-statists are very interested in doing exactly that — and they don’t have the expertise to know for sure their choices are the best choices.
Governments should back off and leave us alone. Our government has been telling us what to eat for 40 years now and subsidizing the foods it insists are good for us. Does anyone believe we’ve gotten healthier as a result?
Here are more “this is what we’re up against” items from the news sent to me by readers:
The Diabetic Diet
By the diabetic diet, I of course mean a diet that will help you become a diabetic … even though that’s not quite what the National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse had in mind when designing it.
In case you somehow overlooked it among the many other federal health agencies, the National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse (NCD) is a division of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), which is a division of National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Ya know, I think what would really improve the nation’s health (NH) would be to add a few more layers (FML) to the federal government’s health bureaucracy (FGHB). After all, they’ve done such a bang-up job (BUJ) reversing obesity and diabetes over the years.
Anyway, here’s how NCD (a division of NIDDK) is telling people to eat to manage their diabetes:
Healthful eating helps keep your blood glucose, also called blood sugar, in your target range. Physical activity and, if needed, diabetes medicines also help. The diabetes target range is the blood glucose level suggested by diabetes experts for good health. You can help prevent health problems by keeping your blood glucose levels on target.
So far, so good. But what exactly is the target glucose level suggested by experts?
Target Blood Glucose Levels for People with Diabetes Before meals: 70 to 130 1 to 2 hours after a meal: less than 180
Well, there you have it, folks: Diabetics should aim for post-meal glucose levels that are well into the “diabetic” range. I guess that “if needed, diabetes medicines also help” statement is more like a prediction than a suggestion. Of course, you pretty much have to set high blood sugar targets when your recommended diet looks like this:
Choose this many servings from these food groups to have 2,000 to 2,400 calories a day:
10 starches
4 vegetables
5 to 7 ounces meat and meat substitutes
2 milks
4 fruits
up to 5 fats
Ten starches and four fruits. Good luck keeping your blood sugar below 180 if you’re already battling diabetes or pre-diabetes. For the diabetics who are more visually oriented, the NCD (a division of NIDDK) provided this helpful graphic as well:
Well, I can see why they grouped fats and sweets in the same category. They have nearly opposite effects on your blood sugar, but the important thing is that they both have an S and a T in their names. Put a couple more letters in between those, and you can spell out what I think of the advice handed out by NCD (a division of NIDDK).
Heart UK’s Ultimate Diet Plan
Britain’s equivalent (I guess) of the American Heart Association refers to itself in press releases as Heart UK – UK’s leading cholesterol charity. I was of course pleased to see that description. There are millions of people around the world who can’t afford foods high in cholesterol, and I’m all in favor helping them out. I’ll happily donate 100 dozen eggs.
Unfortunately, it turns out the cholesterol charity is anti-cholesterol, and they’re promoting a diet to lower cholesterol levels. Here’s their plan to “revolutionize heart health in the UK”:
Step 1 – Motivational behaviour strategies to drive dietary success and reverse negative consumption patterns.
Here’s the behavior strategy you need to adopt: go to the pantry and throw out everything that includes sugar or white flour. Then walk to the fridge and find some meat and eggs. Cook the eggs and meat and eat them. Then you’ll feel motivated.
Step 2 – Reducing saturated fat without compromising on treats and taste. Swapping a chocolate éclair for a hot cross bun is not life changing but the 93% saturated fat drop makes the life-saving recommendation to drop our saturated fat intake so much more achievable.
So a chocolate éclair is the key to avoiding heart disease, is it? Next you’ll be telling me to eat soy.
Steps 3, 4, 5, 6 – A pick ‘n’ mix of four cholesterol-busting foods!
Soya foods e.g. soya milk and yogurt alternatives
Products with plant sterols/stanols e.g. Alpro soya plus milk alternative, cholesterol lowering spreads, cholesterol-lowering yogurts.
Nuts
Soluble fibre from oats, other whole grain foods and beans and pulses.
They should’ve listed “nuts” last -– as a polite commentary on everything above it. Still, one out of four ain’t a bad hit-to-miss ratio for the typical do-gooder health charity. (I’m assuming the nuts weren’t roasted in some horrible vegetable oil.) As for the soy, absolutely, go for it … because what the world needs now is more men with boobs –- they’ll be more understanding when their daughters start puberty.
I must say, though, I can’t help but wonder why Heart UK – the cholesterol charity is so high on soy milk.
The UCLP Ultimate Teaching Tool is available to all health professionals free of charge. The UCLP has been funded by an educational grant from Alpro soya UK.
Boy, it’s really generous of Alpro soya UK to provide health professions with free literature recommending Alpro soya UK products to their patients. But if they were really smart, they’d team up with whichever company finally manufactures the manssiere.
Selling a version of the drug to consumers without a prescription would allow Pfizer to retain some of the $11 billion in annual revenue that Lipitor has been generating.
