Our public health ideologues more often than not wear the garb of zealots. It's why the phrase "public health Nazi" has been coined. They are frequently cast as do-gooders, with an inflated sense of self-righteousness. They are wowsers.
A recent example of their puritanical zeal in New Zealand has been their opposition to Ronald McDonald Houses at hospitals. These are well known facilities, funded by fast-food giant, McDonald whereby parents and relatives of sick children are provided free accommodation to stay near their children whilst they are being treated for serious illnesses in hospitals Many who have benefited from this charity remain deeply grateful. But the public health zealots have a different view. To them Ronald McDonald Houses are part of the Evil Empire who do great harm to people.
In reality, it is the food wowsers who are doing far more harm than good. The ignominy of these zealots has provoked a critical editorial in the NZ Herald.
Food Nazis represent an extreme religious cult within the Broad Church of Secularism. It is inevitable that human beings are constantly seeking a saviour, and food puritanism provides an attractive option.
Firstly, as is the case with all idolatries, food Nazis ooze self-righteousness. This takes the form of asserting their own righteousness as purer than the driven snow, coupled with an implacable determination to force their ways, rules, and dogmas upon all others. Secondly, food Nazis dissemble, lie, and deceive.
Typical of the trope of deception is an example which came to light recently arguing that the food industry was guilty of deceptive and misleading conduct. The "academics" who authored the piece engaged in in a grand induction alleging a world-wide conspiracy against ordinary people--based on one brief email exchange between two people who worked at the time for Coca Cola.
The syndrome of the embarrassing advocate is well known. It is manifest when a public advocate for a cause or principle is so embarrassing the issue ends up tainted by the follies and stupidities of the advocate.
Dr Darren Powell is a lecturer in health education at the faculty of education and social work at the University of Auckland. He is a member of the "food police". The very use of that term--which is now common coinage--indicates the way embarrassing advocates have damaged the cause.
When it comes to food and diet there are plenty of sane advocates. They will talk about balance in diet, rather than removing foods. They will reason with their audience to be self-disciplined and prudent when it comes to diet. "Moderation in all things" is their mantra. Such advocates do not get plastered with the "food police" label.
Dr Powell has written a piece in the NZ Herald which truly casts him as an embarrassing advocate. Confusion, misdirection, and suppressed ideologies infuse his written opinions. He risks defaming the cause of responsible dietitians. He is all in a lather over advertising junk food which appeals to children. Sadly, his language is confused, to say the least.
For most of the period following World War II, the West--or at least the US, Australia, NZ--has been told that eating fat is a gross dietary sin, insofar as it makes the one who ingests obese. Consequently we have been hectored without end to avoid fatty food.
The largest exporting dairy company in the world--Fonterra--recently sponsored a piece in the NZ Herald debunking this particular urban myth.
Myths are difficult to debunk - look how long the old saw that people must drink eight glasses of water a day to avoid dehydration has been around. Here's another one: fat makes you fat. The eight-glasses-a-day mantra is still a thing. So are fears that fat will make you, well, fat - and will play havoc with your heart, weight and make it more likely you'll develop conditions like diabetes.
Now many scientists are beginning to re-draw the boundaries of nutritional knowledge, shifting away from the old thinking that saturated fats (as found in dairy) should be avoided and that the rush to 'low-fat everything' may have been misguided. In fact, in some instances, what we replaced saturated fats with may have been worse.
As is so often the case, the "advice" of the health police turns out to be bad actors.
Whenever I see a ‘low-fat muffin’ in a coffee shop, I have to control an urge to pick it up, jump on it and shout rude words. I am myself an expert in getting fat, and know that this evil blob of sugar and starch is a rapid route to a bigger waistband.
Fat doesn’t make you fat. Butter is good for you. So is cream. Skimmed milk is a futile punitive measure, not a foodstuff, a way of making ourselves needlessly miserable which has taken over the world on the basis of an illusion. Fat doesn’t make you fat. Almost everything most people think about food, and almost everything shops tell them, is completely wrong, says Peter Hitchens
This is because almost everything most people think about food, and almost everything shops tell them, is completely wrong. In an unending struggle to get this across, the National Obesity Forum last week made a renewed attack on these mistaken attitudes. Sugar, not fat, is the menace to our lives. And this has been known since 1972 when a brave scientist, John Yudkin, wrote a book – Pure, White And Deadly – showing it was so.
