In a world where food is affordable and choice is high, some people will not have impulse control. Forget conspiracy mumbo-jumbo about corporations and ultraprocessed foods and addiction, some human somewhere will have fetishized everything so such an "addiction" means nothing, what is true is that foods are more delicious than ever and some people will eat too much.



When your evolutionary mandate is to eat as much as you can while you can because you don't 'know when your next meal will be', it takes cultural maturity for food to become an affordable commodity like a washing machine that you only use when you need it. We're only 30 years into truly affordable food. Prior to that, doomsday prophets like Paul Ehrlich, PhD, and John Holdren, PhD, were promoting "Population Bomb" worries about mass famine and "Ecoscience" world government solutions.


In the 1970s Ehrlich and Holdren rebranded eugenics as Ecoscience. Holdren remained so adored by progressives who believed in population control (mostly of Jews and other minorities, much like progressives in 1930s Germany) that President Obama made him his "Science Czar" - that he used a Russian term for an autocratic leader did not escape notice either.

Science ignored progressive doomsday prophets and set off a fantastic upward curve in creating a more affordable, more environmental food supply to such an extent 15,000,000 acres of farm land have gone out of use. If the world were as pro-science as American farmers, farmland equal to the entire country of India could revert to nature and we wouldn't have one hamburger less.

Yet until that cultural maturity happens, likely by the next generation, obesity will continue to close in on alcohol and cigarettes as a lifestyle disease cause. The Biden administration, like the Obama one from 2009-2017, wants to improve public health, and believe more government-mandated labels will do it.

We know government nutrition posters aren't useful. What was once an easy-to-understand 'food pyramid' has become a ridiculous hodge-podge of aspirational beliefs, to a point where only 5 percent of people even claim they follow the government recommendations, and we know people lie on surveys so reality is probably 2 percent. Labels on packaging do better. It's January, and many gained weight during Hallowthankxmas, so people are looking at calorie numbers as an easy way to reduce intake and undo the energy balance tilt they had for three months.

Given the consumer reality, it is odd that the Biden administration, scrambling to get as much done as possible before a potentially more laissez-faire party takes over the White House and Congress(1), wants everything except calories on the front of food packages.

If history is any indication, these new labels won't work, because they don't address what people care about.(2)

What people really want to know is calories. It is the only thing worth noting. Consumers are right. In 100% of double-blind clinical trials, eating fewer calories than we burn is the only sure way to lose weight. Everything else is just a psychological adjuvant, like believing music therapy helps you when you get chemotherapy.

The new label highlights 3 things with unclear value while ignoring that only thing sure to matter

The new FDA Box shows you right away how flawed epidemiology and progressive beliefs about nutrition aren't leaving government regardless of who is in power - because nearly 90% of career bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. are Democrats and 42% admit they will stall things they don't like and push what they do.



Salt RDA levels, like Body Mass Index, are a clinically useless value. Population-level statistics have little meaning for you as an individual and there is no 'good' or 'bad' salt level that can be applied to everyone. 'Added' sugar is just as deceptive. Orange juice is not healthy because it has no "added" sugar but despite a Coca-Cola with a vitamin C supplement being just 'as healthy' as orange juice, soda gets called out for not having natural sugar. It has the same calories. Saturated fat is only 'linked to' a 'risk factor' for a 'risk factor' for heart disease using food surveys, there is no science in that "value" at all.

So consumers will look at a % value for two things that are truly irrelevant and one that is only correlation for a correlation while the one thing that is relevant - calories - is ignored. They'll see if it's low, medium, or high based on a government panel recommendation stocked by government insiders that also help sell fad diet books and sit on industry panels but will have no idea if there is any science at all involved.

It took 20 years for a President to come along who was more damaging to American science and health policy than Nixon (not to mention more corrupt) and President Trump can't do as much harm as Clinton. He won't ban nuclear energy, exempt supplements from FDA oversight, cut NIH funding, cut NASA, give science funding to a fringe group that wants to prove acupuncture and other alternatives to medicine work, or give organic food believers government legitimacy the way Clinton did, but if he lets government treat government agencies as if Science Is A Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, the way Democratic leader Kennedy Jr. has done for decades, he'll be more like Obama than Biden has been when it comes to undermining science.

That won't help restore public confidence in government science and health at all, it will just shift it to new anti-science posturing.

NOTES:

(1) Indications are that the second Trump administration won't be laissez-faire at all. In 2017, when President-Elect Trump met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Kennedy declared he was told he was going to head a 'vaccine' commission targeting progressive beliefs that vaccines cause autism and other diseases, Dr. Alex Berezow and I wrote an article in Wall Street Journal discouraging that for good reason, and Mr. Trump did the most impressive thing I had seen during my time in science media - he changed his mind. Now he seems to have taken the dark turn President Nixon did in his second term; been so bludgeoned by the dirty tricks and insults of the opposition he is going to become as social authoritarian as them.

(2) When Democrats in Congress and states like California were pushing to get warning labels on "GMOs" (basically, everything not containing a government "Organic" label) it failed because on independent surveys, if people were asked what they wanted to see on labels, only 7% said GMOs. But 80% said pesticides used in growing. Organic trade groups found themselves in the bizarre position of having to claim their toxic pesticides should be exempt from the warning labels they were pushing for their competitors.