However, a nonprescription version would not be available immediately after the patent on Lipitor expires because Pfizer would first have to convince the Food and Drug Administration that consumers could take the drug without a doctor’s supervision.
That’s a bit like worrying that heroin addicts may shoot up without a drug-dealer’s supervision.
An over-the-counter version of Lipitor would no doubt be welcomed by insurers because it would cost less.
I can see the advantage there. Ruining your muscles and your memory shouldn’t be expensive. You’ll need to save as much money as possible to pay for the walkers and the Alzheimer’s care.
In the past, the F.D.A. advisers have been concerned that over-the counter versions of statins could not be used safely, that some patients who did not need the drugs would take them.
I’d be worried about that too. It’s much better to have doctors prescribe cholesterol-lowering drugs to people who don’t need them.
Since high cholesterol is a symptomless condition, consumers would not know whether the drug was working without having their cholesterol checked periodically.
Don’t be silly … of course consumers will know if the Lipitor is working. They’ll wake up in the morning and say, “Holy crap, my muscles and joints are killing me! It must be the … the … Honey, what’s the name of that stuff I’ve been taking?”
5. Double cholesterol whammy. Dietary cholesterol can elevate your blood cholesterol levels, but saturated fat has an even worse effect. However, the two are often found in the same foods, including meat, butter and full-fat dairy. So by limiting your intake of foods rich in saturated fat, you’ll also help reduce your intake of cholesterol.
Even Ancel Keys, the Grand Poopah of Lipophobes, admitted that dietary cholesterol has no effect on the cholesterol level if your blood. As for saturated fat, yes, it will raise your cholesterol … specifically, your HDL and your large, fluffy LDL. Those are both beneficial.
9. Check for tropical oils. Lots of products are now “trans-fat free” but in some cases, these fats are being replaced with saturated fats, such as palm and coconut oils. You may have heard that palm and coconut oils do not negatively affect cholesterol levels, but the research isn’t conclusive and palm kernel oil contains 80 percent saturated fat. Instead, look for products that use polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, which help lower LDL cholesterol.
Hey, now there’s a technique all the bad scientists can applaud: if a study doesn’t show what you want it to show, simply label the results as “inconclusive.” I’ve got news for you: if palm kernel oil and coconut oil did raise cholesterol, the results of those studies would be conclusive.
When a Victoria’s Secret runway model confesses her beauty secret, women will undoubtedly listen. Coconut oil is the new buzz in the beauty world, and now it’s been revealed that supermodel Miranda Kerr swears by it. She says that her shiny hair, perfect skin, and svelte body are the results of healthy living and daily use of this good oil.
Miranda Kerr, who famously bounced back to her pre-baby body just weeks after giving birth to her first child with actor Orlando Bloom, confesses in Daily Mail that her beauty secret is coconut oil. The supermodel says she dilutes the oil either in green tea or drizzles it over salads to keep her glowing. “I’ve been drinking it since I was 14 and it’s the one thing I can’t live without,” she tells Daily Mail.
For everyday beauty, coconut oil can be used as an all-over moisturizer, hair conditioner, and as a gentle eye make-up remover.
We’ll just pause here for a moment so the men in the audience can enjoy the idea of a Victoria’s Secret model using coconut oil as an all-over moisturizer.
US experts yesterday warned against consuming large amounts of coconut oil after Australian supermodel Miranda Kerr said the high-fat oil was the key to her clear skin, shiny hair and trim figure.
The World Health Organization has also warned the oil could contribute to an increased risk of coronary heart disease if taken to excess.
Keith Ayoob, director of the nutrition clinic at the Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said the oil will not give you the body of a supermodel.
It won’t? Rats! I’ve been sitting here spreading coconut oil all over myself hoping to look good in a bikini next summer.
“I can’t say I’d want people consuming lots of coconut oil. You should use it sparingly,” Ayoob said. “You want to cut back on saturated fats in your diet. I don’t know what benefit it would have for weight management because it has just as many calories as any other fat.”
Well, allow me to explain to you, Ayoob the Boob: the type of fat in coconut oil –- medium-chain triglycerides – is actually difficult to store in your adipose tissue, so you tend to burn it off instead. It’s also good for your mood and helps curb your appetite.
Kerr’s dose of four tablespoons a day adds up to about 460 calories, which Ayoob said was too much saturated fat for most people. “She’s getting two and a half times the amount of saturated fat I would recommend for a person consuming 2,000 calories per day,” he said.
Ah, well, if you don’t recommend saturated fat, that proves it’s bad for us. Sorry I didn’t recognize the logic in that sooner. I must’ve been distracted by the Ayoobs.
Part of the problem with convincing people to cut back on carbohydrates and eat more natural fats is what I call everyone knows knowledge. As in everyone knows whole grains are good for you. Everyone knows saturated fat and cholesterol will clog your arteries and kill you. Just try convincing someone who isn’t a critical thinker that what everyone knows can be flat-out wrong.
