December 12 - Butt out - Statistics released recently contain good news.  The longevity of Americans continues is rise while premature deaths from cancer and heart disease continue their decline.  To listen to Big Health, however, is to hear a story of gloom and doom supplemented by demands for government intervention into the lifestyles of citizens.

While Radley Balko's focus on the disconnect between Big Health and the facts specifically addresses the war on obesity, the statistics he cites regarding lower cancer and heart attack rates are useful in countering Big Health's argument that tobacco use is responsible for death and disease.  The decline in these two diseases is has been rapider than the decline in smoking rates, not surprising since the percentage of smokers has been stable for well over a decade.

When looking at government intervention into overeating, Balko notes that if obesity is such a killer two decades of porking up could hardly result in declining cancer and heart attack rates.  A healthier public is at odds with the grim prognostications so beloved by Big Health and its handmaidens in the media.  The goal is not better health but better behaved subjects.

December 2 - Coke suit - The same people who sued the tobacco industry in the 1990's plan to sue Coca Cola for making kids fat.  The parallel couldn't be any more obvious:

Part of the strategy is to claim that soft drink companies use caffeine, a mildly addictive substance, to hook children on a product that is dangerous because of its empty calories.

"It is less egregious, but it is a little like having a cigarette machine in a school," Daynard said about soda vending machines.

Richard Daynard makes his living, often on federal grants, devising strategies to sue rich corporations.  When the definition of "addictive substance" was expanded to include nicotine and caffeine, the anti-tobacco lawyers were given a weapon to litigate the tobacco industry into submission.  Alcohol, food and drink corporations were silent when the law was corrupted to sue the tobacco industry.  Their silence and craven passivity then paved the way for their shakedown now.

November 21 - Incorrect food causes lung disease - Moving on. The anti-food crowd is now fingering naughty food for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, formerly considered the smoker's province.  Guess they're trying to stay a step ahead of prohibition but what will the tobacco control crowd blame for lung disease after all the smokers are safely carted off to smoke-free jails?  This new study could be useful if only to beef up the huge list of confounders not accounted for in studies that aim to finger smoke.

November 11 - Hamburgers cause asthma - In perhaps the most blatant rip-off of anti-smoking health scares, anti-fat researchers in New Zealand are claiming that eating hamburgers cause asthma.  Anti-tobacco tried this trick, blaming secondhand smoke for childhood asthma, but finally gave it up when the facts clearly contradicted this claim.  Not only could they produce no evidence but intuitively people knew that escalating childhood asthma rates could not be caused by smoking at a time when smoking rates were in decline.

The anti-fat brigade doesn't have that problem.  Asthma rates are going up while obesity rates are rising.  On that level, why not blame the demonized fast-food providers?  Too bad the New Zealand researchers managed to find that too many hamburgers only "doubles the risk of asthma attacks and wheezing in children."  In epidemiology, the technique used for this study, a doubling is no big deal.  The researchers have found nothing but in these days of scientific illiteracy they didn't need anything to get the media to report the big fat nothing.

November 9 - Instilling disgust - Taking a page from Canada's endless war on its citizens who smoke, the British Heart Foundation launched an anti-fast food campaign that features images of offal, guts and gristle nestled in a hamburger bun.  Like the disgusting pictures of abscessed teeth and hardened arteries that grace cigarette packs in Canada, the revolting fast food images are designed not so much to "educate" consumers to make better choices as to demonize a legitimate industry.  If smokers or fast food enthusiasts feel dirty for indulging their tastes, so much the better.

One component of the anti-smoking and anti-fat campaigns that will always be missing is a call to make smoking or fast food illegal.  It's a surprising omission since, according to the fanatics, tobacco and fast food lead to a certain, premature and painful death.  If they are so bad, why not make them illegal?  Two reasons; they are not inherently unhealthy and without rich corporations to loot the "anti" crowd would have to seek honest employment.

October 5 - Resistance is futile - The obesity epidemic has now become so wide spread that it doesn’t even matter if you are fat today – you still need mandates from the food police and they have a God-given, morally superior right to feed it to you. According to MSNBC News and The Associated Press the latest studies show the reported odds are now 9 in 10 for men and 7 in 10 for women that they will be come fat at some time in the future! 

Ban restaurant billboards! Tax cheese burgers! Mandate “Barbacue Free” air! Subsidize Tofu and offer health activists taxpayer-funded 401(k) plans that specialize in socially responsible “Fat-Free” stocks! Turn Christine Gregoire loose to craft the 2006 fat Master Settlement Agreement! No, we don’t just need to “Save the Children” anymore! “Save the Parents,” too.

A strident alarm rings out from Boston: “The Fat Ones are Coming! The Fat Ones are Coming!” Of course, it’s not Paul Revere on his horse sounding the alarm this time. It’s Paul’s great-great-great-great-great grand daughter Cruella Revere-DeVille manipulating the controls of an SUV that would intimidate a Mack truck for lane space. Cruella screams into her grant-funded cell phone, “I’m skinny as hell and I’m not taking it anymore! My nostrils burn from a yokel smoking in the next county and my eyes swell shut with an allergic reaction every time I see oversized buns!”

Which explains why zero-body-fat Pristine Cruella was still yelling into her cell phone as she veered across the median and kissed an eighteen wheeler beer truck head on at 85 miles per hour. Her month’s supply of Jenny Craig meals scattered all over the freeway; that will be a $500 littering fine payable by the estate, thank you. She was so skinny that the jaws of life couldn’t get a grip, just like her.

When one is so blinded by agendas that they cannot see reality strange things happen.

Anti-obesity crisis solved, another “Anti-Mentality” professional activist goes out true to form as a self-extinguishing species. One more toilet-tongue silenced by their own fixations.

Thank God that in His universe “Energy always balances!”

More breaking news to follow as this latest crisis unfolds.

October 3 - Chicken Little takes over the WHO - The panic-mongers were in full cry at the World Health Organization last week.  Not only is there an epidemic of obesity hitting the industrial world but even the poor folk are getting fat.  According to the WHO over 1 billion people are overweight and obese and the number will increase by 500 million, mostly in the poorer countries.

