FAT POLICE BRUTALITY - It's not obesity but fat bureaucracies that must be reduced - "Why is the CDC so willing to play fast and loose with the facts?  The answer is bureaucratic entropy coupled with an agenda of some to control behavior."

Steps already have been taken to sell this latest health hysteria to the citizens of the hypochondriac state and this study is part of those steps.  Public money for the report was shuffled through the California Department of Health into the coffers of the Public Health Institute, a Berkeley nonprofit that describes itself as "an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting health, well-being and quality of life for people throughout California, across the nation and around the world".  Quite a task but PHI has lots of help including the National Cancer Institute, the CDC and, as always, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Based on telephone interviews with 1,200 teenagers who were asked what they had eaten the day prior, PRI confesses to being surprised at the self-reported results.  The researchers initially assumed that half the interviewees would be overweight but extrapolations of the tiny sample base revealed that 600,000 12 to 17 year olds are fat.  Truly PRI has struck gold.  Better still the data show that minorities are worse off than whites.  Best of all black children, because they watch the most television, are most subjected to pernicious fast food advertisements which obviously results in them being the fattest of them all, 50 percent.

PRI has shown the state that there is a crisis.  What to do about it? Programs must be enacted to educate these fatsos and their clueless parents on how to eat and exercise.  PRI is not yet ready to advocate a tax on fast food but, in another newspaper report, proposes that the food industry assist in the food education campaigns.

Before the fat campaigns crank up, before a tax is imposed on fast food, a bit of historical perspective is in order.  In 1989 California began the most massive anti-tobacco education campaign in history.  Prior to then, the smoking rate for minors had been declining.  Since 1989 the underage smoking rate has climbed steadily.  Anti-tobacco education equals higher smoking rates for teenagers.  Worse, the age by which teenagers start smoking became younger than it was before anti-tobacco took hold of California.

The Public Health Institute, as well a multitude of other government grant junkies, are licking their chops in anticipation over the prospect of erecting an anti-fat education campaign identical to anti-tobacco education.  If these nonprofits get their way, obesity will skyrocket as did teenage smoking.  California will finally slide into the ocean under the sheer weight of millions of fat teenagers.

Second, the researcher attempts to pass off as conventional wisdom, albeit flawed, an assertion that obesity lowers the risk of lung cancer.  There are as many people who have heard of and believe this idiotic premise as there are people who have proven secondhand smoke causes lung cancer.

Third, and most important, the researcher has released this study just in time to reserve her seat on the trainload of grifters and con artists seeking to make food and it's "abuse" the new frontier of government shakedowns and tort racketeering.

Does anyone remember the good old days, say just a few years ago, when society didn't come to a screeching halt over the fears of a one-in-a-million-chance of a bad thing happening? And why are the people of Canada and the United States of America the only people on the globe where anaphylactic shock occurs and why does it only occur to the great quaking and affluent middle class?

The Center’s agenda is neo-Puritanism at its harshest. "Ban," "restrict," "end" and "regulate" are as common in CSPI’s publications as mosquitoes around a light bulb. The First Amendment is but a quibble when CSPI is in full-attack mode. The Center would outlaw certain billboards, television and radio advertisements. It would prohibit sponsorship of events by such malefactors as Miller Brewing. It would tax beer, wine and liquor so working people could no longer afford the drinks that CSPI thinks are bad for them. It would regulate or ban "junk" food, as CSPI defines it. And CSPI denounces Chinese, Mexican and Italian cuisines so that proud proprietors and hungry patrons feel guilty about what they serve and eat.

SAY CHEESE, BUT WATCH OUT FOR THE FDA - Mmmmm... it teases the tongue, it's so creamy and delicious that IT MUST BE STOPPED!

Too good to be legal: the most delicious cheeses in the world. Yup, the U.S. FDA lurches once again towards its distopian goal of a fat-free, flavorless future with a new ban on a whole class of cheeses. Has anyone in charge there had their head examined lately? Didn't Howard Hughes die because of an obsessive fear of germs? What's with these people? Link above to a commentary by Digby Anderson on the latest from Big Mommy and Daddy. By the way, we're inviting our readers to create a new, more appropriate name to go with the Food and Drug Administration's FDA acronym. Just e-mail your suggestion to FORCES International, and we'll select the best submission for regular use on our pages!

We link to Junkscience.

THE FOOD FASCISTS - "Hitler was a vegetarian, don't you know. He was also an anti-smoker...militantly so." - Joel Mabus

This article from the Los Angeles Times breaks new ground by explicitly revealing the path by which the anti-fat crowd plans to pursue its goals of financial self-interest. The heavy work has already been completed with the planning, testing and implementation of the grand larceny wrought upon smokers. Following that successful blueprint, anti-fat need only repeat the lies over and over until they are accepted as the truth by a public so apathetic it can't see that the claims of anti-fat are almost identical to the claims by anti-tobacco.

About 33,000 Californians are killed by obesity according to a new study. Since California represents a bit over ten percent of the U.S.A. population, the number of deaths from fat occurring in the entire country come very close to the 400,000 toll caused by tobacco. Leave aside that neither the fat nor tobacco death rates have ever been proved by Big Health.