Everyone knows knowledge permeates the culture. I enjoy watching old reruns of Seinfeld, and while they still crack me up, they include a lot of everyone knows ideas about health and nutrition. I recently watched the episode in which Jerry is trying to get healthier by eating veggie sandwiches and salads. Elaine’s cousin cooks dinner for him and asks how he likes his pork chops, to which Jerry replies, “I like mine with an angioplasty.” In another episode, Jerry and his friends gain weight eating frozen yogurt that was advertised as fat-free, but turned out to contain fat. (As if sugary fat-free foods won’t do the trick.) And of course, in countless episodes, Jerry chows down on breakfast cereals. Nothing wrong with those, right? Everyone knows cereal is health food.
In the hilarious film My Cousin Vinny, a cook in a small-town diner plops lard onto a grill to begin fixing breakfast, prompting Vinny to remark something along the lines of “Are you by any chance aware of the rather large cholesterol problem in this country?” And in the very witty film Thank You For Smoking, the scheming tobacco lobbyist defends himself against a crusading senator by pointing out the senator’s state is known primarily for producing “artery-clogging” cheese.
I’m not knocking the writers of these great films and TV shows, you understand. They were simply relying on everyone knows knowledge. I did the same while writing for a small health magazine 20-some years ago …Should you switch to a low-fat diet? Of course! Everyone knows fat is bad for you.
I’m an optimist, so I may be engaging in wishful thinking here, but it seems to me that what everyone knows about diet and health is changing — slowly, perhaps, but changing. When I began my research for Fat Head, I discovered some well-researched articles claiming that the anti-fat hysteria sparked by the McGovern committee was misguided, but those articles appeared mostly on blogs and alternative-medicine sites. (The Gary Taubes article What If It’s All Been A Big Fat Lie? was a notable exception.)
Lately, I’ve been noticing more articles in the mainstream media knocking the standard-issue advice. Back in December, the Los Angeles Times ran an article titled A Reversal on Carbs with the sub-headline Fat was once the devil. Now more nutritionists are pointing accusingly at sugar and refined grains. Here are a few quotes:
Most people can count calories. Many have a clue about where fat lurks in their diets. However, fewer give carbohydrates much thought, or know why they should.
But a growing number of top nutritional scientists blame excessive carbohydrates — not fat — for America’s ills. They say cutting carbohydrates is the key to reversing obesity, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and hypertension.
“Fat is not the problem,” says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. “If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases.”
Outstanding. I can say it, you can say it, Jimmy Moore can say it, Dr. Eades can say it, a hundred other bloggers can say it, and the average mainstream journalist either won’t know or won’t care. But when Dr. Willett at Harvard says it, mainstream journalists pay attention. “Fat is not the problem” ends up being printed in the Los Angeles Times. Now it stands a chance of becoming everyone knows knowledge, at least among newspaper readers.
Over the weekend, readers sent me links to other articles that appeared in the popular press. An article in Consumer Reports that rated diets gave the top pick to the Jenny Craig plan because of a high level of adherence – that’s the bad news. The good news is what the article said about the Atkins diet:
The 2010 edition of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which we’ve used as the basis for the diets’ nutrition Ratings (available to subscribers), still frowns on eating 10 percent or more of calories from saturated fat from meat and dairy products and more than 35 percent from fats overall. So the Atkins diet, which is 64 percent fat calories overall and 18 percent saturated fat, ends up with only a Fair nutrition score.
But there’s more to the story. Evidence is accumulating that refined carbohydrates promote weight gain and type 2 diabetes through their effects on blood sugar and insulin. “If you have insulin resistance, your insulin may go up to 10 or 20 times normal in order to control your blood sugar after you eat sugar or carbs,” says Eric C. Westman, M.D., an associate professor of medicine at Duke University who co-wrote the newest version of the Atkins diet. “But the insulin also tells your body to make and store fat. When you restrict carbs, your insulin goes down and you can burn your body fat, so you eat fewer calories and aren’t as hungry.”
Isn’t it dangerous to eat so much fat? That’s still a subject of vigorous scientific debate, but it’s clear that fat is not the all-round villain we’ve been taught it is. Several epidemiology studies have found that saturated fat doesn’t seem to increase people’s risk of cardiovascular disease or stroke.
Moreover, clinical studies have found that an Atkins or Atkins-like diet not only doesn’t increase heart-disease risk factors but also actually reduces them as much as or more than low-fat, higher-carb diets that produce equivalent weight loss.
So there’s an interesting admission for you: Consumer Reports uses the USDA Guidelines as the basis for its nutrition rankings, then explains that actual research doesn’t support those guidlines. Perhaps in the future, Consumer Reports can do one of its famous reliability tests on the USDA Dietary Guidelines. (“A whopping 92% of our readers report these guidelines failed within the first year.”) But this article is a good start.
