Food is the next battleground of the nanny state. We can already see the battle lines being drawn and celebrities and ‘experts’ picking sides. Jamie Oliver has made opposing sugar a core part of his increasingly shrill schtick, and public health bodies around the western world have toyed with ideas from plain packaging for ‘junk food’ to limits on sugary drink sizes, to outright bans.

So now would be a great time to remind everyone of just how consistently wrong the ‘health experts’ have been over years and decades… and that the current ‘obesity epidemic’ may actually have been partly caused by the ‘public health lobby’.

This article goes into detail of the history one of the more shameful chapters of public health bullying, the demonisation of fat. Fats were nearly unanimously considered to be the ultimate food evil for literally decades. The experts all agreed! The nanny state gleefully pumped countless dollars into promoting the scare and bullying people and companies into adopting low-fat foods, and in the process they contributed to the rapid rise in obesity, because companies switched to using sugar to make their low-fat foods taste nicer.

We’ve since discovered that fat is actually pretty harmless in comparison to sugar… and we’re now starting to finally admit that most of what we thought we knew about cholesterol wasn’t true either… in fact most of what we thought we knew about damn near everything food related has turned out to be wrong sooner or later… and that’s what makes this new wave of sugar-phobia so dangerous.

Now if you’d like to cut sugar in your diet… good for you. Same for people who cut fat, gluten, meat, carbs, seafood, or my personal choice: No tofu! That’s fine. You’re free to make that decision. But what you should not be allowed to do is force that decision onto anyone else… and that’s where things go all pear shaped… if you’ll pardon the pun.

See, not only should no one be allowed to make other peoples personal choices for them, even if it’s for ‘their own good’, but it’s actually impossible to be sure that it really is good for them! We’ve been wrong before… are we sure this time? Who pays the price if we’re wrong? Can we hold governments and health lobbyists liable for their decades of misinformation? Can we sue them for the adverse health affects that their advice has had on us for the last 40 years? Can an obese person or someone who lost a parent to heart disease or diabetes sue the government or public health lobbyists for bullying their loved ones to an early grave? No? They bear no consequences for their bad advice…

We bear the consequences of our diet and food related decisions in our own bodies, that means it’s our own choice. And don’t think the ‘experts’ will save you… As the article linked above says:

A scientist is part of what the Polish philosopher of science Ludwik Fleck called a “thought collective”: a group of people exchanging ideas in a mutually comprehensible idiom. The group, suggested Fleck, inevitably develops a mind of its own, as the individuals in it converge on a way of communicating, thinking and feeling.

This makes scientific inquiry prone to the eternal rules of human social life: deference to the charismatic, herding towards majority opinion, punishment for deviance, and intense discomfort with admitting to error. Of course, such tendencies are precisely what the scientific method was invented to correct for, and over the long run, it does a good job of it. In the long run, however, we’re all dead, quite possibly sooner than we would be if we hadn’t been following a diet based on poor advice.

An ‘expert’ who is wrong is worse than no expert at all. And when an entire ‘scientific’ discipline has a been more wrong than right over the course of its history, we must conclude that their ‘science’ is a poor basis for public spending and public policy.

Say no to the nannies. Eat and drink whatever makes you happy, and judge for yourself what is the right choice of diet for you, and which ‘experts’ you will and wont trust. It’s your body… and if you’re going to die from bad choices, make sure they’re your choices, and you’re not dying early for the bad choices of clueless ‘experts’.

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