'Uncle Sucker' falls for another food scare

BY WASHINGTON EXAMINER | JUNE 17, 2015

If you're inclined to be suspicious about Uncle Sam's involvement in choosing what you eat, you're on pretty solid ground.

Reason Magazine recently interviewed the author of a paper showing that none of the federal nutrition guidelines are based on reliable or useful data. The problem is that the data come from self-reporting of people's diets over long periods they could not have possibly remembered. Frequently, study subjects reported living on diets that no human could survive on. To draw conclusions from such flawed memories is a fool's errand.

The Food and Drug Administration's strongest exhortations about what to eat and avoid are not terribly reliable, either. Remember cholesterol? After five decades of fear-mongering, the Food and Drug Administration has only recently reversed itself on dietary cholesterol, acknowledging in its draft of new dietary guidelines that it "is not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption." The FDA may have to make a similar U-turn on its recommendations for avoiding salt, which have been laid bare in recent medical studies as completely unfounded.

Every time government is the sucker for a new food scare, the consequences are grave. Companies are motivated to use such scares to promote their whatever-free food, which is often less healthy than what people were eating before. Junk science guidelines are imposed on millions and determine many aspects of federal spending in food programs. (Speaking of which, remember the food pyramid?)

This week, the new fad in food-banning is trans fats. The FDA had issued a preliminary determination that will lead soon to a virtual ban on the use of partially hydrogenated oils from which man-made trans fats come. Food companies will have to petition the government to use them and demonstrate that they are not harmful.

Trans fats are only in our diets today because of the very same people now pushing for their elimination. It was they and their food-busybody forebears who caused a false food-scare in the 1980s and 1990s over saturated fats. This led to new labeling requirements and the use of trans fats as a supposedly healthier substitute. Like so many other food fads, the earlier scare that these activists caused has since been debunked.

Moreover, as Reason's Peter Suderman pointed out last month, American consumption of trans fats has already declined by more than 75 percent since the FDA required that foods containing them be labeled as such. Tuesday's action will merely lead to the purging from all food of an ingredient that preserves or improved the texture of some foods that people like to eat on occasion.

Rather than speculate about whether (or how soon) the trans fat scare will blow over, perhaps Americans should revisit the entire idea of the federal government choosing ingredients. To be sure, no one wants anarchy when it comes to the food supply, where it is legal to sell food made with rat poison. But the question of which ingredients are a bit more or less healthy than others is one that the federal government has proven it is poorly equipped to answer. The bureaucrats involved in this heavy-handed maneuver should probably find something better to do with their time.