Another reader informed me over the weekend that the Dallas Morning News ran an opinion piece that shredded the government’s dietary advice. I couldn’t access that article without a subscription, but found that the same article (I think) was also published in City Journal magazine:
America’s public-health officials have long been eager to issue nutrition advice ungrounded in science, and nowhere has this practice been more troubling than in the federal government’s dietary guidelines, first issued by a congressional committee in 1977 and updated every five years since 1980 by the United States Department of Agriculture.
Controversial from the outset for sweeping aside conflicting research, the guidelines have come under increasing attack for being ineffective or even harmful, possibly contributing to a national obesity problem. Unabashed, public-health advocates have pushed ahead with contested new recommendations, leading some of our foremost medical experts to ask whether government should get out of the business of telling Americans what to eat—or, at the very least, adhere to higher standards of evidence.
… The McGovern committee, in coming up with its diet plan, had to choose among very different nutritional regimes that scientists and doctors were studying as potentially beneficial to those at risk for heart disease. Settling on the unproven theory that cholesterol was behind heart disease, the committee issued its guidelines in 1977, urging Americans to reduce the fat that they consumed from 40 percent to 30 percent of their daily calories, principally by eating less meat and fewer dairy products.
… The latest nutritional thinking has indeed zeroed in on carbohydrates as a likely cause of heart disease. Easily digestible carbs, in particular—starches like potatoes, white rice, and bread from processed flour, as well as refined sugar—make it hard to burn fat and also increase inflammations that can cause heart attacks, several studies have concluded. A 2007 Dutch study of 15,000 women found that those who ate foods with the highest “glycemic load,” a measure of portion sizes and of how easily digestible a food is, had the greatest risk of heart disease.
Looking at such evidence, several top medical scientists have concluded that the government’s carb-heavy guidelines may actually have harmed public health …“In general,” the doctors wrote, “weak evidentiary support has been accepted as adequate justification for [the U.S. dietary] guidelines. This low standard of evidence is based on several misconceptions, most importantly the belief that such guidelines could not cause harm.” But, they concluded, “it now seems that the U.S. dietary guidelines recommending fat restriction might have worsened rather than helped the obesity epidemic and, by so doing, possibly laid the groundwork for a future increase in CVD,” cardiovascular disease.
I certainly don’t expect the nutrition geniuses at the USDA to change their guidelines, no matter how many articles like these appear in the mainstream press. But I don’t think it’s overly optimistic to believe we’re approaching the time when everyone knows those guidelines are a load of bologna.
Old Macdonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O And on his farm he had some carrots, E-I-E-I-O With a … with a …
Well, there’s the problem: we don’t know what noise carrots make. If we’re going to turn fat kids into skinny kids by having them sing about carrots instead of pigs, we need to come up with a fun sound for carrots. I’m open to suggestions on that one.
On the other hand, I’d say it’s pretty unlikely changing the lyrics to “Old Macdonald” is going to do diddly about childhood obesity, but apparently a school district in Philadelphia is giving it a shot, along with some other ridiculous initiatives:
The gym teacher, Beverly Griffin, teaches healthy eating using a toy model of the federal food pyramid and rewritten children’s songs. “And on his farm he had some carrots,” Tatyana, a first grader, belted out one recent morning, skipping around the gym with her classmates.
Ah, so that’s why the Food Pyramid has been such a colossal failure: we forgot to produce toy models of it for the kids to play with. A good toy trumps the biological need for quality protein and natural fats every time.
“Mrs. Griffin, I’m hungry!”
“You already had some whole-wheat toast with margarine and cup of skim milk, dear.”
“I know. But I’m really, really hungry!”
“Well, uh … here, play with these plastic loaves of bread. You’ll feel better. And when you’re done, remember they belong on the base of the food pyramid.”
The Philly school is, of course, engaging in all this nonsense to bring itself into alignment with the federal government’s nonsense:
With 20 percent of the nation’s children obese, the United States Department of Agriculture has proposed new standards for federally subsidized school meals that call for more balanced meals and, for the first time, a limit on calories. The current standard specifies only a minimum calorie count, which some schools meet by adding sweet foods.
The Agriculture Department wants to change the content of federally subsidized school meals — 33 million lunches and 9 million breakfasts a day — by the fall of 2012. Beyond the calorie cap, the new standards would emphasize whole grains, vegetables and fruits and set tighter limits on sodium and fats.
Fernando Gallard, a spokesman for the Philadelphia School District, said schools were meeting the new federal meal proposals by using more dark green and orange vegetables, as well as fruits, whole grains and legumes.
