I also want us all to wish him a happy birthday. He turns 55 today, which means he qualifies for senior-citizen discounts at Denny’s and many other fine restaurants.

Happy Birthday, Bro. Now that you’ve got the diet thing figured out, I expect you to enjoy about 40-45 more of them.

Tom should be home or almost home and resting up from the Low Carb Cruise. Looking forward to his report, but he tipped me off that there were some problems with the audio of his roast of the featured speakers. He was huddling up with Jimmy Moore, who also recorded some of it, to see if he can get a good cut for us landlubbers. Keep your fingers crossed.

I wanted to wrap up my run through the weeds with some thoughts on how these economic principles I’ve outlined impact our health and the foods we eat, and what you can do about it.

First let’s look at the biggest common fallacy of both Big Government economics and food policy. It’s what FA Hayek called “The Fatal Conceit.” That’s the assumption that in order to manage an economy (or food policy) full of imperfect human beings, who may or may not have any idea of what they’re doing; said human beings’ best bet is to cede control of all of those individual decisions over to a small group of elected or appointed imperfect human beings; who are educated and credentialed, but in fact may or may not have any idea of what they’re doing.

Along with this hubris comes the implicit assumption that once dipped in the cleansing baptismal font of “public service,” these superior beings will acquire instant and complete immunity from such things as greed, conflict of interest, failure of imagination, peer pressure, careerism, etc., etc. All traits not of, as commonly ascribed, “the market,” or “the one percent,” or “Darwinian capitalism,” but of human beings.

The economy is no more a collection of mathematically definable variables and decisions than a pasture is a collection of nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium, along with some dirt and a few bugs. They are both “organic,” with literally billions of interactions occurring at any moment. Any single change or new input sets off an exponential number of adjustments, adaptations, changes. The larger and less natural the change, the more unpredictable and unhealthy those changes are likely to be, because you have just introduced artificial change into a system that was balanced and self-correcting.

Even given this Fatal Conceit, we could still at least assume people mean well, but you don’t have to look far to conclude that some (much?) of what our authorities does seems downright venal. Swat teams invading Amish stores to destroy raw milk. Schools traumatizing youngsters by confiscating their peanut butter sandwiches and making them eat chicken nuggets. The USDA increasing its buy of Pink Slime once fast food outlets dropped it. Monsanto getting cover to sue farmers whose corn fields get compromised with its GMO crops. Could this be just a few mistakes, or is this the nature of government as is grows?

Another of Hayek’s observations was covered in a whole chapter of “The Road to Serfdom” titled “Why the Worst Get on Top.” Always.

Understand that, no matter what the original intention, a law or regulatory function is a government enforceable edict to compel or prohibit transactions, or to direct resources from one group to another. Although this type of power is always sold as the solution to some perceived problem, injustice, or threat, at base it’s a tool that overrides what would happen in a marketplace of individuals making free-will decisions.

Who can maximize the use of this new power? Perhaps some well-meaning people first proposed it to address some perceived problem or injustice the market wasn’t addressing quickly or visibly enough. But they won’t take “immoral” advantage beyond addressing their original grievance. Perhaps clean food, or healthy meals for kids. But someone with less noble intentions will recognize real value here. This is the power to direct money and resources towards yourself; to inhibit competition; to force transactions on unwilling consumers. Again, who will work hardest to acquire this kind of power? Who will lobby harder? Who will fund “research?” Who will bribe? Who will extend “corporate support?” The well-meaning reformer? Or Big Business, Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Government, Big Oil?

So what?

So this — you cannot have a simple answer in a complex system. So if you find yourself saying “the government ought to…” or “there ought to be a law that…,” first ask yourself if you’re perhaps feeling a bit conceited.

If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you know that as much as us Fat Heads despise the government pushing the Low Fat, High Carb, Eat Less, Exercise More paradigm, most of us also (Tom has stated this emphatically) don’t consider the solution as being for the same government to instead push High Fat, Low Carb. The solution is to let people pursue their own personal answers, then adapt to their own results.

Also, when you look at the universe of Big Government — the USDA and Energy and the FDA and HHS and Education and on and on, please consider that you are dealing with an organism that is incapable of not being owned by the sources of the problems they supposedly exist to mitigate or protect us from. It has nothing to do with which party is in or who’s president or which experts are running what department. It has to do with real economics, reflected in the title of Ludwig von Mises seminal book of the Austrian School of Economics — “Human Action.”

So, if someone is billed as an expert, assume they’re lying. Try to take their argument apart, a la “Science for Smart People,” then decide if it holds up.

Let me come back to one of the points of my original post. The extent to which the government has inserted itself into the food markets and nutritional debate means that it’s hard to find good information. The price of those strawberries at the megamart don’t convey how or how much their journey from South America was taxpayer subsidized. So instead of them saying “maybe you should just eat what’s in season locally” or “if you want us that badly, okay, but that’s why we cost twice as much,” they’re saying “growing food with less nutritional value using massive amounts nonrenewable resource inputs, and then using other resources to ship them half way around the globe — GREAT IDEA! I mean, how could I lie to you — just look at my price.”

