Scientists may be concerned that a prominent journal is giving credence to scaremongering but we are talking about The Lancet - no journalists except Guardian and New York Times consider them scientifically reliable. Yes, they will have producers at "60 Minutes" repeating it and then SEO bloggers at Gizmodo and Daily Beast too, but the public are so jaded by epidemiological misinformation and disinformation, they have learned not to trust anything.
However, the anti-science left and the anti-science right, now under the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) umbrella, are ready to believe anything if it aligns with their Science Is A Vast Corporate Conspiracy narrative.(1)
The only thing that can save us, The Lancet tells us, is more government.
Yes, that's right, the same governments across Europe and the U.S. which routinely deny science if it doesn't match their ideology are to be considered experts on moving target definitions of "ultra-processed" food. Because epidemiologists, who do no science, only correlation, say so. The authors want tariffs on ultra-processed foods plus subsidies for organic bread they consider "minimally" processed.
They even invoke food coloring as a cause of disease. They are doing for Secretary Kennedy what they did for former physician Andrew Wakefield when he wanted to promote his beliefs that vaccines cause autism. Which Secretary Kennedy agreed with, when he was a Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer and Friend of Obama. The Senator who became US President and who also said he was curious about the link between vaccines and autism.(2)
In 100% of double-blind clinical trials, the only thing that matters in weight loss or gain is calories. Not the type of food. If you instead want to believe that eating a hot dog is the same hazard as eating plutonium, or that weedkillers and hot tea will give you cancer, you can instead believe epidemiology. But they lost their way starting when Harvard School of Public Health began trotting out food diary correlations each week. And it worked. So then every school started creating correlations about scary chemicals and miracle diets, with no science involved.
The same funding that real scientists, who do serious work, now think should be restored to places like Harvard. Not only should it not be restored, if Secretary Kennedy really cared about evidence the way he claimed when he switched to the Republican side, he'd also eliminate the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. They are both anti-science barnacles that siphon off funding from science programs that deserve it.
But he won't even criticize them, because they have long been his real tribe; conspiracy theorists and critics of the modern world. Just like Lancet is a reliable platform for his beliefs now, just as they have been for decades.
NOTES:
(1) Toss in a 'Jews are spraying the ultra-processed chemicals in chemtrails' conspiracy and the Tucker Carlson-esque fringe will promote it also.
(2) Along with Robert De Niro, Jenny McCarthy, and an entire Who's Who of coastal wealthy people, right up until 2020, when the vaccine they said was dangerous and Republicans were risking lives by approving became a way to win the presidential election.
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