Despite what people write lifestyle/diet books about, you are not Frank people because you eat Doritos. New York Times the journalists who gush about them want you to believe.
Such claims are pure food populism by rich white people for rich white people. This is not science, on the contrary, it is not even accurate enough to be wrong.
Many people outside science like to feel validated by evidence, but few can actually do so. Historians want to believe that their warm assessment of Xerxes at the Battle of Thermopylae is based on data, but we all know that they are simply writing the opposite of what someone else wrote and claiming a new interpretation. In the post-COVID-19 world, epidemiologists who write diet books claim to be as legitimate as infectious disease experts, medical doctors claim to be epideniologists, and lawyers wrap themselves in the flag of reason when they claim the CDC should be given. Regulatory power over rental housing.
Dinner is one of those times when the ‘follow the data’ fetish doesn’t serve us well, but some dietitians and nutritionists are reductionist about it and don’t use any science, claiming ‘science’ is on their side. . They only use correlations from food diaries. But they will resort to chemicals and nutrients to appear to have empirical evidence.
Dinner isn’t the chemicals you put into your body, but government nutritional guidelines are increasingly moving that that’s what matters. I wrote about the National Institutes of Health 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and how out of touch it is with consumers. I realized that you know you’re going to have a government meeting when they spend an alarming amount of time congratulating and thanking each other for the good work they’ve done to prepare for the meeting. And then they mention diversity over and over again, when their actual proposals are as diverse as the Kentucky Derby. All of this is done in the name of “Health Equity,” ironically ignoring anyone without a six-figure income and a generous food budget.
Jamie Oliver said that parents who pack school lunches with “processed” foods are committing child abuse. He could be on the government’s food panel because no one in the real food industry would hire him. Photo by Andy Butterton/PA Archive via The Conversation
No one has pointed out that you can’t make recommendations at the population level by taking demographic averaging, which is the exact opposite of diversity because it ignores cultural nutrition and tries to force everyone to conform to homogeneous chemical inputs chosen by committee. People don’t live that way and that leads to 95 percent of the population ignoring them, which is what’s happening right now. One panelist noted that the Healthy Eating Index has not been updated since 2015, and people are asking, “When will the new index be released?” I started laughing when he said he wanted to ask the question. Nobody wants to know about this except the printer with a GSA contract who produces things to be ignored on the walls of public schools. Many don’t even know the Healthy Eating Index exists. By the 1990s, with the food pyramid clearly pegged by epidemiologists with an agenda against affordable food, consumers stopped paying attention to government food panels, even though journalists did there best to promote food scare at every opportunity.
If you have attended a few of these, you will notice that they are happy with the “attendance” of their members. This is actually part of the problem. They’re actually happy to exclude anyone who advises on the “industry” – in other words, they’re happy that senior people aren’t allowed on these panels. Of course there will be continuity when you set standards that only insiders can meet, and the way to become an insider is to be in the second tier so no company sees you as an expert and pays you for advice.
True experts will criticize airy definitions of overly processed food. Real experts will warn them that no article they claim to be scientific shows a ‘risk’ between drinks and type 2 diabetes. Their “strong relationships” (whatever that means, high or low stakes) don’t actually show anything any The risk is associated only with the fact that a group of people consume sweet drinks, and some of them suffer from type 2 diabetes. It just means that they show the danger and they all accept it. For dose, some epidemiology papers even use 5 orders of magnitude, so they count 1 candy cart equal to 10,000 to declare it a hazard. They cannot identify risk, so expert panelists should not claim to have done so.
They already do. Because these panels are full of people who self-select from those with shared beliefs, critical thinkers have no problem seeing the “statistical significance” when they point out that they’re discounting obesity among all causes of death, even though it’s literally the most powerful link.
No, UPFs must be magic, calories are wiped out, even though every scientific study shows that calories are the only thing that matters.
They want to go after frappuccinos and aspartame and claim it’s a diet guide. It’s not, it’s just a way for the government to get further away from Evil Corporations and the people they claim they need to save.