The Breaking Point

by James Dale Davidson

  3 http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/translating-uncle-sam/stories/what-happened-to-the-everglades.

  4 Herring, George C., From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

  5 http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/29/opinion/america-s-sugar-daddies.html.

  6 Pooley, Eric, “High Crimes? Or Just a Sex Cover-Up? Starr Shows All the Ways Clinton Tried to Keep Monica Quiet,” http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/1998/09/14/high.crimes.html.

  7 Haney, Rich, “The Cruel War on Innocent Cubans,” Cubaninsider, http://cubaninsider.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-cruel-war-on-innocent-cubans.html.

  8 Bartlett, Donald L., and James B. Steele, “Sweet Deal: Why Are These Men Smiling? The Reason Is in Your Sugar Bowl,” CNN.com, November 23, 1998.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Wexler, Alexandra, “Bulk of U.S. Sugar Loans Went to Three Companies,” Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2013.

  11 https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/rates/pd/avg/2012/2012.htm.

  12 See http://www.asa.org/basics/loans/interest-rates/student-loan-interest-rates.aspx.

  13 See Bartlett and Steele, “Sweet Deal,” CNN.com, November 23, 1998; and “America’s Sugar Daddies,” New York Times, November 21, 2003.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Maneka, Bilal, “U.S Sugar Subsidies and the Caribbean’s Sugar Economies” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, July 2013.

  16 http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/1998/11/16/sweet.deal.html.

  17 Daly, Kyle, “Sugar Industry, Fanjuls Cash in while Taxpayers Foot Bill for Everglades, Ethanol Research,” The Washington Independent, April 14, 2011.

  18 http://www.sweetenerusers.org/Sugar%20Program%20Costs%20Jobs%20-%20%20Oct%2020071.pdf.

  19 http://www.naturalnews.com/026468_sugar_corn_corn_syrup.html.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Big Fat Lie

  Why $3.8 Trillion Year Won’t Cure Baumol’s Disease

  Procter & Gamble’s claims about Crisco touching the lives of every American proved eerily prescient. The substance (like many of its imitators) was 50 percent trans fat, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that its health risks were understood. It is estimated that for every two percent increase in consumption of trans fat (still found in many processed and fast foods) the risk of heart disease increases by 23 percent.

  —Dr. Drew Ramsey and Tyler Graham, “How Vegetable Oils Replaced Animal Fats in the American Diet”

  I admit it.

  As I assembled my notes to write this, I went to the freezer and scooped out a big bowl of Ben & Jerry’s Vanilla Ice Cream, consisting of 40 percent saturated fat.

  Yum. I feel a subversive pleasure in savoring the spoonfuls of creamy goodness—tempered, of course, by recognition that the twenty grams of sugar in each serving are a virtual poison. (I would have been much better advised to eat coconut oil, which is roughly 63 percent saturated fat, one of the highest percentages of any food.)

  My embrace of saturated fats probably shows that I make more use of the Internet than the average person. No doubt among the three billion pieces of intelligence that Big Brother monitors on Americans each month are details of my online searches for accounts of the updated meta-analysis of the recovered data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study and accounts of Dr. William Castelli’s puzzled observations about the people who ate the most saturated fat in the Framingham Heart Study.

  This information confirms another dimension of the defining problem of our time: the status quo is an engineering marvel, a dishonest confection built on half-truths and propaganda through which every effort is made to confound you, mislead you, and keep you too busy consuming to think for yourself.

  More than you might imagine, this is all epitomized by the vexed topic of saturated fats.

  Your Job as an Alimentary Canal

  You see, first and foremost, your contribution to the system is that of an alimentary canal. Don’t forget it. You are meant to consume, avidly and without hesitation, whatever designer rations of modern commerce that the nanny state determines suit you. And of course, the bureaucrats are not just randomly pulling suggestions out of a hat. They are designing the official diet based on what best-connected lobbyists and political contributors want.

  What is good for you, your health or your purse, is of little consequence.

  And of course, if you can’t afford to pay for these delicacies, as is the case with one in five American families, the nanny state will issue you entitlements, SNAP food stamps, so that you can consume and make your contribution to the GDP. And if the “evo-deviant” diet they have prepared for you has morbid effects, so much the better. Your miseries will have contributed some additional stimulus to the lagging GDP. The world’s most expensive health care (or sick care) system, running at an annual tab of $3.8 trillion, can enjoy some more prosperity by ministering to your ruined health.

  It is crony capitalism at its finest.

  America’s Big Problem

  When more resources are force-fed into sectors with declining returns, like health care, education, and the military, the result is not really economic stimulus rightly understood, but a particularly malignant version of Baumol’s Disease—a condition where the least productive sectors grow more costly over time.

  As government diverts more resources into low productivity sectors and reduces the overall growth of the economy through efficiency losses, the politicians also paradoxically increase employment in the parasitic sectors. That is why health care jobs continue to grow faster than the US economy. If you don’t think closely, you could easily draw the false conclusion that growing sick care costs were actually stimulating the sick economy.