He and his unfashionable message were buried in abuse.
Scientists have rounded on the World Health Organisation
(WHO) for claiming that sausages, bacon and ham could pose as big a
cancer risk as cigarettes.
Breitbart Londonreported yesterday
how the WHO is due to add red and processed meats to its ‘encyclopaedia
of carcinogens’, possibly leading to new government legislation
demanding warning labels on packs of meat.
However, a number of scientists have expressed their concerns about the new classification, tellingThe Telegraph about their scepticism.
Dr Ian Johnson, Emeritus Fellow of the Institute of Food Research, said:
“Although there is epidemiological evidence for a
statistically significant association between processed meat consumption
and bowel cancer, it is important to emphasise that the size of the
effect is relatively small, and the mechanism is poorly defined. “It is certainly very inappropriate to suggest that any adverse
effect of bacon and sausages on the risk of bowel cancer is comparable
to the dangers of tobacco smoke, which is loaded with known chemical
carcinogens and increases the risk of lung cancer in cigarette smokers
by around 20 fold.”
Professor Richard Knox, formerly of the Institute of Cancer Research,
echoed Dr Johnson’s comments, saying “most cancer deaths will not be
due to bowel cancer and even fewer linked to meat consumption.”
There are at least two perspective on offer when it comes to the nurture and raising of children: the first is the world-views requiring parental indulgence; the second is world views requiring parental discipline.
Whilst it is a generalisation-- we trust not a hasty one--the Chattering Classes and the Commentariat generally favour parental and societal indulgence when it comes to raising children. The little tykes are assumed to be nascent adults and the more they are treated as if they were adults, the more quickly they will mature. In contrast, those adults whose parenting involves consistent rules, structure, and discipline are regarded as harmful agents, implicitly guilty of child abuse.
A recent newspaper piece illustrates this great divide. The issue was food--the right food--for children. Some parents complain that whilst they know sugar-saturated food is bad for their bairns, the whole world conspires against them
Bankruptcy Alley a 'shocking commentary' on NZ--Debt Commissioner
Matthew Theunissen is a reporter for the Herald on Sunday. (This piece documents another attempt by the Commentariat--of which we are an important part--to argue for more state intrusion to protect people from themselves. Our reporters are on task and remain zealously committed to seeing it done. At the Herald, we are proud to be making a difference.)
Liam Joyce and Alex Wood with their lunch from Burger Fuel, Lincoln Road. Photo / Michael Craig. Smart Kiwis Avoiding the Debt Trap of Fine Dining.
A NZ Debt Commissioner has dubbed a 3km stretch of road featuring more than 30 expensive fine dining restaurants as "Bankruptcy Alley". In Central Auckland, the Viaduct precinct, Vulcan Lane and O'Connell Street offers an astonishing 33 high priced restaurants, 30 of which will force patrons into even more credit card debt, such is the exorbitant cost of their meals. The remaining three have only two items on the menu, so the bankruptcy risk is not as great.
Debt Commissioner, David Impecunious described it as a "shocking commentary on our exorbitant, gratuitously wasteful, first-world country". "I
don't think it would be going too far to call it Bankruptcy Alley -
call it what it is. If it's going to be contributing to people's increased use of credit card debt, it's going to cause more financial stress, leading to more heart
attacks and strokes--and even suicides Yes, let's call it for what it is."
He said it was compounding an environment where being in debt was the norm.
A startling discovery has been made in the area of public health. Sometimes things surprise. At other times, the surprise is so surprisey that one ends up staggering around in the daylight like a sleep deprived inebriate. We still struggle to believe the scintillating insights delivered by a university health study. Against all expectation the astute researchers made the completely unexpected discovery that obesity is caused by eating too much food.