Words such as staggering, overwhelming and tragedy fly fast and furious as the nomenklatura running the WHO deplore the eating habits of just about everyone.  As the rhetoric, if not the actual "epidemic", heats up the number of fatsos escalates unaccountably.  It used to be half and now it's three fourths of various countries populations who are overweight.  Before long the Chicken Littles' outré hysteria will fall on the deaf ears of a weary population.

September 19 - Terminator takes aim - Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's kick butt governor, kicked off a high profile campaign to flatten the "obesity epidemic" running rampant in the world's most health-obsessed location.  No campaign in the Health Reich would be complete without accompanying legislation, described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "the toughest school food nutrition guidelines in the nation when the new laws take effect."  In behavior-control-speak, "tough" is the adjective most preferred when individual choice is eliminated.  Meanwhile the drop-out rate is amongst the highest while educational competence is near the lowest in rankings with the other 49 states.

September 9 - Flat earth labels - California's attorney general, egged on by trial lawyers and anti-fat grifters, filed suit to require warning labels on french fries and potato chips.  He claims that the process that produces these foods, as well as more wholesome fare such as olives, results in the production of a carcinogenic cancer.  The "science" that came to this conclusion is as bogus as the attorney general's qualification for high office.

August 31 - Surgeon Dictator - While normal people enjoyed the last month of summer indulging in vacations, time spent with friends and family, the fat police have been toiling in the vineyards of paternalistic regulation policy. 

John Luik examines one proposal that would require restaurants to cut their servings by one half to two-thirds.  He not only makes mincemeat of the supposed "obesity epidemic" that would justify such a bizarre — not to say wildly illegal — policy but points out how restaurants, as well as all other business, respond to consumer demand not the reverse.

August 31 - French fries and cancer - While french fries are the object of California's health cartel's ire, John Luik writes an informative piece regarding the "science" that found a link between girls who eat them and breast cancer later in life.  This is a must read for those who wish to understand how epidemiology and statistics are perverted to produce a politically desirable result.

August 29 -  Opening the suit floodgates - The shysters celebrated Friday over the announcement by California Attorney General Bill Lockyer that he has sued McDonald's, Burger King and KFC and the makers of several popular potato-chip brands because they failed to warn the public about the dangers of acrylamide, a carcinogen produced when potatoes and other starchy foods are cooked at high temperatures.  That acrylamide hasn't actually been shown to cause cancer except when force fed to animals in extraordinary amounts is no concern to Lockyer who believes the key to future political success is to sue as many unpopular businesses as possible.

Acrylamide, naturally produced when starchy foods like potatoes and bread are baked, roasted, fried or toasted, has been around as long as baking.  What is new is the American tort system that has become the biggest shakedown racket on the planet.  Using junk science lawyers sue rich corporations under various pretexts that have nothing to do with health or safety.  Acrylamide may be a carcinogen when taken in massive doses but as a byproduct of standard culinary processes that have been in operation for millennia it has been safely consumed for all of recorded history.

Lockyer's ostensible pretext for suing the food industry is that Proposition 65, the voter-approved initiative that requires warnings when people are exposed to known carcinogens or toxic chemicals, requires the food processors to clearly label their products as carcinogenic.  That has never been proven and the government agency charged with requiring warning labels has not yet ruled that potato chips, french fries, prune juice, asparagus and olives need them.  Lockyer's political ambition and his subservience to the trial lawyers once again trumps the law.

August 22 - "Healthy" foods flop - A major subtext of the war on fat is that the portly and obese are victims of the food industry.  If only healthy fare were offered in the nation's restaurants and fast food joints the obesity crisis would be diminished if not solved.  Left out of this simplistic equation is personal taste and choice, two bad concepts according to the behavioral engineers and shakedown artists that created the epidemic of obesity.

One restaurant decided to incorporate the nutritional guidelines promulgated by the anti-fat warriors.  More than 40 healthful items were added to the menu, complete with written calorie count and fat content.  Diners didn't bite and now the healthful dishes have been drastically reduced and banished to the back of the menu.  The restaurant is now promoting its biggest burgers and has resumed the large servings of french fries and pasta.  Sales are now up 3 to 4 percent.

August 12  - Big Apple embraces the con - New York City continues its collapse into hysterical silliness by issuing a call to every restaurant in the city to cease using partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, known as trans fats.  Three decades ago the same health hysterics now demanding that their banishment from the kitchen embraced trans fats as healthy alternatives to saturated fats like butter.  With the rise of junk science and the phony war on fat the bossy elite now declares that trans fats are as dangerous as asbestos and lead.

While NYC Health Commissioner Thomas R. Frieden — "one of the city's most activist public health commissioners in a generation," in the fawning prose of the NY Times — insists eliminating trans fats is completely voluntary we've all seen health dictators move their agendas from the voluntary to brute coercion.  Mayor Michael Bloomberg is itching to enforce compliance to his peculiar vision of slapping the lower orders into shape.

Since the New York Times neglects to do so, we will point out that there is no evidence that trans fats are a health problem.  A shoddy study in Sweden launched the crusade a few years ago.  That study has been debunked as well as those erupting subsequently.  Below are a sampling of dissenting opinion that have been ignored by the special interest operative running New York's public health.

Going in Circles

This Food Can Kill You

August 5 - Filling the void with food - The British are drowning their sorrows in tons of high-risk, high-cal comfort food.  The medical establishment expects a spike in the obesity rate as growing numbers turn to junk food for comfort.  Three quarters of the population admits to gorging on chocolates and potato chips rather than confiding in friends or seeking medical help.

"These people are desperate to fill the void created by loneliness, depression and insecurity.  You could describe this as 'hungry for love," says sob sister and consultant psychiatrist Dr Peter Rowan.

