In 1915's The Temperance Program, Thomas F. Hubbard et al. laid out the progressive case for why alcohol needed to be banned so convincingly that in 1917, with Democratic control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they got the 18th Amendment to the Constitution out of Washington, D.C. and into voting by the states.(1) Because people irrationally sided with elites then as they do now, Democratic states immediately ratified it and it raced to the 36 needed so quickly that the two Republican-controlled states that voted it down, Connecticut and Rhode Island, were irrelevant.

The book had a chapter on how to raise an alcoholic and it contained things like Mexican food, pickles, and even coffee. Those caused alcoholism. If it reads like conspiracy rhetoric of the Republican party in 2025, you're right. It was also the Democratic party from 1960-2021.


The organic™ industry targets white mothers just like Prohibitionists did, because it was shown to be a proven model for success. Image from the chapter "How To Make A Drunkard."

Why did anyone believe Mexican food was a gateway to alcoholism? In small part it was because of the casual racism of progressives, now famous for popularizing the Eugenics which targeted minorities, (2) but in large part it was because of what has continued to undermine American trust in science since.

Epidemiology.

Epidemiology, despite what you may read on social media posts or an equivalent source like Newsweek, is not science. It is only correlation. To correlate a food to harm you ask people what they ate, then you look at what diseases they have. If you get enough people saying they ate something and then had some malady that you can declare statistical significance, the US government - thanks to Democratic President Johnson creating the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences - will publish it in a journal they created and control, Environmental Health Perspectives.(3)

Cultural mullahs epidemiologically linked lots of things to alcoholism to advance their agenda, including pickles and Mexican food. They had the the old-time equivalent of "Bro, do you even science?" correlation on their side. Basically, crowds shouting down anyone who was skeptical.  After all, people ate pickes in bars and progressives believed the worst about all Mexicans then in the way they do Jews now. So they argued the food caused it. That's not science but it is 9,000 papers in peer-reviewed journals each year.

Not all epidemiology is bad. Epidemiologists were once so rigorous and methodologically conservative they were the last to agree about a hereditary link for cancer. They settled the cigarette smoking issue so convincingly everyone knew it was only a matter of time before it went from nearly 45% of people in the 1950s to 0%, which will hopefully be soon.

But it also had its suspect underbelly and that is what progressive exploited then and now. The first chemophobia scare, about cranberries in 1959, was caused by epidemiology that was turned into government policy regardless of how many scientists objected. Once epidemiologists became cultural 'rock stars', after the Surgeon General's report on cigarettes in 1964, everyone in the field wanted to be the one to find the next Big Tobacco. So they began to scaremonger lots and lots of common chemicals, hoping to get into the New York Times and testifying before Congress. Then on the miracle food side of epidemiology we got low-fat diets and juice cleanses and acai berries and quinoa. We got International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in France so desperate to find new cancer-causing agents they claim plutonium is as harmful as...pickles. Hot tea causes cancer too. They suggest 900 different things supposedly cause cancer, while putting in small print they only do correlation, not causation, that California, which was foolish enough to abdicate its public health to IARC decades ago, now has Proposition 65 'may cause cancer' warning labels on over 80,000 products.

Given that a modern progressive, former Natural Resources Defense Council attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is in charge of America's government health structure, including an FDA and CDC he can easily weaponize against them, companies are rushing to take artificial food colors out of products just as fast as they rushed to create electric cars and DEI programs when President Trump's predecessor sent an 'or else' message to them. Not because they believe food coloring is harmful, but because they know government is.

The same spurious correlation that links organic food to autism and virtual pollution to obesity is the only thing that says food coloring is bad.

That does not make it science. It is still only epidemiology.  FDA has never once approved a drug or product based on epidemiology. That is why it should never be used for enacting public policy without a plausible scientific mechanism for why it has any claimed effect. Until then, it is only an effect found in an Excel spreadsheet.

NOTES:

(1) Along with the Draft, the Espionage Act, the Food and Fuel Control Act, and the following year the Sedition Act. When a President is physically unfit to conduct the office and no one out in the public know, bad things always happen and the reason only comes to light later.

(2) Planned Parenthood and Sierra Club do fine work now but anyone who knows their history knows how much of their mandate was originally to protect white culture - just like eugenics was. Because the founders of both were eugenicists.

(3) If you are a Democrat who now believes NIH can't be trusted because of Kennedy, why did you ever trust them? Some of us complained about their poiliticization of science and scaremongering propaganda for decades. Environmental Health Perspectives is as rigorous as a publication about astrology. Let me extend a welcome to being called a 'corporate shill.' The downside is that the money is terrible because no corporations actually give you any money. The upside is that half of America reflexively hates you because you dispute the same elites they disagreed with two years ago.