So, we know the “price mechanism” — which is the best, most efficient way to convey the sum of the relative values of all inputs in a free market — is hopelessly compromised.

But if you don’t know the real value of your food, you don’t know much of real value. I suggested a little bit of basic market research in Part II. It’s Spring here, and if you’ve got a local food outlet (ours starts this week!), get out there. See what real food costs when you’re paying real money. I’m not saying to buy all of your meat or veggies at the farmer’s market if your budget doesn’t justify it. I am suggesting that by patronizing the folks who are working the dirt, even for a few tomatoes, or a bundle of herbs, or a pound of grass fed beef, you’ll gain valuable awareness.

I think it’s likely that we’ll be going the way of Greece sooner rather than later. Whether through honest downsizing, controlled crash landing, or some degree of collapse, a lot of those subsidies could get tossed. It would be good to be aware of what your food is going to cost when those lyin’ strawberries have to fess up. It would be even better to have a good relationship with some of those local folks who use mostly sweat and sunshine to grow food, because they could become very popular. I just got a half-share this year of a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), which keeps costs competitive with the megamart.

Okay, you’ve humored me long enough. I’ll wrap it up.

Ultimately, you’re not going to have a realistic understanding of the power, capabilities, and limitations of government (and human beings); how that will affect your food, your career, your family — without a grasp of some fundamental economic concepts. Like your friendly neighborhood establishment nutritionist, good intentions are completely overrated as a virtue when ignorance is causing real damage. And like with all experts, none of them can care more about your money, your kids, or your health as much as you can.

Hope I’ve given you food for thought about our food. See you in the comments.

Cheers!

The Older Brother

One of the most gratifying parts of getting to sit in the Big Chair while Tom’s out spreading the word is the quality of the folks reading and commenting here. It’s also the most exhausting part, and I’m bushed!

For today, I meant to wrap up my meandering discussion of some fundamental economic concepts from the seldom heard, free-market side of economic thought, integrate them into a model that explains how we end up with things like frankenfoods, a medical research establishment that has been turned into a lobbying arm of Big Pharma, bad health, and finally, what you can do about it.

Unfortunately, there’s way too many really smart Fat Heads out there, some of whom disagree or want to trade ideas. If you’ve been reading the comments, there’s been threads way longer than my already long posts, and we’ve gone way out in “the weeds” from just the economics of food and nutrition and human behavior, into health care (inevitable, I guess), government’s role generally, the monetary system, etc. Which I just love.

When someone takes time to write out a well-reasoned response along with facts and arguments that question my thinking and conclusions, I feel obligated to expand on the topic. Flattered, too. Especially when it’s someone who disagrees with me. Robust debate between people of good will and differing opinions is how we move forward in the philosophical pursuits, within which the Austrian School includes Economics. (Keynesians think they’re scientists. This was a point of contention in a comment “Pierce” and I chewed on in Part II)

At any rate, these last two posts, contra to my initial fear of being met with snores or cries of boredom (well, there was one, probably more just didn’t let me know), kicked off some of the strongest debates I’ve initiated, which has kept me challenged and busy. Good challenged and busy.

I also had a client meeting last night, a couple for tomorrow, did my last guest speaker engagement for the semester this morning for the Economics class at Lutheran High, spent the rest the day at an out-of-town meeting, and am off momentarily for a Power Squadron meeting (if you have a boat, find your local squadron and join!). So regretfully, I’m not going to be able to complete the finale until the weekend.

If you’re interested in wide-ranging economics ideas generally and haven’t read the comments on Parts I and II, I’d invite you to read through them. For those of you who’ve commented, thanks for keeping me on my toes.

Cheers,

The Older Brother

* Government “helping” in the economy — via government programs, money printing, subsidies, bailouts, regulations, tax breaks, etc. — distorts prices. This is an unstated but automatic goal.

* Price is the mechanism by which markets convey information, so government intervention = bad information.

* Whenever a company or industry or government program gets created or propped up, a constituency is created that has an existential interest in maintaining those subsidies.

* As this bad information gets diffused and incorporated throughout the economy, its source becomes rapidly unrecognizable, but the damage doesn’t lose potency.

We’ll hit a few other concepts as we go.

[ Finally, please note that this model and these concepts apply regardless of stated intentions, desired outcomes, or party affiliation, okay? I'm getting tired of being called a closet Republican. Thanks. --OB ]

Okay, let’s get back to my premise from Part I — real food seems to cost too much, but it’s really the right price. It looks high because Big Food costs too little.

First, let’s put our cool-looking Official Junior Economics Nerd beanies on and take a walk down to the farmer’s market.

We’ll note that — setting aside the burdens, barriers, and hoops local food providers have to jump through (which do increase costs) — there’s not a lot else in the price at our vendor’s booth that isn’t real. Real labor, real fertilizer, real sunshine, real seeds. Gas money for the 20 mile drive to market. That’s their costs. Not much place to hide anything. Hopefully, they’re adding enough of a markup to make a good living for themselves and their families, but they’re not flying to shareholder meetings on the corporate jet (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

If they get a little too proud of their produce, the folks in a booth a couple of doors down will probably be exerting a little “market discipline,” i.e., charge a lower price. Even if they all band together like OPEC to collude on prices, by the end of the day they’ve either got to sell at a price that literally “clears the market” or they’re hauling the result of all that time and sweat and seed money home to the compost pile.

