So many of you might have seen the study showing that a low-fat diet has no effect on the diseases most likely to kill most women — cancer and heart disease.

Which means all that sacrificing the federal government and the healthists have been telling you to do was probably for naught, at least when it comes to diminishing your risk of early death.

Coincidentally today, the day after that study was released, we get statistics from the federal government showing that for the first time in history, the total number of deaths from cancer declined in 2003. Of course, the rates of death from cancer have been declining for 15 years. But an overall decline is stunning, given the annual increases in our population.

Of course all of this good news (death rates from heart disease and stroke have been dropping, too) has been taking place as we’ve all been getting thicker around the middle, despite warnings from those same federal government bureaucrats and public health nannies that our spare tires are a prescription for early death (life expectancy last year hit an all-time high, too — oops!).

All of these wonderful developments are, of course, the result of prosperity and a free market system that continues to produce remarkable innovations in medicine. If you ask me, the only thing that can slow it down are government restraints. If our politicians continue to push our health care system toward socialism (thus removing that nefarious “profit motive” from health care) we’ll see an end to the competition, innovation, and breakthroughs that have pushed lifespans skyward, and put the diseases that have plagued us for most of human history on the run. And we all know that the people most pushing for heavy regulation of healthcare and socialized medicine are the same public health activists who demand government intervention in issues like obesity, ironically for the state purpose of prolonging our lives.

In other words, the biggest threat to the public health may well be the ever-expanding definition of “public health,” and “public health” activsts themselves.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006 at 10:50 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.