They've gone ban-happy, the opposite of market-driven innovation and affordability they previously claimed to value above all. HHS Secretary Kennedy knows the threat of government is enough to drive change.(2) His experience in manipulating culture as a progressive, tell believers to Ban X and you Prevent Y, has been the clarion call of Democrats for generations. His current war on food shows that he not only still hates science, he has no empathy at all for the poor. How would he? He has never known want in his life.(3) Instead, he has been enabled ever since he was a child.
Less enabling of children that would've prevented Kennedy from being who he became is ironically the way to prevent the obesity he claims only his personal picks of winners (organic food, raw milk) and losers (everyone else) can accomplish. It will lower obesity and therefore prevent a lot of lifestyle diseases.
This is a treat, not a lifestyle. A decade ago, left-wing food nannies ranted about this stuff. The good news about the right doing it now is that academics on the left finally see the problem in hammering corporations to virtue signal to their tribe. They're getting the corporate conspiracy culture they believed they wanted.
Without question, there is an obesity problem. In 30 years, obesity could overtake cigarette smoking as the leading cause of lifestyle diseases, but even now it is only behind alcohol. The problem is not so-called "ultra-processed" or "refined" sugar or a food coloring, it is now and always has been calories.
Individual initiative and common sense and choice. The kind of thing pre-Kennedy Republicans embraced.
Calories remain the only issue. It has never been about gluten or quinoa or fish. In 100% of studies, people who burned more calories than they consumed lost weight. And people who aren't obese have risk of many diseases in youth dramatically reduced.
A new analysis shows that instead of more social authoritarianism and centralized government, cutting down on behaviors that create "avid" eaters will send kids into adulthood with less emotional eating and associating happiness with food. It means that your grandparents were right, sitting down together as a family at meals creates positive examples. That doesn't mean kids can't have snacks. Food evangelists behind the Prohibition movement 100 years ago, when Kennedy's grandfather was involved in a criminal booze-running enterprise to get rich, claimed Mexican food caused alcoholism.(4)
Their experiment was parents with obese kids who downloaded a phone app which sent four messages per day for 10 days asking them to fill out a survey of questions about mood and stress. If kids got food, or asked for food parents filled out a questionnaire to provide information about eating practices. They wanted to see how structure there was - like regular meals and then a snack or two at set times, how much involved healthier eating practices such as enjoying together, and mealtime setting atmosphere.
Frequency of momentary structure-based feeding practices used, split by meal and snack times, with the frequency of parents reporting ‘yes’ to using the specific feeding practice for snacking occasions (n = 506) and mealtimes (n = 1271).
They found that avid eaters claim to be hungry a lot and want treats based on their emotions. Unsurprisingly, they were obese.
The obvious change to make is not to ban food types, it is to recognize that food is a basic need, not an emotional regulator. This was easier in the past when people were agrarian or food was scarce. You came in from the field to eat and went back out if you were in the country. If you were in the city you were often poor so there was no snacking. Gout was a rich-person disease.
Yes, making food more expensive will also lower obesity, the same way famine will. People 100 years ago who were in poverty were thin. Why does Kennedy think the time of his booze-running grandfather was better than now? Science instead fought to make food affordable so for the first time in human history people had the choice to get fat.
That means we need cultural maturity to overcome our biological 'I don't know when my next meal will be' evolutionary mandate. It just takes time. No one stands in line overnight for a new iPhone now but government didn't have to ban them to get that to stop.
NOTES:
(1) American Republicans transformed into 2019 Democrats virtually overnight. They now think food and medicine are corporate conspiracies, just like progressive cranks at Democracy Now, Mother Jones, and every organic food group claimed for decades.
(2) In 1994, President Clinton made baseball owners cave into the Player's Association union by hinting he'd get involved if they didn't. During the Biden years, companies scrambled to add onto existing federal law banning discrimination of the last 60 years by creating poorly-defined "DEI" initiatives. Because they knew if they didn't do it, government would, and make things both worse and more expensive than he had already done.
(3) He has known greed. He invented a brain disease for himself to get out of paying alimony to the woman divorcing him because of his chronic infidelity. He said he couldn't make any money because he was disabled. His illness went away after she committed suicide and alimony was no longer a concern.
(4) Their methodology was a lot like Kennedy embraces now; choose a belief, find studies to match the conclusion. Lump them all into a pile and declare you have "weight of evidence." That is Greenpeace methodology when they want to ban modern rice, not for Republicans who claim to be Conservatives.
Comments