The nauseating verbiage continues at exhausting length but rather than waste time poking holes through the bogus premise of a national mental breakdown causing an obesity epidemic itching to be fixed by wholesale therapy sessions, let us instead offer a simple solution:

Stop the war on tobacco!  When smoking was ubiquitous throughout Great Britain the inhabitants were respected throughout the world for their steadfastness, courage, good manners and above all their stiff upper lips.  Disintegrating into a lugubrious mound of quivering Jell-O when faced with the vicissitudes of life was considered bad form.  Straighten up!  When unlucky in love, stop the whining and spit out the bonbons.  Pour yourselves a stiff one, light one up, pull yourself together and tell the therapists where to shove it.

July 27 - Cost considerations - As the war on the portly accelerates many in the behavior control camp, recognizing that the public is not yet quite ready to accept the proposition that every health issue is a public issue, are pushing forward the proposition that individual health is the public's concern since health care costs are shared.  This is the same notion that removed smoking from the private sphere and erroneously thrust it into the public square.  Jacob Sullum deconstructs this false premise and places it in the context of volition and compulsion.

July 18  - Greasing the path for the lawyers - The deceptively named Center for Science in the Public Interest has called upon the Food and Drug Administration to impose a series of health notices on containers of non-diet soft drinks.  The rotating labels, inspired by the warnings on packs of cigarettes, would exhort the drinker to cut back on the soda to prevent weight gain, tooth decay and "other health problems," warn against the "addictive" properties of caffeine and imply that drinking soft drinks rather than milk leads to brittle bones and calcium loss.

Steve Milloy makes short work of the "science" that forms the basis of CSPI's justification for government interference in the soft drink industry and, as an amusing aside, highlights the groups hypocrisy in seemingly endorsing milk consumption.  What he doesn't say, although CSPI's reputation eloquently would so confirm, is that this scheme would be highly welcome by the trial lawyers.  Counterintuitive though it is on the surface, the cigarette warning labels, imposed by the government, were a boon to ushering in the shakedown of the consumers of tobacco products.  Every action the anti-fat brigade takes is a step to further the rape and pillage of the food industry and its customers.

June 23 - Caution: potato chips are hazardous to your health - If a gang of shakedown artists gets its way bags of potato chips in California will soon be required to carry warning labels that chips and dip are a shortcut to the graveyard.  Preposterously state law gives weight to the racketeers' insane claim that potato chips warrant a stringent warning label. 

As any visitor to the state will attest California is polluted with endless warning signs in gas stations, restaurants, grocery stores, parking lots, hardware stores, each warning the public that this and that can cause cancer, harm children or cause pregnancy complications.  These signs are required under a voter approved initiative passed nearly twenty years ago. 

As the war on fat heats up and resources are diverted from tobacco junk studies to food junk studies the gangsters will manufacture the "evidence" that will be used to ultimately ban the foods they don't like.

June 16 - Federal diet from hell - Earlier this year, to much fanfare, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services released a brand new food pyramid, supposedly ushering that venerable symbol into the modern world.  A tribute to modernity, however, meant that the new, improved food pyramid is basically incomprehensible.  The food groups that made up the old pyramid have been airbrushed out of the design rendering it useless to all but those trained in the arts of physiology and nutrition.

Sandy Szwarc is qualified and has examined the pyramid and its underlying concepts.  She finds a disturbing trend ignored by the subservient press. 

Despite proclaiming the pyramid to be a design for "personalized" calorie recommendations rather than a guide for loosing weight, the recommendations, if followed, will put nearly everyone on a diet that would be far more hazardous than retaining our Body Mass Index that, after some juggling by the anti-fat brigade, pushes most of us into the overweight category.  While few people can achieve the goals set by the pyramid many will, as Szwarc points out, be driven to the eating disorders that result from an obsession with counting calories and restrictive eating. 

What's most appalling in her report is not the furtive goal of putting most Americans on an impossible diet —  one of the end results of the war on fat, in addition to shaking down the food industry, is behavior modification on a massive level —  but the complete lack of scientific integrity that underlines the entire scheme.

June 13 - CDC Swat Team Hits West Virginia - "It is definitely a waste of taxpayer dollars" said Ables, president of FORCES West Virginia. The nonprofit consumer organization advocates personal choice and freedoms. "This country never was intended to be run by healthism."

In other words, if a behavior is considered unhealthy, the individual is prohibited from doing it. "Unhealthy" always is defined by others, she noted.

Maryetta Ables is being diplomatic.  The incident she is talking about could almost be attributed as an assault upon one West Virginia country.  Apparently not a bit embarrassed about wildly overestimating the death toll from obesity, the Centers for Disease Control dispatched a team of specialists to study fat the same way it studies outbreaks of infectious diseases.  During the three-week investigation the team interrogated school administrators about school lunches and physical activity programs.  The team put local grocery stores under the microscope to see if fresh fruit, vegetables and skim milk were available.

The CDC is reaping reams of bad press for its foray into the hinterland in search of politically incorrect eating habits but as the "war" on smoking began modestly and escalated into an outright assault on civil liberties, so too shall the war on fat begin with "suggestions" that will soon turner into orders.

June 10 - Pudgy milk drinkers - A collaborative effort between the anti-farigade and vegetarian activists has shown promising results in an anti-milk study.  The targets of this particular study are children.  The study "suggests" that children who drink milk are more prone to obesity.  Further, as this story notes, milk drinking can lead to prostate and ovarian cancer.  Milk as a good source of calcium, needed for strong bones, is a myth.

"The basic beverage should be water," Willett added. "We know that in many parts of the world, kids don't drink any milk at all and they end up with healthy bones."

Dr. Walter Willet works for the Harvard Medical School, the outfit that finds one half of Americans mentally disturbed.  Way down at the end of this "news story" we find that the study didn't clearly show that milk causes weight gain.

June 10 - Eat what you want - Sandy Szwarc, understandably pleased at the Centers for Disease Control falling flat on its face, is even more pleased to report on a randomized clinical trial that buries the dieting myth.  It's no secret that that nation's obsession with dieting and its fetish for "low fat/low cal" snake oil coincided with the increase in overweight people.  The anti-fat warriors and the diet industry may scream in anger but the old virtue of moderation again appears to be the best route to health.