Great. Awesome. Fabulous. So we’re going to give kids calorie-restricted meals full of fruits and grains, but low in fat. I tried that type of diet back when I didn’t know any better, and all it did was make me hungrier. An email I received today from a recent Fat Head viewer sums it up pretty well:
I had always wondered why eating a big bowl of Cheerios for breakfast at 7:30 left me starving by 10 am, while I could get by until 10:30 on nothing but a mug of tea. Oatmeal has me jonesing for lunch by 11, while a cheese omelet sees me through dinner. This morning I set aside my usual two slices of wheat toast with jam and ate two hardboiled eggs instead. I feel rather awesome, not hungry at all. And ALERT!
Well, heck, we don’t want schoolkids feeling satisfied and alert. We want them so light-headed and hungry, they’ll happily run around singing songs about carrots. Then when their blood sugar crashes because they didn’t eat enough fat to provide real fuel for their bodies, they’ll run out and grab the first sugary snacks they can find.
But no worries. The school and some parents who don’t know any better are attempting to fix that problem with a new program called Hassling Local Businesses:
Tatyana Gray bolted from her house and headed toward her elementary school. But when she reached the corner store where she usually gets her morning snack of chips or a sweet drink, she encountered a protective phalanx of parents with bright-colored safety vests and walkie-talkies.
“Candy!” said one of the parents, McKinley Harris, peering into a small bag one child carried out of the store. “That’s not food.”
The parents standing guard outside the Oxford Food Shop are foot soldiers in a national battle over the diets of children that has taken on new fervor.
Good grief. Nothing like recruiting parents to act as Food Fascists in that national battle over the diets of children. The vest-and-walkie-talkie brigade was apparently the brainchild of the school principal, who has decided convenience stores are part of the problem:
To match the efforts inside the school, one of Ms. Brown’s first acts as principal last August was to ask owners of nearby corner stores to stop selling to students in the morning.
Gladys Tejada, who owns the Oxford shop, said, “It’s a good thing, what they’re trying to do, but I can’t control who comes in.” Nor can she control what they buy. “They like it sweet,” she said. “They like it cheap.”
Bingo. Ms. Tejada is running a store, not a diet center. Unless she’s giving away snacks for free, the kids are spending money given to them by their parents. It’s not Ms. Tejada’s job to be a substitute mommy and control what these kids eat. That’s a job for their own parents.
If schools are prohibited from serving whole milk but allowed to serve chocolate skim milk, juice boxes, and peaches in syrup, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that we’re raising a generation of sugar addicts. Convenience stores -– like all stores –- can only sell what people are willing to buy, as I pointed out in a recent post. For some reason, do-gooders can’t seem to grasp this basic principle of economics … which explains programs like this:
Since 2001, a Philadelphia organization called Food Trust has worked to get corner stores to offer healthier foods, including fresh fruit, vegetables and water, as well as products with reduced sugar, salt and fat. But just 507 of the city’s estimated 2,500 corner stores have signed on.
So only about 20% of the stores signed on, hmm? I wonder why the other 80% aren’t jumping in there and doing their part to battle childhood obesity by offering more fruits and vegetables?
Jetro Cash and Carry, which supplies many corner stores, joined the effort. But Jack Sagen, a Jetro sales and marketing director, said he recently lost $500 buying several dozen cases of 15-cent bags of sliced apples that perished before they could catch on with the stores.
Well, obviously the 15-cent price tag was a major deterrent for all those kids clamoring for apples. Thank goodness the federal government is spending $400 million to make fruits and vegetables cheaper and more available in “under-served” urban areas.
But after several weeks of parent intervention, Ms. Brown said more children were skipping the corner stores, showing progress against the pull of sweet snacks.
I would of course love to see kids stop eating so many sweet snacks. But I’ll bet you dollars to donuts (and you can keep the donuts) those kids are just finding the foods that feed their sugar addiction somewhere else.
“It does what they need it to do for that moment,” she said of the snacks. “It hits them in the stomach. They feel full. It’s cheap and fast.”
Here’s a crazy idea: maybe those USDA-approved school breakfasts and lunches should include more protein and animal fats. Then when the kids head home from school, they’ll already feel full.
An organization called NuVal has come up with a simplified system for telling us which foods we should eat. Instead of continuing to strain our brains by counting grams of fat, carbohydrates, sugar, fiber, and protein, we can now just read the NuVal score, which ranges from 1 to 100. Check it out:
After watching the video, I couldn’t quite figure how the NuVal people assign scores to foods, so I went to their web site for the answer.
The NuVal(tm) Nutritional Scoring System is powered by the Overall Nutritional Quality Index (ONQI(tm)), a patent-pending algorithm for measuring the nutritional quality of foods and beverages based on the influence they have on overall dietary goals.
That’s a great start. I’ve always believed choosing quality foods requires at least one algorithm and a patent or two. As you probably know, archeologists have found several algorithms etched into the walls alongside Paleolithic cave paintings. There’s even a theory that Neanderthals died out because their primitive tools were incapable of producing the symbol for division.