That’s about as honest of a price as you’re going to get.

So the cost of that dozen eggs may be twice what they sell for at the store, but it’s real chickens raised on real ground, fed real chicken feed shipped over a reasonably short distance, along with some water, sunshine, and labor. Same with those tomatoes, or turnips, or grass-fed beef.

So if those are real prices, that means perhaps the mega-mart goods are under-priced. But how so? Grocery stores are pretty low profit margin operations (they make their money on volume), but surely they’re not selling food for half its cost.

Of course, “economies of scale” (meaning it’s usually more efficient to make, say 1,000 widgets in one place than it is to have 10 widget factories making 100 each) could certainly be a factor, but how are the Big Food boys so ungodly efficient that they can ship eggs 500 miles, or move fruit up from South America, and still undersell a family farm that lives in the same zip code by 50%?

Perhaps there’s some bad information? Let us count the ways.

Let’s start with outright subsidies.

Under the (proposed 2012) five year Farm Bill, our government will again tax or borrow $100 billion a year from somewhere and inject it into the food system. How’s that for bad information?

About $20 billion of that goes to things like commodities support. Said commodities consist 90% of corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton, and rice. These billions are spent to keep prices stable, meaning “up.” Okay, nerds, follow along:

By guaranteeing a minimum price level and income, we’ve now manipulated the profit and risk information farmers evaluate when making planting decisions, driving production away from other types of crops (green veggies, pastured operations, etc) and into the subsidized and insured (mostly grain) crops. That means supply is higher that it would’ve been otherwise, which reduces the market price. So, spending money to keep the prices ends up reducing the price. Hello, Cheerios.

[The government sometimes buys up these excess commodities to boost the price back up. Can't give it out here, though, because that would just be silly, so we magnanimously bundle it up as foreign aid and ship it to other countries, where free food tends to wipe out any indigenous agricultural markets and make them dependent on handouts and just a wee bit resentful. Ingrates. (In case there's an extra credit question on the quiz, kids, that would be a good example of the "Law of Unintended Consequences.")]

Meanwhile, back in the States, the fact that there’s not enough farm state votes in Congress, means that in order to pass a Farm Bill to spend $20 billion to boost food prices, you’ll have to include another $80 billion for food stamps to help the “po folk” buy the food the urban politicians are voting to help jack the price up on.

Those food stamps, now being passed out to one in seven of your neighbors, apparently aren’t chasing fresh veggies around at the market. If they were, we wouldn’t keep hearing how obesity, diabetes, etc. disproportionately affect lower income folks. Think of it as a $80 billion transfer payment to the cereal, macaroni and cheese, fruit juice, soda, and junk food manufacturers.

Now for a couple of indirect subsidies or hidden costs.

It’s not always dollars getting shoveled around that distorts the true cost of our SAD foodstuffs. All of the government commodity programs incentivize high yields to maximize income because that means buying more chemicals and equipment from Big Ag,which higher income drives land prices and rents higher, but higher yields means prices go down (more supply = lower price, remember) which means increased reach for even higher yields to increase income, because there’s loans to pay for that equipment and land. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

What’s getting lost in the equation is topsoil. Like the money we’re borrowing from our childrens’ futures, farmers are “spending” their kids’ topsoil at unsustainable rates in exchange for dollars to pay those loans and rents. The fact that we’re rapidly losing, through erosion and chemical sterilization, the very dirt that our agriculture depends on, is as much a ticking time bomb as the national debt.

Also not showing up on our SAD grocery receipt is all of transportation and fossil fuel infrastructure that gets subsidized by taxpayers generally, then benefits Big Food and Big Grain directly. Commodity corn doesn’t grow without fossil fuel based fertilizers and chemicals, and Big Meat doesn’t run without commodity grains. Or without taxpayer financed inspectors and regulators.

Related to the fossil fuel subsidies, let’s not ever forget that those are paid not just with treasure, but also blood. We can’t make “cheap” food without “cheap” oil, and for decades we’ve pursued policies and relationships around the world that say clearer than any speech that we’d rather have cheap oil, deal with despots, and pay with blood, than we would let the price of energy do what the market wants and adapt, adjust, and innovate our way around it.

(HA! NOW DO YOU BELIEVE I’M NOT A REPUBLICAN?)

I know I’ve gone really long, and if you’re still reading this your patience is probably getting really short, so I’ll just hit one final point of the economics of nutritional insanity:

Cost shifting. That’s where the actual cost of something gets paid somewhere else not related, making a good or product look cheaper than it really is. (You’ve probably noticed that many of these concepts overlap).

One of the commenters on Part I mentioned that they were spending somewhat more on food after going LCHF (and some folks report spending less money than on their former SAD grocery bill), but their medical spending had gone down and the savings more than offset the higher grocery bill.

