Here’s a stunning admission from Walter Willett, avid obesity warrior, nanny, and head of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health:

“There was a lot of resistance from the scientific community because a lot of people had made their careers telling people to eat margarine instead of butter. When I was a physician in the 1980′s, that’s what I was telling people to do and unfortunately we were often sending them to their graves prematurely.”

It’s Willett and his cohorts who are today proposing public policy to regulate and govern our diets. For the love of Pete, if this guy’s advice twenty years ago killed people, why would we make law based on his advice today?

Damned good evidence showing why government should get out of the business of promoting diet altogether. The research lawmakers and reulgators rely upon changes every ten years (remember when pasta was good for you?), and is too prone to academic politicking and the whims of researchers looking to please grant writers. And that’s just the research. Policymakers then mesh that research with the demands of favored interest groups, U.S. agriculture concerns, and their own biases before drawing up acutal guidelines.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2005 at 5:29 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Nanny State, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.