  Not so.

  In November 2012, the Altarum Institute, a health care consulting company, reported that since the recession began in December 2007, the health sector added 1.4 million jobs—a cumulative growth of 10.1 percent—while non-health employment fell by 5.6 million jobs—a cumulative decline of 4.6 percent.

  I have no reason to dispute the figures from the Altarum Institute. In fact, they are just what you should expect—a measure of the increased misallocation of resources. The extra trillions paid for health care in recent decades meant prosperity for that sector, while other innovative sectors with rising marginal returns starved for resources.

  So while health care added jobs, more productive sectors shed 5.6 million jobs.

  Not good.

  Don’t mistake this for a moment. The obesity bubble is no free market phenomenon, any more than the subprime bubble was anything other than a regulated catastrophe. We never would have lost trillions building McMansions for persons with bad credit if the Federal Reserve and the leaders of government had not gone along with the gag and encouraged the banks to play fast and loose with your money.

  Equally, the “Big Fat Lie,” which has destroyed the health of millions to ensure the prosperity of a few, is a corrupt exploitation of centralized power presided over through the FDA and other agencies of the Big Government corporatocracy. The food industry, Big Pharma, and the mainstream medical industry have successfully manipulated the system to promote the obesity epidemic at your expense. And the government is their not-so-silent partner.

  If you have heeded the dietary guidelines promulgated by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), then your health has been compromised by eating the official government diet. It is not a coincidence that obesity in America has surged fiftyfold over the last century, mostly since the nanny state issued its first dietary guidelines extolling the high-carb, low-fat (i.e., trans fat) diet. In a startling coincidence, the corporate state almost invariably endorsed whatever fandango of cheap artificial ingredients the food industry found most profitable to improvise and purvey.

  As Mary Enig, the PhD biochemist and nutritionist who first blew the whistle on the dangers of trans fats put it, organizations such as the American Soybean Association (ASA), Ingredion (formerly Corn Products
International), and the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) have all been economically motivated to promulgate dietary misinformation. They are also aided by the FDA, many of whose key personnel come from, and later return to, the vegetable oil industry.

  And in an even more startling coincidence, the mass media will have conditioned you to want whatever processed approximation of food that industry was prepared to sell you. For example, you have probably been led to believe that you should avoid “artery-clogging saturated fats.” Try Googling that phrase in quotes. When I tried it, I got 428,000 hits—clear proof that “artery-clogging saturated fats” has become a pervasive cliché of our culture. If you do not feel that saturated fats are bad for you, you must be either of independent mind or oblivious. Thanks to the Internet, it is now much easier to be of independent mind. You can now search for evidence showing that saturated fats are good for you.

  There is plenty of it.

  What you will find helps illuminate what could otherwise be a perplexing puzzle—how the traditional human diet came to be demonized in our culture within my lifetime. It involved an impressive, if not noble, campaign of propaganda that enlisted all the organs of authority—from the government, to the medical establishment, to an equally self-interested pharmaceutical industry and the compliant mass media—to misinform you about the nature of heart health and rational dietary choices.

  In this respect, I think it illuminating to focus on saturated fats as the soft underbelly of crony capitalism. It brings another dimension to the problem of sclerosis that fascinated my late friend and mentor, Mancur Olson. He argued in The Rise and Decline of Nations that the longer societies remain stable the more likely it is that powerful special-interest lobbies will collude to twist the rules of the economy to their own ends and your detriment. Olson shrewdly recognized that special interest groups can change “the direction of social evolution.” But little research has been devoted to the efforts by special interests with strong incentives to inform popular views on important subjects by clogging information channels with officially sanctioned propaganda and lies. If you understand how this corrupt system works, you would not be surprised to learn that the biggest sponsors of dietitians’ conventions and trade shows are junk food makers.

  The demonization of saturated fats provides an excellent case study of how crony capitalists mislead you for their own profit on health issues. This came about as a proximate consequence of the eclipse of the family farm and the emergence of a potentially vast market for cheap artificial ingredients that could be profitably processed into palatable form.

  The sad truth was recognized early on by Popular Science magazine, commenting on the waste products of cotton farming, with the observation that what ended up on your table “was garbage in 1860.” The garbage quotient grew exponentially after food processors learned to process corn oil with extreme heat, nickel, emulsifiers, bleach, and artificial flavors and coloring to fabricate food-like products that would not make consumers gag. After the garbage fats became palatable, they were to be processed into Wonder Bread, cakes, Pringles, doughnuts, Oreos, moon pies, Twinkies, Girl Scout Cookies, Kentucky Fried Chicken, french fries, and other trans fat–laden staples of suburban culture.