That makes perfect sense, and this is exactly the kind of result we’d like to think a good system would produce. Spend an extra $100 a month on groceries, but end up with $200 less a month in medical costs — maybe less allergy attacks, avoid insulin or other diabetes drugs, all kinds of good things people here talk about. And feel better to boot. Beautiful. Doing smart things makes your checking balance bigger.

But, as I responded back, what if you didn’t have to pay any medical expenses out-of-pocket? In Illinois, 2.7 million people — more than one out of five — are on Medicaid (this occurs with anyone with subsidized health care, but Medicaid is generally “free”). So looking now, and dealing with people of limited means and options, what does it cost to make the same decision?

Let’s see, now you spend the extra $100, but in return, your savings are … zero. Yeah, feeling better, breathing easier, and not having your toes amputated would be nice, but the mashed potatoes and cola are cheaper than the argula and grass-fed beef (or store bought lettuce and hamburger), and coming up with another $100 a month isn’t a real option.

It’s going to shift costs to “society” potentially in the tens of thousands of dollars per person in future health claims, but that person on the bottom rung of the ladder is going to make the best rational decision they can. Based on really bad information.

All of this and more gets worked through our system, pushing prices up, pushing them down, pushing them sideways, to the point that you just have no idea what that carton of strawberries in the produce aisle is trying to tell you. All you can really know for sure is that whatever they’re saying, they’re lying their seedy little guts out, because they got bad information, too.

Okay, I guess you get the point. They don’t call economics “the dismal science” for nothing.

I’ll wrap up Thursday with a short (I swear) entry on why I wanted you to understand this, and what I think you should do with your new found fascination of all things economic — see you in the comments.

Cheers,

the Older Brother

Well, I’m guessing Tom is mostly packed for the Low Carb Cruise and is using his last couple of days before departing to practice his speech/celebrity roast a couple of hundred more times.

Seriously. The man has a thing about being prepared. He’s actually been that way since we were kids; but his preparation for, and career as a standup comedian years ago really cemented it into his personality. I went to Chicago a couple of times back in the day when he was getting started to see him at “open mike” nights. He’d spent months preparing material, worked the door in a couple of clubs for awhile so he could get paid to observe and learn, and would always get to the open mikes early to see who else was in the lineup, check out the crowd, make sure he didn’t get stuck performing right after a damned folk singer, etc. (Nobody laughs right after ten minutes of hearing how we’re killing all the whales. Off key.).

Of course, he always did pretty good, but as fun as it was to watch him work, I had to stop going to them. There was invariably an excruciating five minutes or so starring someone you could tell must’ve been the “comedian” of their social circle. The one people always tell “oh, you’re so funny – you should do standup!” So they’d assume all you had to do was stand up and be funny, and there they’d be at the open mike, completely unprepared, staring at a bunch of strangers, trying to “be funny.” Watching them suffer through it as their egos melted onstage gave ME flop sweats! You’re like “for the love of God and mercy, bring out the folk singer!” Anyway, the point is, if you want people to think you’re spontaneously funny in front of a crowd, it’s best to practice like hell.

The other point is, you’re officially stuck with me again for the next week or so.

Here’s something that’s been on my mind…

When I talk or blog about “real” food or great low carb eats – fresh eggs, raw milk, pastured meat, fish, dairy, fresh veggies, nuts etc. — there’s invariably a remark or two referring to the cost of eating this way. It sounds great, the thinking goes, but it “costs too much.” This is accurate in a relative sense, but also completely wrong.

Sure, you will likely spend more money if you’re shopping local and spending most of your time at the meat counter and produce aisles at the grocery instead in the central area of the store (i.e., the Carb Zone). So from a “what’s left in the bank” sense, it seems eating LCHF may “cost too much,” but in fact the real problem is that our whole low-fat, hyper-processed, modified, enriched, hearthealthywholegrain-based Standard American Diet (SAD) costs way too little.

It’s a real difference, and it’s important to understand it. Unfortunately, that means I’m going to talk about economics. I know Tom and I both have other blogs dedicated to our libertarian rantings, but this is integral to understanding your food and your health, and I think it’s important for you to consider. If you promise to try to stay awake, I’ll promise to try to make it interesting.

First, we need to digress to the Austrian Business Cycle. You likely haven’t heard of it.

That’s because any economist you read in the mainstream media is going to be a Keynesian economist, who are to economic reality what ADA nutritionists are to healthy eating. That is, they’re both intelligent, highly educated, credentialed shills for the big businesses and government agencies who employ them.

The Keynesian Theory of the Business Cycle then, which is probably the one you heard if you had a high school economics class, is that an economy can be humming along nicely — people buying lots of stuff, low unemployment, rising incomes — when some disconcerting event or circumstance (like a stock market crash) hurts the economy’s self esteem and it all inexplicably goes bad. So consumers stop buying things, so businesses start losing money, so businesses lay people off, so people buy even less and it all starts circling the drain. Everyone. At the exact same time. Stupid businesses. Stupid consumers. This is a recession, or depression, or bubble, or something bad.

