Category: Uncategorized

Until recently a common understanding of reality drove cross-party policy making. A Republican president, Richard Nixon, created the Environmental Protection Agency with bipartisan support. A Democrat, Bill Clinton, worked with Republicans in Congress to reform welfare, and came close to a deal to preserve the long-term sustainability of Social Security. Such comity is growing harder to find. Right and left do not just disagree on how to regulate pollution; most Republican voters do not accept that man-made global warming is happening. As for America’s future solvency, leading Democrats, such as Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, question whether Social Security faces a crisis at all, suggesting that its benefits should in fact be expanded.

What is going on? Democrats have an explanation. The whole country is polarised, they say, but the right has moved further from the centre. What’s more–say Democrats–too many Republicans live in a bubble of para-facts and propaganda, fed to them by Fox News or sham studies paid for by conservative billionaires. That is a bit too glib. For one thing, the left has its own shibboleths of irrationality. Just ask about genetically modified crops, declared safe by the scientific establishment, but reviled as Frankenfoods by the Subarus-and-sandals set.

A recent Lexington column in The Economist, which touches on so many of the things I’d love to blog about, but which would probably take me five or six posts to cover much less elegantly and succinctly than The Economist does. Among other things:

I began a three-year term as associate editor over at Food Policy at the end of last year, which means that I handle submissions in my areas of expertise, deciding which manuscripts get reviewed and which ones get desk rejected, selecting reviewers for those manuscripts that do get reviewed, and so on.

Once again, I wanted to feature a few articles from the latest issue of the journal. There is nothing special about those articles beyond the fact that I thought they would be of interest to readers of this blog.

Seeing the US population grow sicker and fatter while adhering to official dietary guidelines has put nutrition authorities in an awkward position. Recently, the response of many researchers has been to blame “Big Food” for bombarding Americans with sugar-laden products. No doubt these are bad for us, but it is also fair to say that the food industry has simply been responding to the dietary guidelines issued by the American Heart Association (AHA) and the US Department of Agriculture, which have encouraged high-carbohydrate diets and until quite recently said next to nothing about the need to limit sugar.

Indeed, up until 1999, the AHA was still advising Americans to reach for “soft drinks,” and in 2001, the group was still recommending snacks of “gum-drops” and “hard candies made primarily with sugar” to avoid fatty foods.

Our half-century effort to cut back on the consumption of meat, eggs and whole-fat dairy has a tragic quality. More than a billion dollars have been spent trying to prove Ancel Keys’s hypothesis, but evidence of its benefits has never been produced. It is time to put the saturated-fat hypothesis to bed and to move on to test other possible culprits for our nation’s health woes.

That’s the conclusion of a recent article in the Wall Street Journal by Nina Teicholz, a science journalist working on a book titled Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, and whose Twitter feed you can find here.

Teicholz’s book is a sign that the tide is finally turning as regards what constitutes a healthful way to eat. As far as I can tell, it has been turning for about five years: I remember reading about Art De Vany‘s New Evolution Diet — which advocates a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet — back in 2008, at about the same time the Paleo Diet and the Keto Diet started gaining in popularity.