Financially the overweight burden California to the tune of $6-billion annually, according to the LA Times. It can't be a coincidence that smokers cost the California taxpayers a bit more than $6-billion per year, as determined by anti-tobacco activists who generally claim that the nation forks out $65-billion to pay for smoking related ailments. As above, this cost-of-smoking figure has never been proved and is flatly contradicted by research done by the Congressional Research Services.

Smokers, according to Big Health, comprise 18% of California's population. By a weird coincidence, the obese also make up the exact same percentage of state smokers. Again the percentage of smokers is a figure that has no basis in reality and is used strictly for political purposes.

Rearing its ugly head is the same junk science that pollutes the discussion of tobacco, here applied brazenly to the issue of obesity. The percentage of fatties, intones the LA Times, jumped dramatically in 1998 not because of any mass gluttony on the part of Americans but simply because the federal definition of "overweight" became more stringent. The validity of the Fed's new formula for determining obesity can be judged by its absurd notion that men and women of the same height should weigh the same or, in the new way of looking at weight, have the same body mass index. The notion that a 5-foot-7 housewife and a 5-foot-7 jackhammer operator should have the same body index is insane.

Finally we have the media, which neglects even a cursory examination of the data, assuming the role of advocate for the special interests who plan to make a ton of money off the obesity "crisis".

ERECTILE DYSFUNCTION MORE LIKELY IN LARGE-WAISTED MEN, NEW DATA DEMONSTRATE - "Men with large waistlines are more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction than those of slimmer girth, according to new data presented today at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association. In a survey of 1,981 men aged 51 to 88, 34 percent reported moderate to severe erectile dysfunction." As in the case of smokers, anything goes to make you give up that hamburger!

Is that so?! In the late seventies, since the beginning of man, disease of some type strikes anyway. But of course, acknowledging that reality makes for no grant money. Or perhaps, those who have made this statement are in their late seventies, and are obese...

FAT SMOKERS SAVE YOU MONEY - Aside from the usual off-the-assembly-line statements about the health dangers of smoking and other enjoyable habits of life, this article documents once again the new attack on people's choice by the Nanny State. But are smokers really living shorter lives than non-smokers are? Who knows... thought the very data of the CDC contradicts both the CDC 's own statements and the common beliefs of what every day is less of a science and more of a fanatical religion.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT ABOUT 'SOUL' FOOD - "We are killing ourselves with food. We are committing mass suicide on a scale that makes Jonestown seem like a mere burp. We have turned the lowly fork into a weapon of mass destruction. And, most alarmingly of all, we are starting down the inexorable spiral toward high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, heart disease and a host of other maladies at a young and younger age. "[...]

"Better plump than facing the stark specter of a wasting eating disorder, you say? It's not so cut and dried -- and it's not about clothes sizes. It's about closing arteries. It's about compromised lives and premature deaths. It's a simple matter of life and death. Some solutions are within our grasp. We can become as alarmed by the known arsenal in our cupboards as we are by the unknown assailants in the streets."

Hey, how's that for building up hysteria? ... Same junk science as antismoking, eater boys and girls, and same alarmist rhetoric. Soon, also same taxes and vilification. Welcome among the unwanted of society... there is no room for eating in a healthy society! The doors of the segregation club are wide open.

Now, this is yet another example of what's happening when bureaucrats get to control the state machine. Make that obtuse, dishonest, intrusive and fascist bureaucrats and - Voila! - you have the FDA, the EPA, the OSHA, and all those entities originally created with good intentions, and that now should be erased from existence if we want to have a free, real world back again.

So, the computer spits out 17,100 yearly cases (exactly) of coronary heart disease cases, and 5,600 (exactly) annual deaths. This, of course, occurs after guesses and speculations have been entered in the junk science-programmed machines. The printer's ink is still fresh on the pages and the imbeciles start barking about labeling crackers.

Enough garbage already! We are sold "B" movie-style pseudo-scientific trash, and we are paying billions of dollars to be taken for a ride by a bunch of dishonest incompetents who add insult to injury by often calling themselves doctors, and have the arrogance and the face to show themselves on TV thanks to irresponsible media giving great relevance to their colossally expensive jokes.

"Health revolution," huh? Yes, let us have a real health revolution. Let's start with wiping out all the virtual computer-generated deaths, firing their masters, and jailing the mouthpieces -- especially when they use their academic credentials to knowingly sell us frauds as truths. Then let's continue with taking politics out of science. Finally, let's see what's left, and go back to practicing sensible science, and sound health policies -- with the appropriate priorities.

Most food is zero-rated for VAT (value added tax) on the basis that it is an essential item but Dr Tom Marshall, of the University of Birmingham, says treating all foods as of equal benefit is a mistake. Imposing VAT on foods that are the main sources of saturated fat in the British diet: full-cream milk (not skimmed), butter and cheese would encourage shoppers to choose low-fat alternatives and reduce people's cholesterol levels."

Are people going to take this one too? Possible. The health cartel and its robbers seems to have replaced religion and Church in "modern & progressive" society. The health cartel can lie, falsify, obliterate freedom, rob, tax and persecute: as long as it is for our own good and for our health, it can do no wrong! (If the above link does not work, click here