The solution then, happily enough for the government and big business, is for the government to jump in and spend money, via government programs and bailouts, to fire things back up and jump-start another happy cycle.

Once our resident geniuses have everything running smoothly again, the Keynesian Theory says the government should then cut back on spending (to avoid inflation) and start saving money. Snork! Sorry — I can never seem to say that and keep a straight face.

To summaraize, the Keynesian view of the role of government is to spur the “animal spirits” of a down economy with high unemployment with spending (gas) and temper the irrational exuberance and potential inflation of a “hot” economy with savings and cutbacks (brakes). It has no explanation for things like “stagflation” as we’re seeing now — high unemployment and rising prices.

The Austrian School, on the other hand, says that the business cycle isn’t the result of “animal spirits” or “consumer confidence” killing off a booming good economy. It asks how could an economy be ostensibly zooming along (boom), when suddenly every business in the country (or world, in the present case) become stupid and all make the exact wrong decision and make too much stuff (houses, car plants, etc) at the exact same time people stop buying stuff (bust)? The Austrian answer is that the only way you can get everyone to make the same wrong decision at the same time is if they all get the exact same wrong information at the same time to make that decision with. And the only way everyone can have the same wrong information at the same time is if the government gives that information to them.

Information like if we told millions of people this, for example:

“To help the economy, we’ll make money so cheap (via low interest rates) and risk free (via government mortgage guarantees), you can buy a $500,000 house with nothing down even though you’re only making $30,000 a year and have $60,000 in credit card debt and a car loan. If you don’t have a car loan, take out a second mortgage and buy one. After all, house prices always go up!”

So millions of people who shouldn’t even buy a $150,000 house go out and “buy” (they’ll never really pay for it) a $500,000 house.

So thousands of builders build millions of homes that aren’t going to be paid for. And hire tens of thousands of construction workers to build homes no one can really afford. Who buy thousands of pickup trucks that they really can’t afford because they’re going to lose their jobs when people stop making their loan payments and banks stop making loans to people who can’t afford them so builders stop building, because now there’s millions of houses built that can’t be sold.

Here’s another kind of bad information:

If you spend $30,000 on solar panels, we’ll give you a $10,000 tax credit.

Same effect, different flavor.

You’re telling a solar panel manufacturer, for instance, that it’s a good idea to hire people and buy materials and invest in equipment if they can do that for a total value of expended assets of, say, $25,000. This appears to be a good decision because by expending $25,000 they receive $30,0000, meaning they’ve created a surplus (profit) of $5,000 of value – a 20% return.

But they’ve really only created $20,000 of value, so they’re really — on net — destroying $5,000 of resources every time they manufacture a new system.

(No, I don’t mean Solyndra — they knew and they’re crooks.)

And so on.

Everyone meant well enough. They just all had bad information. When they heard they could afford the mortgage, or heard someone ask to build them a new home, or heard someone ask them to be a roofer or concrete worker or electrician, or heard someone say they wanted to buy a new truck, or buy equipment for a new truck plant, or make a solar panel, they thought “the market” was telling them people had more money and wanted to buy more stuff, so they built factories and hired people.

But the market wasn’t telling them that. It was the government. The problem is, when that builder is sitting down with that expectant homeowner, or the construction worker is sitting the truck dealer’s office, or the auto manufacturer is talking with the bumper vendor, or the solar panel maker is hiring people, they have no way of knowing whether it’s the market or the government doing the talking, because they both use the same language – the dollar. And that dollar isn’t saying if it came from someone creating value and saving it to spend or invest for other value in return, or if it just came off of a printing press.

Bad information. Bad information always creates an incentive to misdirect and waste assets.

Once this builds up to the point that it can no longer be sustained with more taxing, borrowing, or printing, here comes the “bust.” But understand that it’s really the “boom” that is the disease — the inefficient companies, the factories built to produce goods people can’t really afford, etc. The “bust” is the cure. It’s the only solution that will actually put things right. Via crashed house prices, jobs dislocated, factories closed, all kinds of painful things the government is intent on postponing or trying to shift to others to pay. You can’t heal until the toxins are purged.

Still awake? You’re a trooper. We’ll get back to our grocery bill, and my basic premise, on Monday in Part II.

Have a great weekend — see you in the comments.

Cheers,

The Older Brother

Chareva’s parents are arriving Thursday to stay at the house and take care of the girls, dogs, chickens, garden, etc. while we’re gone, so this will be my last post until after the cruise.  We’ll fill orders for DVDs and t-shirts until Friday, but any orders that come in while we’re gone will have to wait until we get back.

The Older Brother has agreed take over the Fat Head chair starting on Thursday and write some posts while we’re gone.   In the meantime, here are two more episodes from the UCTV series “The Skinny on Obesity,” featuring Dr. Robert Lustig.

State Threatens to Shut Down Nutrition Blogger

The North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition is threatening to send a blogger to jail for recounting publicly his battle against diabetes and encouraging others to follow his lifestyle.

Chapter 90, Article 25 of the North Carolina General Statutes makes it a misdemeanor to “practice dietetics or nutrition” without a license. According to the law, “practicing” nutrition includes “assessing the nutritional needs of individuals and groups” and “providing nutrition counseling.”

