Are government nutritional guidelines killing you? City Journal Article

It is not surprising that the state of science and nutrition has evolved.  But for sheer stupidity the message "low fat high carb is healthy" has to be one of the greatest screw-ups in our benighted Federal Government's history.  City Journal has the tale:

Looking at such evidence, several top medical scientists have concluded that the government’s carb-heavy guidelines may actually have harmed public health. In 2008, three researchers from the Albert Einstein School of Medicine—including the associate dean of clinical research, Paul Marantz, and a former president of the International Hypertension Society, Michael Alderman—observed in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine that since 1977, Americans have largely followed the government’s advice, doubtless as conveyed by the doctors they consulted. Men, for instance, cut their fat intake from 37 percent of their daily calories to 32 percent and increased their carbohydrate intake from 42 percent to 49 percent. Yet over the same three decades, the fraction of American men who were overweight or obese increased from 53 percent of the population to about 69 percent. The doctors wondered whether this correlation was an unintended consequence of telling the entire population to change its eating patterns. “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.

But the real story is not the details or the advice but the 'progressive' assumption that the state has any business telling people what to eat any more than it has business telling people what to buy or who to vote for.  It is this attitude that the state is responsible for enforcing 'healthy behaviors' that led to the chaos of alcohol prohibition followed by the current chaos of drug prohibition.  My consuming a marijuana cigarette (or a Martini) in my back yard hurts no one except (perhaps) myself.  Having no victim, it is (as the Soviets would put it) a 'crime against the state'.  And the 'progressive' state, arrogating the right to dictate what is "healthy and righteous" and punish that which is "unhealthy and unrighteous" has proceeded to imprison and convict a higher proportion of human beings for these 'crimes against the state' than any other nation in the history of the world.

Such are the wages of 'progressivism' - or as I call it, fascism.

Update 1:  OK, OK, Hitler and Stalin probably imprisoned more people.  But if that's you're argument, God help you.

Update 2:  I am reminded of another 'progressive' initiative that is assiduously being shoved down the memory hole.

TREVOR BURRUS: One Generation of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. is Enough. Holmes, Jr. is overrated. Holmes, Sr. is underrated.

But here’s the key: “In all, more than 60,000 people—including 7,600 in North Carolina—were forcibly sterilized in the United States in the name of ‘progress.’ Progressives of the time lauded the decision in Buck. Individual rights, they firmly believed, should not be allowed to stand in the way of collective progress.” Related item here.

And here’s what Holmes Sr. said after quitting law school for medical school: “I know not what the temple of law may be to those who have entered it, but to me it seems very cold and cheerless about the threshold.”