You have to have a PhD in social medicine and a second PhD in public health to enable such rarefied discoveries to be made.
When it comes to eating, consumers are biting off more than they can chew. That's the finding a New Zealand study that confirms the link between energy food supply and the global obesity epidemic. The findings, published today in the Bulletin of the World Health
Organisation, show that overeating is the driving force behind the
global obesity epidemic in high-income countries like New Zealand. [TVNZ News]
The lead researcher was one Stephie Vandevijvere. Her research is so startling and novel that it made the pages of the World Health Magazine.
Look out, everyone: The nation’s
school-lunch lady, Michelle Obama, is mad. With her federal nutrition
program under fire across the country and now on Capitol Hill, Mrs.
Obama put out a “forceful” call to arms this week to “health activists,”
according to the Washington Post. She’s cracking the whip. Her orders are clear: There must be no
escape. The East Wing and its sycophants zealously oppose any effort to
alter, delay, or waive top-down school-meal rules. Big Lunch must be
guarded at all costs.
Progressives blame kid-hating Republicans and greedy businesses for
the revolt against Mrs. Obama’s failed policies. But the truth is right
around the corner in our students’ cafeterias. Districts are losing
money. Discarded food is piling high. Kids are going off-campus to fill
their tummies or just going hungry.
According to the School Nutrition Association, almost half of school
meal programs reported declines in revenue in the 2012–13 school year,
and 90 percent said food costs were up.
Never trust "official science"--that is, the science being pushed by government agencies. If scepticism is the good oil of solid scientific research, once the science becomes "official" in the sense of being accepted by government programmes and enforced by government regulations, healthy scepticism withers on the vine. At that point, science has become intermingled with, if not captured by, propaganda: the trustworthiness of science diminishes substantially.
To make matters worse, there are lots of vested interests vying for commercial advantage when science becomes "official". Engineer a government "tick" and millions can be made. Achieve the promulgation of a government programme, and millions can be parlayed into billions of dollars. It becomes, in the coarse words of US Vice President, Joe Biden, a "big . . . deal"--that is, a crude joke.
It is now becoming clear that generations of diet advice--official diet prescriptions--backed by scientific research, is wrong. In fact, it has done enormous damage to human health. A significant essay recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal, by Nina Teicholz:
We have endured the monstrous regime of the feminazis. We continue to labour under the monstrous regime of the foodnazis. There are those who wish to command and control all that we put in our mouths--for our own good--and, of course, society's good, since the state pays for health care. And we are facing a plague of illnesses, about to descend with more deadly intent than the Bubonic Plague. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease: this evil triumvirate must be combated with taxes, rules, regulations, controls, bans and government sponsored cotton-wool.
One biggie is the cost of fast food--you know, that fatty stuff sold in burger bars and fish 'n chip shops. What's wrong here, you ask. Well, it's too cheap the foodnazis tell us. It is being bought and consumed by the truckloads because it is cheaper than decent food. Coke is cheaper than milk. So, let's force the price upwards. Let's tax it. The new-left command and control economists tell us that if you tax something, you get less of it. Let's put a tax on sugar saturated drinks.
Such moves would hit the poor obese, forcing them to consume something better, argue the zealots
One of the most famous episodes in Seinfeld is the Soup Nazi. It has probably been watched more than any other. (In case you have missed it, there is a YouTube highlights version below.)
As life once again imitates art, years later we find ourselves beset by food Nazis of all kinds, telling us what to eat and, more importantly, what not to eat. But the matter does not stop at nagging and hectoring. It is ironic that Seinfeld, which was such an acute insightful commentary upon New York City and New Yorkers, has ended up parodying-in-advance the actual charge by Nanny Mayor Bloomberg to rule and regulate what New Yorkers can and cannot eat. Bloomberg became the actual incarnation of the Soup Nazi, aspiring to control every part of the human anatomy--for our own good, naturally. And so it has come to pass that Food Police are now everywhere--yearning and lusting for the reins of power--passing rules, regulating, and controlling, all to protect us from ourselves. Bovine New Yorkers love it. The rest of us? Not so much.