June 7  - Supersize this - Duane D. Freese takes on an anti-fat "activist" and Michael Moore wannabe, dribbling him up and down the court right before he slices and dices his pretensions into an unappetizing glob of mush, ready to be flushed down the drain.  For a satisfying exposé of a con man who became the toast of the progressives, read this piece and enjoy.

June 6  - Baby talk for giving orders - Say this for the anti-fat warriors at the Centers for Disease Control; they may have been caught with their pants down but they concede nothing.

A few months after acknowledging her agency cooked the books to inflate the obesity death toll numbers, Julie Gerberding, director of the CDC, is unashamedly demanding that the utmost priority be given to fighting obesity, come hell or high water.

"It is not OK to be overweight. People need to be fit, they need to have a healthy diet, they need to exercise.

Frankly, Julie, people don't need to have a health diet anymore than they need to exercise.  You are an unelected bureaucrat who has absolutely no power over the citizens of this country.  So sorry, but that's the way it is.  And please, Julie, if you want to be taken seriously can the euphemistic "not OK."  We have perfectly good words such as "bad", "unhealthy" and the like.

May 20 - Just how fat are we? - The Center for Disease Control's colossal overestimation of the death toll caused by obesity is the give that just keeps on giving.  Larry Elder joins the crowd in piling on this federal agency whose hysterical exaggerations —  400,00, no 440,000, no 500,000 dead from smoking! —  have become the fodder for a legion of comedians.  Elder presents a hilarious conversation with one of those dreary busybodies who believe the government must crack down on the fatsoes.

May 11 - Super-Sized Statistics - Medicalized behavior is behavior that government deems proper to control. If the food going into your mouth is an addiction or an epidemic, then your diet ceases to be a personal choice and becomes an issue of public safety. The lunch you pack for your children becomes a matter of public policy.

After the limp response from most of the media to the Centers for Disease Control's mistake in grossly overestimating the death toll from overeating, this article by Wendy McElroy, FORCES Honour Committee is refreshing indeed.  McElroy doesn't take the tack that the CDC's mistake may be deplorable but it's heart is in the right place.  She instead points out how researchers and agencies routinely hype their findings with the object of maximizing the panic factor.  The more the hysteria the faster the grants flow in.

It is disappointing that she doesn't explicitly damn the CDC's tally of Americans "killed" by tobacco but every criticism of the CDC's methods that produced the outrageous fat death toll applies equally to the smoking death toll that yearly grows larger, despite the same CDC saying that smoking rates have declined.

Pay special attention to the case of a top obesity researcher who “fabricated data in 17 applications for federal grants to make his work seem more promising, helping him win nearly $3 million in government funding.”  This con artist isn't unique.

May 10 - Fat tax in the works - It's only a matter of time before a "progressive" city or state enacts a punitive tax on the fare offered by fast food establishments.  The city of Detroit enters the sweepstakes to see who will be first with a bona fide fat tax.  Although the mayor, who proposed the fat tax, plays lip service to the god of health, everyone knows that the motivation for imposing the tax is strictly financial.  The city is broke.

Anti-tax activists claim that it will impact the poor the most.  Well, so do the high cigarette taxes that Michigan imposes.  The poor always bare the brunt of so-called sin taxes and if Detroit gets its way, McDonalds will now become a sinful pleasure.

May 10 - It's not a joke, it's a con job - The CDC's conclusions about mortality weren't based on anyone's science, but like hundreds of "studies" reported each week on what has been discovered to be good for us or not good for us, it was based almost wholly on statistical associations.

Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal, like many in the news business, is having great fun with the Centers for Disease Control's about face on the obesity death toll.  Last year the CDC released a report showing that nearly 400,000 Americans per year died of diseases related to overeating.  Last month the CDC released a revised figured showing that the annual death toll form overeating is only 26,000.  That's quite a spread, and we don't mean waist size.

Henninger's explanation of the CDC's "mistake" is adequate, as far as it goes, and his mockery of health hysteria and the resulting heavy-handedness of the government and associated do-gooders is welcome.  He stops short, however, in carrying his conclusions through to the logical endpoint, which is that the CDC's "mistake" was deliberate.  He also is sadly mistaken if he thinks that CDC is chastened and that the admission of its "mistake" will end the war on fat.

The CDC purposefully chose the nearly 400,000 fat death toll because it was nearly the same as the death toll from tobacco.  The important point that Henninger, and too many others, is missing is that just as the 400,000 fat death toll was based upon nothing but statistical manipulation so too is the 400,000 tobacco death toll based upon nothing by lies.

As tobacco became demonized and more harmful in direct proportion to the financial rewards accruing to the anti-smoking warriors, so overeating becomes, and will become despite Henninger's naive optimism, more deadly as more money is dispersed to the con artists who grow rich off health hysteria.

May 6 - The portly rich - Lest the affluent feel left out of the hoopla over the obesity "epidemic", researchers have discovered that being rich is no antidote to being fat.  As always when they want to make a splash the researchers are "surprised" at what they found, although they not that their findings "underline the whole complexity" of the obesity "epidemic."  The final sentence of this story is not very surprising as the researchers confide that, "We need to have a lot more research ... to tailor our interventions to specific populations."

May 2 - Undeterred by the facts - After an article in a leading medical journal reported last week that people who are overweight, but not obese, have a lower risk of death than normal-size and skinny people, it might seem that pleasingly plump could finally become the socially accepted norm. But even the Centers for Disease Control, whose researchers helped conduct the journal study, continue to say that fighting fat remains a top public health priority.  And some social critics and medical researchers say that because there are so many groups with an entrenched interest in crusading against fat it is unlikely that the obesity epidemic will be declared over anytime soon.

Whether there is an "epidemic" of obesity or not is not particularly relevant in the case of the CDC admitting it had wildly inflated the death toll from fat.  What is relevant is that it did so and was caught.  The huge range of deaths, from nearly 400,000 to less than 30,000, is what is important and has been almost ignored by the mainstream press. 

