Did the Government Make us Fat?

Posted on by John C. Goodman

There is a new study at the Goodman Institute website that makes fascinating reading. Author Greg Rehmke writes:

Saturated fat as the major cause of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease in the U.S. and around the world. They promoted a low-fat diet with increased consumption of carbohydrates instead. Obesity in the US has been steadily increasing ever since.

View/Download the PDF document from the Goodman Institute website in a new tab.

2 thoughts on “Did the Government Make us Fat?”

  2. Do all kinds of governments make people fat? The proportion of self-reported obese adults increased in every OECD country that reported data in 2001-2002 and 2013-2014. Well, some governments do make people thin, see North Korea and Ukraine under Stalin in the 1930s, but they have thankfully been rather rare lately.

    When randomized groups eat prepackaged foods for a few months, weight loss seems about the same on low, moderate, and high carb diets. Insulin resistance seems to improve with lower carbs. Study duration, and who knows what else, may affect results. Programs like Weight Watchers work for some people, and radical calorie reduction works for everyone as shown by gastric banding, the 6-month long Minnesota starvation study on (volunteer) conscientious objectors in 1944, and an unfortunate variety of natural experiments with famines and gulags.

    My impression is that dietary research is not on a solid enough basis for any kind of policy. Self-reported food intake is unreliable, researchers cannot agree on the accuracy of energy expenditure measurements, and there even was a big quarrel in the BMJ over whether the expert report underpinning the next set of US Dietary Guidelines for Americans accurately reflected the literature. The Mediterranean Diet lives on in official advice even though the main study underpinning it was retracted 5 years after it was published.

    Government needs to stick to mom advice: exercise, eat a varied diet, and get some sleep. Easy way to reduce health care spending would be to eliminate the budget of any part of HHS tasked with coming up with diet recommendations and pretending to base them on Science, when they are really just based on dodgy statistics.

    The miserable state of work on nutrition matters because the latest HHS Healthy People program states that the government plans to adopt health goals such as having no processed sugar added to foods. Translation: for your own good, government is going to control the foods available to eat. Healthy People also has goals for employment and pay. Someone in the bowels of HHS has determined that people with a predictable income are healthier. We must act!

    If they don’t stop they’re going to make everyone less healthy. Given their stellar policy prescriptions over the last two years, the prospect of academic MDs and MPHs running economic policy will likely make everyone unable to sleep.

    As a dedicated omnivore with a sweet tooth, I think the government should butt out. I will start criticizing other people for being overweight once I manage to lose those 5 pounds and keep them off.

    Linda Gorman

    Independence Institute

    Denver, Colorado

    Reply

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