Developed by a team of leading nutrition, public health, and medical experts, the ONQI algorithm uses the Institute of Medicine’s Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs – quantitative reference values for recommended intakes of nutrients) and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (advice from the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture about how good dietary habits can promote health and reduce risk for major chronic diseases) to quantify the presence of more than 30 nutrients – including vitamins, minerals, fiber, and antioxidants; sugar, salt, trans fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol.
So they’re using the USDA’s dietary guidelines to create the algorithm. That would explain some of the foods that receive a high NuVal score:
Chicken Breast (boneless) – 39
Pork Tenderloin – 35
Turkey Breast – 31
Ground Sirloin (Beef 90/10) – 30
Ham – 27
Coconuts (husked) – 24
But I figured there must be more to a patent-pending algorithm than USDA recommendations, so I called the NuVal people and asked for an interview. One of them agreed to speak to me on the condition that I wouldn’t reveal his name.
Fat Head: Back in the 1990s, the FDA mandated a standardized food label that promotes a high-carb, low-fat diet, and since then we’ve gotten fatter. Why did you decide American consumers need a simplified version of the same advice?
NuVal: The FDA and USDA did a pretty good job of helping millions of people to become obese and diabetic, and we applaud their efforts. But if you look at the statistics from recent years, rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes are starting to level off somewhat. We concluded that the government’s plan to fatten up the population has run into an unforeseen barrier.
Fat Head: And what’s that?
NuVal: Mathematical illiteracy. As often happens with the federal government, one branch didn’t know what the other was up to. So while the FDA and USDA were working to make people fatter by offering detailed nutrition advice, the Department of Education was busy making sure millions of Americans can’t do math.
Fat Head: I’m not sure I see how that –
NuVal: Let me give you an example. We’ve been telling people to get at least 60 percent of their calories from carbohydrates, because we know that will produce runaway blood sugar for a whole lot of them, right?
Fat Head: Right.
NuVal: Okay, so you’re looking at a food label, and it says 60 carbohydrates, 30 grams of fat, and 10 grams of protein. I bet you think that means 60 percent of the calories come from carbohydrates.
Fat Head: No, because fat has more than twice as many calories per gram than carbohydrates. So it’s more like 43 percent carbohydrates.
NuVal: How did you … ? Never mind. The point is, a lot of people aren’t eating enough carbohydrates to jack up their blood sugar because they’re lousy at math. Plus that whole “gram” thing doesn’t make sense to anyone except the drug addicts, and they eat plenty of carbohydrates already. We needed something simple.
Fat Head: I see. So that’s why it’s called “A Food System for Dummies” on your web site.
NuVal: Exactly. Now people can just choose foods that rank high on the NuVal scale and keep their blood sugar jacked up all the time, without all that math.
Fat Head: But I noticed you also give sugary foods a low score and green vegetables a high score. That would seem to undermine your goal of turning more people into diabetics.
NuVal: True, but we also discourage people from eating anything with adequate amounts of animal protein or fat, so we know they’ll be hungry and fill up on carbohydrates eventually. Besides, the system has to look credible when it comes to vegetables or no one will use it.
Fat Head: Let’s talk about that scoring system a bit. In your algorithm, you give foods a high score for certain nutrients, but then you divide by what you consider bad nutrients: trans fat, sugar, sodium, saturated fat and cholesterol.
NuVal: It’s complicated, but yes, that’s basically it.
Fat Head: That’s where I’m getting confused. Trans fat and saturated fat have different chemical structures and different effects in the body. Trans fats lower HDL, while saturated fat raises it. Trans fats weaken cells, while saturated fats make them stronger. Recent studies show zero association between saturated fat and heart disease. So how did saturated fat become what you call a denominator?
NuVal: We consider them biochemically equivalent because our algorithm showed that if you take all the letters that are common to both trans fat and saturated fat, you can create a long list of the same words.
Fat Head: But that doesn’t seem like a good way to–
NuVal: Fat Rats, Fast Rat, Fat Arts, Fat Star, Star Aft, and my favorite, Sat Fart.
Fat Head: I see. So biochemically, you’d consider Tom Naughton the equivalent of a Math Nut Goon.
NuVal: Yes. Or a Homo Gnat Nut.
Fat Head: I also don’t see why cholesterol and sodium are denominators. Your site says the inputs for the algorithm are based on broad scientific research. Can you actually point to any research that proves cholesterol and sodium are bad for us?
NuVal: We conducted an exhaustive review of the literature and found that in nearly every case, the federal government said cholesterol and sodium are bad.
Fat Head: Your algorithm is also supposed to take the glycemic index into account, according to your web site. I was pleased to see white bread receive a low score, for example. And yet Silk Chocolate Soy Milk received a score of 68, despite containing nearly as much sugar per cup as Coca-Cola. What’s that about?