Steve Cooksey has learned that the definition, at least in the eyes of the state board, is expansive.

Cooksey, who was hospitalized in 2009 for complications of diabetes, created his Diabetes Warrior blog after a low-carb paleo diet proved so effective, he was able to stop taking insulin and other drugs.  In other words, he did what a lot of us have done:  after discovering a diet that worked, he decided to share the good news online.  That’s the Wisdom of Crowds at work.  Bloggers like Cooksey have probably saved more lives than all the dietitians in the country combined.

That’s exactly the problem, of course.  As I recounted in my Crisis in Nutrition speech, more and more people are turning away from doctors, nutritionists and dietitians and seeking information on the internet because they’re tired of following advice that doesn’t work.  The nutritionists and dietitians don’t like the competition.  So at least in this case, they’re trotting out ridiculous licensing laws in hopes of keeping their monopoly.  As I wrote in a recent post, that’s often the true purpose of licensing laws:  stifling competition.

The article doesn’t say who exactly decided to go after Cooksey, but it does provide us with enough information to make an educated guess:

Jan. 12, Cooksey attended a nutrition seminar at a church in Charlotte. The speaker was the director of diabetes services for a local hospital.

“She was giving all the wrong information, just like everyone always does — carbs are OK to eat, we must eat carbs to live, promoting low-fat, etc.,” Cooksey said. “So I spoke up.”

After the meeting he handed out a couple of business cards pointing people to his website. Three days later, he got a call from the director of the nutrition board.

“Basically, she told me I could not give out nutritional advice without a license,” Cooksey said.

Now why is that, exactly?  Cooksey hasn’t claimed he’s a doctor or claimed he holds degrees he doesn’t.  Far from it, in fact:

Cooksey posts the following disclaimer at the bottom of every page on his website:

“I am not a doctor, dietitian, nor nutritionist … in fact I have no medical training of any kind.”

That means the people who seek his advice know exactly what he is – and what he isn’t.

[Board director Charla] Burill said the disclaimer may not protect a nutrition blogger from the law.

“If I’ve given you reason to not worry that I don’t have a license because I have all these other reasons I’m an expert, you could still harm the public,” she said.

And what harm would that be, Ms. Burill?  How exactly are diabetics going to be harmed by following Cooksey’s advice and restricting carbohydrates?  The only potential harm here will be to the bank accounts of dietitians, who may find there are fewer people willing to pay them to be harmed by their crappy advice.

I’ve seen plenty of books in bookstores that offer nutrition advice, but weren’t written by people with degrees or licenses.  If any of those authors live in North Carolina, will the state’s dietetics and nutrition board be going after them next?  Are those of us who don’t live in North Carolina going to be threatened with fines or jail, since we have readers in North Carolina?

Burill told Carolina Journal she could not discuss the details of Cooksey’s case because his website is still under investigation, but agreed to talk about the law in the hypothetical.

It’s not necessarily against the law to give your sister or your friend nutritional advice, she said.

Not necessarily against the law?  You mean it could be?

And it’s not necessarily against the law to use a blog to tell people what they should eat.

Where it crosses the line, Burill said, is when a blogger “advertises himself as an expert” and “takes information from someone such that he’s performing some sort of assessment and then giving it back with some sort of plan or diet.”

So you can give advice to your friend or sister … well, what about a co-worker?  A co-worker of mine recently asked me for advice about his diet because his triglycerides are way too high and the low-fat diet he was advised to follow isn’t helping.  (Duh.)  He gave me a copy of his lab report and a list of his typical meals.  I’d say that means I performed an assessment. If we were in North Carolina, could I get around the law by declaring that I consider the co-worker a friend?  Would we need to submit pictures of ourselves having drinks together after work to prove we’re friends?

That’s how ridiculous these issues can become.

It’s a fine line between what’s legal and what’s not when it comes to talking about nutrition.

“Anyone can talk about anything they want,” Burill said. “That’s a First Amendment right, so to speak.”

So to speak?

For example, a person could write a blog advocating vegetarianism, she said.

I’ve heard that could happen.

“Now if you advertised that you’d taken classes in nutrition, you’ve worked at [the federal government’s Food and Nutrition Service] for three years, and you say ‘I believe everyone should be a vegetarian, and I’m here to help you if you want to change your diet’ [that could be crossing the line],” Burill said.

No, you flippin’ idiot, the “crossing the line” part would be advertising that you’ve taken nutrition classes or worked for a federal agency if you haven’t.  That’s called fraud.  Prosecuting fraud is a legitimate function of government.  Prosecuting people for stating their opinions about what constitutes a good diet isn’t.

“A vegetarian diet would be a little bit harder [to prosecute] because a vegetarian is not really like a medical diet.”

True, a vegetarian is not really like a medical diet.  A vegetarian is more like a person who doesn’t eat meat.  But plenty of vegetarians write online about the wonders their diet has done for their health, and plenty of them offer advice too.  What the @#$% is the difference?

