On 3 June, First Lady Michelle Obama along with Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Surgeon General Regina Benjamin unveiled the new US Department of Agriculture “myplate,” an icon designed to replace the USDA Food Pyramid. The icon depicts a plate with approximately 20% of the space devoted to fruit, 30% to vegetables, 30% to grains, and 20% to “protein.” The icon also depicts a cup representing dairy products.  

If your dinner plate looks like the icon, with lots of fruits and vegetables, “Then we’re good, it’s as simple as that,” the First Lady explained.  

The USDA has created a website, choosemyplate.com, offering nutritional information and tips on meal planning. The site also offers advice on steps to a healthier weight, counseling obese people to increase their physical activity levels and watch their portion sizes.  

This is the same Department of Agriculture that takes our tax money and uses it to find propaganda campaigns to tell people to eat less cheese, while at the same  time taking more of our tax dollars to fund propaganda campaigns telling people to eat more cheese.

It also takes billions of our tax dollars every year to subsidize the production of corn,wheat, and soybeans, which are made into high-fructose corn syrup, white flour, and soybean oil, which in turn are transmogrified into a dizzying variety of junk foods. Federally subsidized corn and soybeans are also fed to livestock to ensure an abundance of cheap meat. And then people react the way anyone who has taken half a semester of Econ 101 would predict: they eat more meat and junk food, and fewer fruits and vegetables.

Now the government is demanding even more of our tax dollars to tell us to stop eating so much meat and junk food. Does anyone see a problem here?

Anyway, the notion that "experts" know what we "should" be eating is absurd. As Michael Pollan points out in In Defense of Food, almost the whole of nutritional science is built on shifting sand. The nutritional scientists don’t know what people should eat because they don’t even know what people are eating now. How could they? Do you think they follow someone around for a year and write down everything she eats? Of course not.  

The only way to measure this sort of thing is through surveys, which are notoriously inaccurate. I’ll bet there is not one person reading this who could accurately recall everything he has eaten in the past three days, let alone the past three months. I know I couldn’t. To give you an idea of how wildly inaccurate these surveys are, they usually report the average person eats something like 2,000 calories a day, whereas the United States produces almost 4,000 calories per day for every man, woman, and child.

And so they generate reams of data with huge margins of error, which they mine endlessly for tiny correlations. That’s why every week there is either a new panacea (fish, or olive oil, or oat bran, or nuts will make you live forever) or a new poison (saturated fat, or high-fructose corn syrup, or meat, or eggs, will make you fall over dead).  

The only way they can really know what a person is eating is by means of inpatient studies which measure only extremely short-term outcomes, often in the context of highly artificial clinical situations which may not have any relevance to real life. For example: it’s true that giving people extremely high doses of salt, much more than any normal person would ever eat, can raise their blood pressure. That does not prove that moderately elevated salt intake over the long term will produce the same effect on blood pressure, let alone increase the risk of any adverse clinical outcome. Have these people never heard of a threshold effect?  

I see the self-appointed experts went into conniptions recently when a study was published in JAMA showing that the people who ate the most salt were no more likely to develop high blood pressure and actually had lower rates of heart attacks and strokes than those with the lowest salt intake. They blasted the study, finding problems with the methods and complaining the sample sizes were too small, as if the same problems couldn’t be found in the studies on which they base their recommendations.  

And these studies never take into account the effects of exercise. My guess is that people who exercise strenuously every day really don't need to worry about sodium or cholesterol or saturated fat or glycemic load or whatever the media is telling us this week we should worry about.

I freely admit I don't know this for sure. But then, neither do the self-appointed "experts."

Anyway, who ever said the only function of food is fuel for the body? Food has many other functions as well, as a way of expressing ethnic identity, as a means to help us celebrate holidays and special occasions, and simple comfort. I believe we all retain fond memories of special meals from our childhood, be it the Thanksgiving turkey and stuffing, the summertime backyard barbeque, or a simple grilled cheese sandwich and bowl of tomato soup our mothers made for us when we were children.

So why is it the business of the government to be telling us what to eat? This article in the San Francisco Chronicle provides us with the answer: 

“[Surgeon General] Benjamin said good eating habits are at the crux of saving health care costs in this country, where one in three children are overweight.” 

Oh Gawd, not the health care cost argument again. Sorry, doc, the reason health care costs are soaring is not because we dummies don’t know what we should be eating, it’s because your professional colleagues are Hell-bent on foisting on people as many expensive and invasive interventions as the traffic will bear, often without any data that these interventions result in clinically significant benefits.

When the same folks point to soaring health care costs and click their tongues and say, "Look at how health care costs are going up -- you better let us tell you how to run your lives," it's time to for the rest of us to pelt them with rotten vegetables.  

Weightlifting photo by author 

All other photos via Wikimedia Commons