This report from the New York Times is typical in that the reporter refuses to acknowledge the pattern of deception common to the CDC.  Its estimates of people killed by tobacco are as unrealistic as its estimate of those who ate themselves to death.  The identical methods are used for not only smoking and obesity but for all the diseases and ailments that catch the CDC's eye.  The reporter is certainly correct, however, that the fat "epidemic" will continue apace as long as there are people able to get rich off the hysteria.

May 2 - Fighting back cultural imperialism - Hoping to case in on the obesity hysteria, some grant junkies in Hong Kong launched an assault upon the popular Chinese dish, dim sum.  If it feels good, then it must be bad for you was the extent of the "evidence" the scientists offered yet the government fell into lock step and took the anti-dim sum campaign to the people.

It appears that the residents have no use for panic-mongers hoping to wipe out the pleasures that make life worth living.  In a subtle but welcome repudiation to the dim sum equals death crowd, the reporter interviews an 86-year old man who likes his dim sum to leave trails of grease on his plate.

April 26 - Anatomy of a fraud - She calls it a "grossly exaggerated and fabricated scare campaign" and then Sandy Szwarc takes her gloves off and really lets the Centers for Disease Control have it.  How did the CDC overestimate the death toll by overeating by 1,450 percent?  Just like it did the death toll from tobacco.  Delve into the murky world of manufacturing hysteria for control and profit.

April 21 - Modernizing the food pyramid - As the hysteria over the fat epidemic accelerates the information from the government become more confusing, if not contradictory.  For years special interests working for the food, tort and regulatory industries have demanded that the old food pyramid be upgraded and made more relevant.

The pyramid has been around since the 1960's and was developed as a shorthand guide to healthy nutrition.  Although few people followed the recommended servings of the food groups contained in the pyramid it is a symbol recognized by everyone.  Crank groups for the past few decades have complained that it is heavy on meat and dairy consumption at the expense of vegetables and grains, invariably described as "wholesome" by proponents seeking to refurbish the decor of the pyramid with more politically correct furnishings.  The cranks have now won and the resulting pyramid is now an icon of our times.  The food groups are now just colored section while an energetic, sexless being frenetically ascends the pyramid's slope.

What should be yet another example of the federal government's smothering paternalism is treated as a starting point to a new era of health consciousness.

April 21 - Weirdly fungible numbers - Last year the Centers for disease control issued a report showing that the number of people dying from being overweight is almost as much as those supposedly killed by tobacco.  Anti-tobacco went ballistic over this intrusion onto their turf and the CDC admitted that its numbers were inaccurate.  Months later and the CDC has reduced the fat death toll by two thirds, well below that caused by smoking and a bit more than those killed by alcohol.

The CDC's incompetence has a silver lining for all who are becoming suspicious about fluctuating death tolls.  The debacle of the fat deaths reminds people that the death toll from smoking, drinking and many other causes are not connected to reality.  All are determined from statistical calculations, not from actual dead bodies.  The CDC was guessing about the obesity deaths just as it is guessing about tobacco deaths.  Both will fluctuate depending upon which gang has the most juice.  Right now anti-tobacco is supreme as is attested to the constantly rising tobacco-related deaths even as anti-tobacco is crowing that smoking rates continue to decline. 

April 19 - Cultural invasion - Dim sum is a Chinese dish that has been eaten for centuries.  In America it is one of the most representatives of Chinese cuisine due to the diversity and tastiness of the ingredients.  The international anti-fat brigade is hoping to make them a think of the past, even though the Chinese are certainly not participating in the "epidemic of obesity."  Nonetheless the bite sized treats have been dissected, measured, tabulated and quantified.  Tiny time bombs is what they are, according to the busybodies hoping to drain every morsel of pleasure from life.

April 4 - Rigging the system - None of this may matter to the Senate's leading socialist and his fellow nanny-staters. Messages of individual accountability for health and well-being have little place in his world where Washington and trial attorneys are itching to take control of what you see and hear and what you eat.

What Nick Schulz is talking about is how legislators and special interests collude to devise a system that compels corporations to adopt policies and practices that are then subject to litigation by special interests who wish to shakedown and rape the corporations.  The template for this was constructed years ago when anti-tobacco special interests lobbied the government to force the cigarette manufacturers to make low-tar cigarettes.  The companies complied and now find themselves embroiled in lawsuits accusing them of deceiving the public that these light cigarettes are safer than the full flavored brands.

The same is being done to the food industry, where, as an example, Kraft foods is being sued because it sells a low sugar cereal that the plaintiff claims is no healthier than the regular cereals.  The same politicians, in this article the anti-tobacco Senator Harkin, D-Iowa, are fulfilling the same roles they  assumed in anti-tobacco regulation.  Such a collusion between the governing class and mercantile special interests and their lawyers is legalized racketeering and a mockery of our political tradition

March 31 - Big Salt - There's a menace abroad in the land, a lethal white powder that is being consumed by sensation-seekers all across America. And like meth and other fashionable horrors, this scourge is not confined to the mean streets of the big city, but can be found in the small towns, big malls and red states of the heartland. Worse still, there's disturbing evidence that many otherwise responsible people are being tricked into taking this substance; horrifying report after horrifying report of innocent and unsuspecting individuals swallowing food cynically spiked with this silent and seductive killer, a killer which is, some say, responsible for the loss of 150,000 Americans — that's nearly forty times the battlefield death toll at Antietam — each year.

And over one quarter as much as are killed by tobacco, we must add since the pattern so amusingly recounted here derives completely from the war on smokers.  Andrew Suttaford aims his barbs and facts at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the most repulsive of the outfits springing up to share the spoils when the food industry is shaken down as was the tobacco industry.  Junk science, hysteria-peddling, media compliance and naked financial maneuverings, all are part of the battle against salt, one battle in the war on food providers and their customers.