Declan McCullagh, a CBSNews.com correspondent who writes about online free speech, says the board probably is violating Cooksey’s First Amendment rights.

“In general, I think that as long as someone is very clear that they’re not a licensed dietician, state officials can probably find better uses of their time,” he said.

You’re right about the First Amendment, Mr. McCullagh.  But as for state officials finding better use for their time … naw, I don’t think so.  This is exactly the kind of petty nonsense they live for.  To make better use of their time, they’d have to leave government and get a real job.

The tube diet

Here’s a novel idea for losing weight rapidly:  drip some protein and fat into your stomach through a tube in your nose.  Apparently this is now popular among brides-to-be who want to walk down the aisle wearing a dress they’ll never fit into again.

The K-E diet, which boasts promises of shedding 20 pounds in 10 days, is an increasingly popular alternative to ordinary calorie-counting programs. The program has dieters inserting a feeding tube into their nose that runs to the stomach. They’re fed a constant slow drip of protein and fat, mixed with water, which contains zero carbohydrates and totals 800 calories a day. Body fat is burned off through a process called ketosis, which leaves muscle intact, Dr. Oliver Di Pietro of Bay Harbor Islands, Fla., said.

“It is a hunger-free, effective way of dieting,” Di Pietro said. “Within a few hours your hunger and appetite go away completely, so patients are actually not hungry at all for the whole 10 days. That’s what is so amazing about this diet.”

I have to admit, I’m curious as to why they’re not hungry on 800 calories per day.  Sure, a ketogenic diet can suppress appetite to an extent, but those are semi-starvation rations.  Is it because they don’t smell or taste the food?  Would they be hungrier if they consumed 800 calories of fried eggs instead?

Di Pietro says patients are under a doctor’s supervision, although they’re not hospitalized during the dieting process. Instead, they carry the food solution with them, in a bag, like a purse, keeping the tube in their nose for 10 days straight. Di Pietro says there are few side effects.

Maybe having a tube up your nose for 10 days is an appetite suppressant.  I’d try some self-experimentation with that, but people at work already think I’m odd because I eat sandwiches with no bread.

“The main side effects are bad breath; there is some constipation because there is no fiber in the food,” he said.

“William, do you take this malodorous, constipated woman to be your bride, to have and to hold her, to love and respect her, forsaking all others, until death do you part?”

“Uhhh …”

“William?  WILLIAM!”

Scientists are freakin’ liars

I occasionally receive emails from people who were offended by the “scientists are freakin’ liars” line in my Science For Smart People speech.  Those emails usually include some variation on Who are you to say scientists are liars?  Huh?  Huh?

I’m a guy who can read, that’s who.  Check out this article from the New York Times:

In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an unsettling discovery. Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal Infection and Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several papers. It was a new experience for him. “Prior to that time,” he said in an interview, “Infection and Immunity had only retracted nine articles over a 40-year period.”

The journal wound up retracting six of the papers from the author, Naoki Mori of the University of the Ryukyus in Japan. And it soon became clear that Infection and Immunity was hardly the only victim of Dr. Mori’s misconduct. Since then, other scientific journals have retracted two dozen of his papers, according to the watchdog blog Retraction Watch.

Oh, well.  Probably just one bad apple.

Dr. Fang became curious how far the rot extended. To find out, he teamed up with a fellow editor at the journal, Dr. Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. And before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.

Dr. Casadevall, now editor in chief of the journal mBio, said he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct.

In other words …

No one claims that science was ever free of misconduct or bad research … But critics like Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall argue that science has changed in some worrying ways in recent decades — especially biomedical research, which consumes a larger and larger share of government science spending.

In October 2011, for example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent. In 2010 The Journal of Medical Ethics published a study finding the new raft of recent retractions was a mix of misconduct and honest scientific mistakes.

Do we have more  bad scientists now than before?  I don’t think so.  The article gives a possible explanation for the 10-fold rise in retractions that I believe has rather a lot to do with it:

Several factors are at play here, scientists say. One may be that because journals are now online, bad papers are simply reaching a wider audience, making it more likely that errors will be spotted.

Indeed, it’s not just other scientists busting bad science anymore.  The so-called “pajamas media” has gotten involved as well.

But other forces are more pernicious. To survive professionally, scientists feel the need to publish as many papers as possible, and to get them into high-profile journals. And sometimes they cut corners or even commit misconduct to get there.

To measure this claim, Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall looked at the rate of retractions in 17 journals from 2001 to 2010 and compared it with the journals’ “impact factor,” a score based on how often their papers are cited by scientists. The higher a journal’s impact factor, the two editors found, the higher its retraction rate.

So it’s the journals most cited by other scientists that are most likely to publish bad science.  Or it could be that those journals, because they are more prestigious, feel the most pressure to issue a retraction.

Either way, it doesn’t paint a pretty picture.

They’re not fat because they don’t have access to vegetables

One of recommendations listed in the 2010 USDA’s Dietary Goals report was to make fresh fruits and vegetables more available in poor neighborhoods – in other words, they want politicians to take your money and use it to subsidize fresh produce and the people who sell it.  Because ya know, if only we could get more broccoli and carrots into poor neighborhoods, poor people wouldn’t have such high rates of obesity.