NuVal: Boobs.
Fat Head: Excuse me?!
NuVal: We love boobs. The isoflavones in soy are chemically similar to estrogen, so if we can get kids drinking a lot more soy milk, we won’t have to wait until they’re teenagers to see some boobs.
Fat Head: But …you realize that can happen to the boys too, right?
NuVal: I consider myself very open-minded.
Fat Head: Well, as someone who developed boobs as a boy, I don’t think that’s healthy, physically or mentally, unless you enjoy having other boys call you names.
NuVal: Like “Homo Gnat Nut”?
Fat Head: No, but you’re in the ballpark. The point is, why the heck would you give anything made out of soy a high score? How is soy milk a healthier option than a slice of ham or a chicken breast?
NuVal: Don’t say breast. It makes me think of b-
Fat Head: Thank you for your time.
So there you have it: A simple system to help people choose a low-fat, high-carb diet based on processed grains and soy, while limiting perfectly natural proteins and fats. Obesity, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and premature puberty made easy.
The only bright spot is that NuVal is a commercial enterprise, so if they fail, they’ll probably go away. If they were a government health agency, failure would be an excuse to double their budget.
I probably shouldn’t be laughing about this, but I can’t help myself. When a group of Weight Watchers members in Sweden got together recently for their regular weigh-in, the floor collapsed. As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up. Here are some quotes from the online news story:
“We suddenly heard a huge thud; we almost thought it was an earthquake and everything flew up in the air,” one of about 20 group members said to the Smalandsposten newspaper. “The floor collapsed in one corner of the room and along the walls.”
After the initial collapse on Wednesday evening, the floor started to cave in other parts of the room, and the stench of sewage crept into the clinic, which is in Vaxjo, a city in south central Sweden. The group is looking for an alternate location for future meetings, Weight Watchers consultant Therese Levin told the Swedish paper.
Since they were able to break the floor badly enough to stir up some sewage, I’m guessing these people were 1) brand-new members of Weight Watchers or 2) long-time members of Weight Watchers.
I’ve known a handful of people who joined Weight Watchers at least once — all women, by the way. They all lost some weight. And they all gained it back, usually with a few extra pounds as a going-away present.
Given what Weight Watchers believes constitutes a good diet, I’m not surprised. Their entire program is based on the belief that the federal government’s nutrition guidelines are actually based on something resembling science. So Weight Watchers preaches the same guidelines: fat is bad, a bit of protein is okay, and carbohydrates are wonderful.
I never joined Weight Watchers, but before I knew better, I did try living on their low-fat Smart Ones meals (along with Lean Cuisines and other diet meals I could nuke.) By the end of the day, I’d be famished. Eventually I’d give up and then, like most dieters, blame myself for not having any discipline. Now I understand the problem wasn’t a lack of discipline; it was a lack of good nutrition.
To illustrate the problem, I went to the Weight Watchers site and put together a sample diet for one day. Since I’m a male, I allowed myself about 1700 calories. Figuring three meals and couple of side dishes, I chose a breakfast sandwich, angel hair pasta with marinara, chicken enchiladas, chicken on grilled flatbread, mac and cheese, and rice and beans. That’s a pretty fair sample of the kind of meals I chose back in the day. Here’s how they add up:
As a percent of total calories, it works out to 20% fat, 18% protein, and 62% carbohydrates — just what the FDA prescribes. It’s also a prescription for hunger.
If you’re a regular reader or have seen Fat Head, you already know that fat is the most satiating macronutrient … in addition to being cricual for mood, hormone formation, vitamin absorption, etc. I won’t go into the many wonders of fat here, except to say that this diet contains far too little of it. That’s one reason I was so hungry.
The diet is also too low in protein. The FDA would approve, but not the people who actually know what they’re talking about, like Drs. Mike and Mary Dan Eades. According to their calculations, I need more like 120 grams of protein per day. Eating too little protein produces exactly the kind of physical effects dieters don’t want.
For one, it’ll make you hungry — never mind the calories. Research shows that primates eat until they satisfy their protein requirements. If the food is low in protein, they’ll eat more of it. Here are some quotes from an article on the subject:
Nutritional ecologist Professor David Raubenheimer’s just-published collaborative study with international colleagues found the Bolivian rainforest spider monkey regulates protein intake by eating greater quantities of low protein/high carbohydrate foods when protein-rich foods are not available.
“This is interesting because our experiments show that humans do the same,” says Professor Raubenheimer from the University’s Institute of Natural Sciences at Albany. The consequence is the current obesity epidemic.
Professor Raubenheimer has been involved in a range of similar studies on other primates, as well as human subjects in Australia, the Philippines and Jamaica, to observe how the protein content of their diets influences energy intake.