March 31 - Dining hints from the Feds - The benevolent government has placed its imprimatur on bread.  We are now free to enjoy it, in moderation of course, as long is it is prepared using wholesome whole grains.  Forget the processed white stuff and replace cake with trail mix, whole grains are good for you and that must be the only consideration for dining in the age of Big Health.  Of course this isn't really bad advice and Granny may have so advised the same back in the dark ages when the government didn't have the run of our kitchens.

March 29 - Marketing Circle Jerk - With the explosion of the Internet and cable news, the need to package 24 hours worth of news, seven days a week becomes a quite a challenge.  Nonetheless this story from Fox News, courtesy of the Associated Press, really scrapes the bottom of the huge barrel of numbing triviality.

Fox News breathlessly informs its readers, and no doubt its viewers as well, that Burger King has updated its breakfast menu.  Stop the presses!  The "news" in a story that should be relegated to fast food trade magazines is that Burger King's tasty new meal packs 730 calories and 47 grams of fat in the form of an omelet on steroids.  The genesis of this leaden treat is not covered by the AP report.

The anti-fat brigade thrust calories onto the public consciousness and the anathema heaped upon fast food purveyors, rendering every move these companies make "news."  Burger King gets free advertising from outlets like Fox News and the New York Times each time it launches a new low-cal item.  When Burger King, or any other fast food joint, really wants to attract notice it introduces a meal that will give the health nuts the vapors.  This omelet is guaranteed to prod anti-fat pressure groups into shrill denunciations of corporate greed and hysterical cries for government regulation.  Fox News and the New York Times will duly report the outrage while ignoring the real story of how corporate interests collude with "health" special interests groups by drumming up controversy where no should exist.  It's a great deal for all parties concerned, except for the public, which is, as always, spared any distressing information of how the citizens are being played for patsies.

March 18 - Threat to longevity - Just a few years ago we found out that we are in the midst of an epidemic of obesity.  This week we find out that the every increasing life span is doomed to reversal.  Our children will not live as long as we do because they are so damned fat.

So say the "researchers" in a "provocative" new analysis published in the New England Journal of Medicine.  Threaded throughout the ominous report are the qualifiers that we've grown to love:

• Could be shortened by two to five years in coming decades unless aggressive efforts are taken to slow the obesity epidemic.

• The youth of today may, on average, live less healthy and possibly even shorter lives than their parents,

They do trash the qualifiers when alluding to the recently released news touting the highest longevity rates in our history by musing that if it weren't for our overweight population our life span would be even higher.  So good news morphs into bad news while agenda-pushing takes center stage.

March 18 - The windbags weigh in - “It has become a full-fledged epidemic,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, at a news conference Wednesday. “Junk food ads are pervasive on TV and radio, in print media, on the Internet, on billboards, in movies and along grocery store aisles. Not even schools are safe havens anymore.”

When last we saw the rabidly anti-tobacco senator he was filling in as a coat rack for erstwhile presidential candidate Howard Dean.  Now he is clawing his way back from political Ultima Thule by grasping onto the sexiest political fad going on these days.  Ignoring the deficit, the war in Iraq and Social Security reform Congress is prepared to tackle fat epidemic and they are itching to pass a plethora of rules and regulations.

Backing up the grandstanding politicians is a chorus of financially motivated special interests who manufactured the "epidemic" and who now are providing the "evidence" and "proof" that its cause is the predatory food and advertising industries that must be controlled.  We've seen this sideshow before.  Not long ago the industry in the congressional hot seat was Big Tobacco.  Today it is the food industry facing shakedown while the inquisitors are the same old bunch of gangsters and hacks who grow rich ripping off corporations (consumers) and make cheap political points ululating about the latest crisis.

March 17 - Sharing the hysteria - Thanks to the rapidity of our world the bad habits of America are infecting Europe far quicker than they used to.  Anti-tobacco took nearly a decade to take hold in Western Europe while the fat panic is proceeding apace with that in USA.  Whether obesity is actually increasing in either place is a good question that articles such as this don't answer.

In Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Malta and Slovakia, a higher percentage of men are obese or overweight than the estimated 67 percent of men in the United States.  In Greece 38 percent of the women are obese as opposed to 34 percent of the women in the United States.

Obviously  these percentages bare no relation to reality in these country or in the United States.  They are numbers pulled from a hat as are the statistics that  "show" nearly one third of children in Malta, Italy, Portugal and Spain are overweight or obese.  Even the French are beefing up dangerously according to this report from the International Obesity Task Force.

The wars on fat, smoking, alcohol are fueled by the huge multi-national pharmaceutical corporations and fanned by the massive health bureaucracies ever on the lookout to find ways to justify their inflated workforces and enormous drain on public coffers.  Curb Big Drugs and reduce the health establishments and we'd all marvel at how quickly these "epidemics" would vanish.

March 14 - Secondhand obesity - Sutton WV - First the study that found eating a burger near someone will influence them to eat too. Now the cost of the obese is not firsthand but referred to as "secondhand." Obesity is one of the new "cash cows" of the nanny/Nazi industry. (Depends on your point of view of the situation.)

While the nannies are telling us where we can smoke, drink, and soon where and possibly what we can eat - and those are the three main facets of how our society socializes in general, our local, state and national economies are going to hell in a hand bag.

And the tax man is having a hay-day taxing us to the hilt for our personal sins, sins which are defined by public policy, public policy which is now defined by paid advertisements from special interest groups, special interest groups who are funded by our tax dollars.

When will we stop allowing our government to fund special interest groups to micro manage our behavior and how we choose to socialize in our society with devastating effects to our economy?

"The health care costs of obese American adults amount to an estimated $90 billion annually, driving up expenses for anyone with a health insurance policy - or for anyone who pays taxes.
"It's like secondhand smoking," said Morgan Downey, executive director of the American Obesity Association. "You don't have to be obese to be affected.""

While this story, and a heart gripping one it is, is referring to someone who is hundreds of pounds overweight. The trouble is that it implies that someone who is only slightly overweight is a great burden on society and costs all taxpayers excessive money, and surely will die a premature death. 

Remember, until recently when the US Government changed the definition of obese, we were not an obese nation. 