Recent studies disagree:

It has become an article of faith among some policy makers and advocates, including Michelle Obama, that poor urban neighborhoods are food deserts, bereft of fresh fruits and vegetables.

But two new studies have found something unexpected. Such neighborhoods not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.

Even if we’re talking about neighborhoods where there truly aren’t as many vegetables being sold, people get the causality backwards.  The local residents aren’t fat because they don’t have access to vegetables.  The vegetables aren’t available because people don’t buy them.

Some experts say these new findings raise questions about the effectiveness of efforts to combat the obesity epidemic simply by improving access to healthy foods. Despite campaigns to get Americans to exercise more and eat healthier foods, obesity rates have not budged over the past decade, according to recently released federal data.

Duh.  That’s largely because the government’s definition of “healthy foods” is all screwed up.  Nothing wrong with fruits and vegetables, of course, but as long as they keep pushing low-fat diets based on breads, cereals and pasta, they can open a subsidized vegetable stand next to every poor person’s residence in the country and it won’t make any difference.

Advocates have long called for more supermarkets in poor neighborhoods and questioned the quality of the food that is available. And Mrs. Obama has made elimination of food deserts an element of her broader campaign against childhood obesity, Let’s Move, winning praise from Democrats and even some Republicans, and denunciations from conservative commentators and bloggers who have cited it as yet another example of the nanny state.

Speaking in October on the South Side of Chicago, she said that in too many neighborhoods “if people want to buy a head of lettuce or salad or some fruit for their kid’s lunch, they have to take two or three buses, maybe pay for a taxicab, in order to do it.”

Here’s what people like Mrs. Obama can’t seem to grasp:  if enough people in those neighborhoods wanted lettuce and fruit in their kids’ lunches, plenty of greedy capitalists would happily move in to sell them.  In a previous post, I wrote about a chain of stores that tried selling 15-cent bags of apple slices in a poor neighborhood.  The apple slices had to be thrown away because they didn’t sell.

Mrs. Obama has also advocated getting schools to serve healthier lunches and communities to build more playgrounds.

Her office referred questions about the food deserts issue to the Department of Agriculture. A spokesman there, Justin DeJong, said by e-mail that fighting obesity requires “a comprehensive response.”

No problem then.  The government’s on the job and planning a comprehensive response.  That of course means a really expensive and ultimately futile response.

Farm News:  Guineas Gone

Well, we knew we’d make a few mistakes when we took up farming.  The result of our first mistake is that our guinea fowl are all gone.

Once they’d grown considerably and seemed determined to fly around the basement, we decided to move them out to chicken coop.  The theory was they’d bond with the chickens for awhile and get to considering the area their home, then we’d let them free-range.

They free-ranged, all right.  On Sunday we took the girls to see a Sondheim musical at a theater in downtown Franklin.  When we returned home, seven of the guineas were already out and about.  The girls tried to chase them down, which of course merely inspired them to flee.  For a couple of days, they hung around our property, usually waddling around in a pack.  They seemed fond of the creek, so we hoped they’d stick around.

Nope.  We haven’t seen them in two days now.  The other three wandered off as well.  The coop has a fence around it and a big net covering the fence so hawks don’t swoop down and fly away with our chickens, but there are gaps large enough for a determined bird to get out.

We’ll try again after making the area more escape-proof.

The Ace

This has nothing to do with diets, health, fitness or farming, but I feel the need to report it anyway:  I finally got a hole-in-one on my frisbee golf course.  The disc sailed towards the basket about 200 feet away, looked as if it would miss high and to the right, then faded left, hit the chains, and dropped into the basket.  I let out a self-congratulatory war whoop.

Unfortunately, I was out there playing by myself.  You get a hole-in-one, you want a witness.  Since I didn’t have one, I’m telling all of you.

Someone on YouTube suggested I watch this BBC documentary about a researcher who conducted a similar experiment:  a group of naturally-thin young adults doubled their normal caloric intake for four weeks.  Sure enough, some gained about what you’d expect, but others gained significantly less.  One barely put on any extra bodyfat at all.

Most of them reported easily losing the weight they’d gained once they stopped the experiment — and no, they didn’t count calories.  They didn’t need to.   Their bodies are geared to resist becoming fat, so they just returned to their normal eating behaviors and dropped the weight.  That’s what happened to Chareva after both of her pregnancies.  A month after delivery, you’d never know she’d been pregnant to look at her.

As if to demonstrate just how pig-headed people can be about this topic even after the evidence from a controlled study is presented to them, some genius left this in the comments section for the documentary:

this is the most moronic documentary ever.

eat more than your body burns = gain weight, vice versa

END OF STORY

The genius is probably one of those people who never gains weight and thinks it’s because of his superior discipline.  Or as I’ve put it before, he was born on the finish line and thinks he won a race.  (He no doubt believes he’s qualified to tell others how to win the race as well.  But enough about Dr. Oz.)

I trust you’ll come to a less simple-minded conclusion after watching.  Enjoy.