Ian Leslie has written a long piece for The Guardian, outlining how America’s dietary guardians got it dead wrong. Dietary guidelines in the past decades have emphasized reducing saturated fats; however, the real culprit in obesity and heart disease is sugar.
But the establishment representing the industry of science has been obdurate, showing the moral hazards that exist in scientific research. Professional reputations get established for following certain lines of inquiry and for getting certain types of consistent answers. (Think of the similarities in certain types of political economy research... doesn’t matter the context, the policy recommendation is always the same!)
In the world of health care, there is lots of money for promoting things that may, or may not, make any sense. This would include the over-emphasis on fats and the relative neglect of sugar.
Leslie notes:
“If, as seems increasingly likely, the nutritional advice on which we have relied for 40 years was profoundly flawed, this is not a mistake that can be laid at the door of corporate ogres. Nor can it be passed off as innocuous scientific error…. this is something the scientists did to themselves – and, consequently, to us.”
What’s missing from this article is the underbelly of sordid economic public policy. The U.S. maintains a quota on sugar imports from the world, so as to fatten the wallets of a few billionaires in Florida, Louisiana, and Hawaii, who at times have produced American sugar at 4 times the world price. While a high sugar price is a good thing (if sugar is to be avoided), it would be far better to import sugar and then tax its final use to fund health care.
A worse downside is that the high price of sugar has led to the rise of corn-based sweeteners, so that now there is an unholy alliance of sugar farmers and corn farmers aligned against freer trade. The greater power of corn has contributed also to our hugely uneconomic policy of mandated ethanol fuel (boondoggle upon boondoggle). The corrupt influences of big agro and big industry are intricately related now to big health care and big government paternalism.
In short, it’s a total mess.
[Thanks to Jim Bacon and Bacon’s Rebellion for the link to this story.]
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