We became an obese nation with the stroke of a pen, which opened the flood gates to the untapped grant dollars available for the latest social behavior control program.  - Maryetta Ables, FORCES-West Virginia

March 7 - Tarnished Halos - It's either laugh or cry as the nation continues its descent into artificially generated hysteria.  Consumer Freedom wisely decides to laugh at some of the most harebrained, ludicrous and absolutely repulsive do-gooders infecting our society.  The focus is on food but this gang will shakedown anything that moves.  Why are they allowed to get away with it?

March 3 - Cultural Assault - To the behavior engineers all the complexities of life boil down to binary simplemindedness.  Smoking?  Quit or die.  Physical exercise?  Stringent, constant and exhausting or don't bother with it.  Diet?  Tofu, bottled water, carrot sticks and wholesome grains, anything else but austerity is akin to pigging out daily at McDonalds.

For generations the Navajos treated themselves on special occasions with a super rich white flour concoction known as fry bread.  Lately fry bread has become associated with Indians beyond the Southwest and has made its way into the amorphous American cuisine.  As the war on fat heats up nothing must remain unsullied so a do-gooder, based in Washington DC, is calling all Indians to forsake fry bread, in total, forever.  Not only is obesity and diabetes suffered by Native Americans caused by fry bread, the treat somehow contributes to demeaning stereotypes.  From all accounts American Indians are reacting to Big Brother's hectoring very appropriately.  They are shrugging it off and ignoring it.

March 2 - Where's the accountability? - Last year the Centers for Disease Control issued a report hyping the large number of Americans supposedly killed by overeating.  Experts took a look at the data and noticed peculiarities leading to the CDC admitting it had made a mistake.  Missing from this story was an acknowledgement that the "mistakes" made in calculating the deaths from obesity are the same "mistakes" that riddle the calculations tallying the death toll from tobacco.

This editorial from the Washington Times recounts the saga, including many details overlooked by most of the media.  The editorial accuses the CDC of ignoring problems with the study because it wished to produce a report that supported its political agenda.  The Washington Times demands that the agency issue a retraction with all the fanfare that greeted the announcement of the flawed report.  It also demands that the agency, which is supported by tax dollars, issue an apology.  Don't hold your breath. 

February 28 - Drug Co. Pressure Tactics - A "health" advocacy group, funded by a pharmaceutical front group, asked a federal court to force the government to regulate salt content.  The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a leftwing DC outfit, contends that salt is a "food additive" that should be placed under the regulatory auspices of the Food and Drug Administration.  Citing the usual statistical junk that defines social engineering "science", CSPI claims that too much salt kills 150,000 Americans per year but that dubious assertion is merely a smokescreen to open another avenue for litigation leading to a shakedown of the food industry. February 21 - Moving on to the new Utopia, where everyone is perfect. Austrian, Alan Lopez, a former WHO adviser said "Obesity will be a very large public health problem, and potentially a larger problem than tobacco".

Once the war on tobacco and obesity is "under control" the next front will be alcohol, the only question is which country or State in the U.S. will initialize it

February 16 - Southern Rebellion - The elite Puritans on the east and Pacific coasts are troubled indeed by the benighted residents of the southern states.  They smoke too much, they drink too much and what they eat is atrocious!  It's too fatty and, horrors of horrors, all too often fried!  It's also so damned tasty that it's nigh well irresistible.  Despite the best efforts of "heath educators", southerners refuse to switch from good taste to the gloomy fare preferred by the pursed-lipped, sour-faced nannies who live their lives quaking in fear that they may some day day.  It may be time conquer the south anew, for its own good, of course.

February 16 - Protection racket - McDonald's, under duress, foolishly made a promise it should never had made.  That bit of foolishness cost it $8.5-million, most of which went to the American Heart Association.  The mob was a piker compared to the health racketeers.

February 15 - Fad diets sent patient to the grave - The purveyors of junk science and panic-driven misinformation count upon the collective amnesia that hold this country in a iron grip.  Just as global cooling was the crisis in the late 70's and early 1980's so the hysteria about eating, although virulent for a generation, had different focuses 20 years ago.  Back then the quacks were advising patients to replace saturated fats with oil containing trans fats.  The trans fats enthusiasts are now claiming their advice sent people to an early grave.  These days the same "experts" are singing a different tune and are damning the same trans fat they once recommended.  The only question now is why on earth should anyone believe anything these people are saying now?

February 2 --  Other than denigrate personal responsibility, equate adult consumers with children and elevate the legal profession above representative democracy, this missive from John F. Banzhaf III is quite reasonable...for hordes of legal barracudas ever on the outlook to pick consumers' pockets.  He does, surely by accident, write one sentence that is truthful.  As for the rest, judge for yourself.

But expensive taxpayer-funded government educational campaigns weren't very effective in reducing smoking

February 1 - An Important Distinction - WEYCO, Inc. DID NOT terminate smokers because they had symptoms of smoking-related disease, they terminated their employees for lawfully consuming legal tobacco products that allegedly lead to smoking-related disease. In like manner, under its product-ban policy WEYCO could just as easily fire employees who lawfully choose to consume legal bacon-cheese burgers or French fires or milkshakes, not for being fat, because such food products also allegedly contribute to obesity. The hallmark of "Anti-Mentality" mandate muggers is to craft deliberately misleading and deceptive excuses to "justify" self-serving acts of overt discrimination to puff thier own bottom lines. So when will employees be forced to take random "cheese burger" tests at WEYCO, or be prohibited from purchasing a car that does not have the highest crash test ratings, to save the company more money?

WEYCO's denial that they could of would fire the obese is specious and deceptive. Their own legal product-ban corporate policy clearly establishes the means by which they could do so.

January 31 - Next on the chopping block - The world reacted very negatively to last week's story of a Michigan company firing four of its employees for refusing to stop smoking off the job and on their own time.  The usual slippery slope was cited and predictions arose that those employees who are overweight at Weyco, Inc. had better start dieting and exercising lest they be the next to get the ax.

