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News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Eat at will!

We don't even have to talk about global warming climate change to discredit that "the science is settled" nonsense. Been reading about new "insights" into food lately?

A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine adds to the body of evidence that cutting back on carbs, not fat, can lead to more weight loss.

Eating some foods high in saturated fat is not necessarily going to increase your risk of heart disease, a study shows, contrary to the dietary science of the past 40 years.

Fat is bad! No, it isn't. Put away that salt! Well . . . No eggs! Oh, OK, you can have an egg. Are coffee and red wine good or bad for us today? I can't keep up. Neither can science, which means all that nutritional advice you've been following and/or obsessing over may be wrong or at least incomplete or misleading. Furthermore:

The thing is, though, it’s not just the science of the last 40 years that was to blame for steering people wrong. It’s a coalition of nanny-staters in the government, media, and compliant and opportunistic food manufacturers who hype every trend in nutrition research. Scientists offer findings, media extrapolates those findings wildly, government rushes to threaten or place restrictions on whatever has just recently been called “bad,” and food manufacturers perform a combination of folding to government threats and capitalizing on a health trend. And, that my friends, is why I can’t find full-fat Greek yogurt to save my ever-loving life. It’s yogurt. It’s a dairy product. It should have all the fat in it. That’s what it’s for.

Science and politics will always be a bad mix. Science is about our evolving understanding of the world around us and how it affects us and we affect it. We adopt new theories and abandon old ones as we learn more. But politics fixates on the here and now. A policy is adopted and by God it will be followed right down the line no matter what. 

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