The findings, published in the latest issue of the journal Behavioural Ecology, reinforce the theory that humans and other primates are physiologically predisposed to maintain a constant level of protein in their diets. But when the range of foods available to them is low in protein (yet high in fats and carbohydrates) they are compelled to eat greater quantities in order to maintain correct protein levels.
Trust me, I definitely felt compelled to eat greater quantities. I just didn’t allow myself to, at least until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
The other problem with eating too little protein is muscle loss. I’ve heard some researchers claim people lose the same amount of weight on almost any diet if the calories are controlled — that hasn’t been my experience, but let’s suppose it’s true. So what? The point of dieting isn’t really to lose weight, it’s to lose fat. Digesting your own muscles is a lousy idea. In Protein Power, Drs. Eades & Eades wrote:
On typical low-calorie, high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets, protein intake is often marginal, and as a result as much as 50 percent of weight loss can be muscle weight. Each pound of active muscle mass lost reduces your rate of metabolism.
Now, a pound of muscle loss isn’t going to dramatically affect your metabolism, but I don’t think most people – especially men — go on a diet hoping to shed a few pounds off their biceps and pecs. Muscle makes a body look good, whether the body is male or female.
The biggest problem with the diet is, of course, the 62% carbohydrates. If you’re insulin resistant — and most fat people these days are — all those carbs are going to drive up your insulin and tell your body to store a disproportionate share of the 1673 calories as fat. Then you’ll starve at the cellular level and really feel hungry. Keep it up, and you’ll probably make your insulin resistance worse.
And as I learned from an excellent article by Dr. Doug McGuff, insulin resistance can also shrink your muscles. Dr. McGuff wondered why so many fat people have weak muscles — they are, after all, hauling a lot of weight around. That ought to make them stronger, but usually doesn’t. Here’s an edited version of what he figured out (the full article is worth the read):
The key to the paradox of the obese-yet weak client was insulin sensitivity. The modern Western diet is very high in refined carbohydrates when compared to the diet in our evolutionary past. In the face of very high carbohydrate intake, one’s glycogen stores will become completely full. Once the glycogen stores are completely full, glucose will begin to stack up in the blood stream. The evolutionary-based response is to increase insulin to drive more glycogen storage. However, pushing more glucose into a cell whose glycogen stores are full can be very damaging.
In the chronically overfed state, the body protects itself by decreasing the sensitivity of insulin receptors on the muscle cells and preserving (actually increasing) insulin sensitivity on the fat cells. By this mechanism blood sugar can be held in check without making the interior of the cells a syrupy mess, and energy is stored for future starvation (which never comes). The problem is, insulin not only controls glucose homeostasis, it is a major hormone for nutrient storage and all of the anabolic processes of the body. In the state we describe above, a vicious form of nutrient partitioning begins to occur. Nutrients used for growth and differentiation are shunted away from the muscle and the liver and are diverted to body fat. The muscles become smaller and weaker and the liver becomes infiltrated with fat as it desperately tries to produce VLDL.
Not a pretty picture, is it? I know, because by the time I was 14, I was a fat kid with skinny muscles. I finally started reshaping my body a bit when my older brother bought some barbells and more or less insisted we work out together. Our high-school health teacher also us to cut back on sugar, potatoes and bread if we wanted to lose weight, so I did. Then the low-fat diet craze hit, and I got stupid all over again.
Now I’m at least smart enough to know that Smart Ones aren’t going to help most people lose weight and keep it off, and neither will Weight Watchers. They claim a success rate of nearly 50%, based on a study they funded. But it’s interesting how they came up with that figure.
First off, the study only included people who were already lifetime members. To become a lifetime member, you have to reach your goal weight and stay there for six weeks. That means all the people who yelled “I’m starving!” and quit after a month or so were excluded … as were all the people who stuck it out but didn’t reach their goal weight.
After five years, most of the lifetime members included in the study had regained at least half of what they lost — but Weight Watchers defined “success” as weighing 5% less than when they first joined. So if you started at 200 pounds, reached your goal weight of 170, and went back up to 190, you were counted as successful. Wow. Sounds like “budget-cutting” in Washington.
A blogger analyzed the study, crunched his own numbers based on Weight Watchers’ enrollment figures, and calculated something closer to 6% of all members ever reaching their goal weight and staying there for six weeks … and when he crunched them again, counting only people who stayed at their goal weight for five years, he calculated a success rate of about two in a thousand.
I’d say the best thing Weight Watchers could do is reinforce their floors.
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Developed by a team of leading nutrition, public health, and medical experts, the ONQI algorithm uses the Institute of Medicine’s Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs – quantitative reference values for recommended intakes of nutrients) and the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (advice from the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture about how good dietary habits can promote health and reduce risk for major chronic diseases) to quantify the presence of more than 30 nutrients – including vitamins, minerals, fiber, and antioxidants; sugar, salt, trans fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol.
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