We didn't have long to wait for the little Napoleon running the company to throw more banana peels down the slope.  From New Zealand to New Mexico the headlines screamed:  "You're fired, fatso."

Weyco has asked Reuters to issue a retraction saying it was misrepresented in the story about firing the overweight.  Reuters is standing by its story.   Weyco appears to be extracting itself from its latest intrusion into personal behavior by saying that the obese are "protected."  No details as to what "protects" the overweight but Weyco could be relying on the most liberal interpretations of the American Disabilities Act.  By those interpretations Weyco is saying that it cannot fire drug addicts, alcoholics, the morbidly obese or the insane.   It can, however, fire smokers and by god it will.

January 21 - Sadomasochism at the table -  The federal government just released the 2005 Dietary Guidelines, emphasis on diet.  What started out over 100 years ago as an attempt to ensure that the population received adequate nutrition morphed in 1977 to a tool to determine what segments of the agricultural industry deserved federal subsidies.  The guidelines have morphed again, this time into a national weight loss diet that only the Marquis de Sade could endorse, for his victims.

Tuesday we highlighted a satirical take on these new guidelines, which asked how on earth anyone could follow such a stringent regimen.  Today we present a serious look at these guidelines and find that their entire concept is fatally flawed and, in fact, are being deceptively labeled as something they are not.

January 20 - Fat Ed -  Under a plan concocted by a Texas Legislature Sue and Johnny will be taking home grades on how fat, slim and in shape they are.  The legislator gets an F for common sense and the same for her weight. January 20 - The war on fat is rapidly eclipsing the war on tobacco.  The shift is partly due to weariness with tobacco but most likely is due to the bigger dollar signs hanging over the food industry.  Whatever the case the conmen who want America to shape up are taking their messages to the people.

From Michele Simon, a public-health attorney, comes the message the government must do more to get people to take their obesity seriously.  She is opposed to placing the responsibility for weight loss on those who are overweight.  Exercise is not enough.  Government shouldn't make suggestions on what we could eat but should, instead, order us what not to eat.  Not surprisingly for someone who works for the University of California her list of unacceptable fare is quite extensive.  

From another busybody in San Francisco, a lawyer and former school teacher, comes a plan that will rein in the restaurant business and insert nutrition into the public school curriculum.  He also takes a dim view on contests such as hotdog and pie eating competitions.  Aggressive action must be taken because childhood obesity is "every bit as threatening to us as is the terrorist threat we face today. It is the threat from within."

Why Uncle Sam won't tell you what not to eat  

New threat to kids -- their waists  

January 19 - Where are the other corrections? -  Caught up in its desire to augment the hysteria over obesity, the Center for Disease Control issued a report that direly warned obesity was on the verge of surpassing smoking as the major cause of death in the United States.  The anti-fat brigade was gratified but the anti-smoking gangsters cried foul and demanded a re-look at the data.  The chastened CDC's re-look not surprisingly revealed an error.  Now it's time for the CDC to explain why smoking-related deaths keep escalating while smoking rates are declining.  We won't hold our breath.

January 18 - How on earth can we comply? -  The government came up with some brand new guidelines on proper nutrition a few days ago.  Beyond what to eat the caring Feds are this time telling us how much to exercise.  This  reinvention of the wheel reveals that the nannies at the top have gone stark raving mad.  A saint couldn't reach the goals set by the busybodies toiling night and day to make us behave.  Joe Soucheray took a look at the guidelines and discovered their flaws.

January 13 - Psychotic wet dreams - Not all that long ago the fanatics making up the Center for Science in the Public Interest would be relegated to a Lower East Side tenement, mimeographing anti-corporate screeds to be thrust upon indifferent pedestrians.  With some hefty grants from anti-pleasure sugar daddies, such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, CSPI is guaranteed to reach an appreciative audience of mainstream media types who live to broadcast messages of doom, gloom, despair and corporate malfeasance. 

CSPI wants to stamp out smoking, drinking and pleasurable dining.  When persuasion doesn't work, as it never will given the organization's bleak view of life, litigation cannot be far behind.  CSPI's tactic, taken directly from the tobacco shakedown squad, is to set up a standard of corporate behavior that, if followed, would lead to bankruptcy.  When business refuses to follow CSPI's "voluntary guidelines" they are taken to court.

Duane Freese of Tech Central Station explains how the scam will work, highlights the pile of lies on which CSPI bases its case and exposes the truly bizarre visions these zealots believe will bring the masses to heel.

January 11 - And the cure is...Olestra! -  As the assault on fat began cranking into gear a fat substitute named Olestra was developed to keep tasty treats delicious while reducing caloric intake.  Used in cookies and other snack foods Olestra was immediately attacked by various factions of the food shakedown crowd.  It's dangerous, they screamed, although neither they, nor the Food and Drug Administration, which had approved it, were forthcoming in listing the dangers.  What made the anti-fat crowd livid is that losing weight must be associated with self-denial.  Now it seems that Olestra is beneficial in removing toxins from the body.  The shrieks of outrage from the anti-fat brigade will soon be heard. 

January 10 - Preempting the fat law suits -  Credit the tort lawyers and their special interest accomplices for cluttering up our criminal and civil codes.  Not only are they filled with outrageous laws, such as smoking bans, that should never have seen the light of day, but are now being expanded with preventative measures to curb the sharks that grow rich off society.  One such measure is being proposed in Virginia that will prevent lawyers from shaking down restaurants for the obesity of their customers.  Such a bill wouldn't be necessary if the lawyers behaved themselves.  

January 10 - Europe plays catch up -  Despite official pronouncements highlighting the differences, and implicit superiority, of the European Union as opposed to the United States, the Old World is enthusiastically embracing one of the worst aspects of the New.  Taking a leaf from the officious nannies of the U.S., the EU is now addressing the supposed epidemic of childhood obesity by cracking down on advertising.  From east to west and north and south EU countries are discovering the pleasure of self-righteous censorship.  Moving beyond anything proposed in the hysterical U.S. some commandants are proposing that "unhealthy" foods be stamped with a red stop light.  Can prohibition be far behind?