  When I was a child in the 1950s, however, most foods were still prepared the old-fashioned way—at home with eggs, butter, cream, cheese, and (dare I mention it?) lard. But this entailed major drawbacks from the perspective of the food industry:

  1. Butter, cream, and other natural saturated fats are expensive to produce, transport, and store. The food industry was looking to substitute cheaper ingredients to widen profit margins and make production more scalable.

  2. Foods prepared with natural saturated fats like butter, eggs, and cream vary in taste and consistency from batch to batch, depending on the diet of the animals that produced the fat. The food industry preferred to deal with synthetic or processed fats that would yield products with a standardized appearance, taste, and texture that could be mass-produced.

  3. Traditional foods were almost always consumed immediately upon preparation. The natural saturated fats employed in most recipes could go rancid if left unrefrigerated for even a few hours. The food industry wanted products with the shelf life of a mop handle.

  Big Fat Lies

  Given these considerations, the food industry had a stake in weaning the public away from the natural saturated fats that had formed an important component of the healthy human diet from hunting and gathering times forward. For 200,000 years, biologically modern humans had thrived eating saturated fats. But suddenly, in the last century, one of the boldest episodes of crony capitalist manipulation ever attempted succeeded in convincing a distracted and gullible public to change their diet in health-threatening ways.

  How did they do it? They resorted to the time-tested methods of shaping public opinion: scare tactics and the big lie. J. Walter Thompson, America’s first full-service Madison Avenue advertising agency, pointed the way. One of the eight alternative marketing strategies they concocted for the launch of Procter & Gamble’s pioneering artificial fat product, Crisco, was based on the unsubstantiated pretense that it was “a healthier alternative to cooking with animal fats.”

  Another milestone in establishing the Big Fat Lie was achieved three-quarters of a century later by one-time Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern. McGovern built his Senate career in thrall to the grain farmers for whom he advocated lavish subsidies. But he really went overboard as the chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs.

  McGovern pushed the federal government to embrace the imaginary health benefits of the low-fat, high-carb diet. These were incorporated into federal nutritional guidelines. This special-interest recipe for ill health was soon foisted on innocent children through the school lunch program.

  The inescapable corollary of reducing calories from saturated fats was to increase the ingestion of the cheapest substitute ingredients. The result was a tilt in the American diet away from consuming natural and satisfying saturated fats toward carbohydrate convections laced with toxic trans fats and artificial high fructose corn sugars.

  High Fructose Poison

  The overrepresentation of HFCS on the American table was a follow-on consequence of the Big Fat Lie, driven by the fact that HFCS is sweeter and cheaper than cane sugar. Experts on sugar metabolism, like Dr. Robert Lustig, argue that there are major differences in how your body processes different types of sugars. Any cell in your body can use glucose, but virtually the entire metabolic burden of fructose rests with your liver, where unlike glucose, it tends to get stored as fat.

  Dr. Lustig argues that the fatty acids created during fructose metabolism cause insulin resistance and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, which have skyrocketed in the United States since the high-carb, low-fat diet was adopted.

  And don’t forget, the pharmaceutical industry was waiting in the wings to enjoy windfall profits from all the damage that low-fat diets did to human health.

  Cholesterol Confusion

  The whole notion that saturated fat is bad for you began with an intellectually dishonest twentieth-century medical experiment undertaken by Nikolaj Nikolajewitsch Anitschkow in which large amounts of dietary cholesterol were cruelly fed to rabbits. If your knowledge of zoology extends even so far as having seen “Bugs Bunny’s Thanksgiving Diet” on television, you know that Bugs is always nibbling on a carrot, not a sausage.

  Rabbits don’t eat meat.

  Little wonder then that when rabbits were force-fed dietary cholesterol it literally did “clog” their arteries. But to say that this proved dietary cholesterol is bad for humans is like pretending you have proven that tuna fish can’t swim by dumping a hundred rabbits overboard in the middle of the ocean. The fact that rabbits cannot process dietary cholesterol says nothing about how omnivores like humans are affected by eating saturated fats.

  Without delving too deeply into all the intellectua
l frauds entailed in the demonization of saturated fat, The Big Fat Lie gained growing traction during my childhood as companies marketed artificial trans fats in margarine and other processed vegetable oils as healthy (and cheaper) alternatives to butter (also known as “the 70 cents spread”). They even concocted “non-dairy creamers” loaded with trans fats that required no refrigeration.

  Margarine: Edible Wax?

  This switch from natural butter to artificial trans fats in margarine took advantage of a patent formulated by the German chemist Wilhelm Normann in 1902. Normann invented a process whereby liquid oils could be hydrogenated and turned into solids. Initially, he intended the artificial hydrogenated fats to substitute for wax and tallow in the production of candles.

  But when the candle market crashed due to the spread of electricity, Procter & Gamble found a more profitable use for Normann’s invention. They acquired rights to the patent and began producing a trans fat product for human consumption called Crisco, composed of partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil. Like candles, but unlike traditional shortening, Crisco never went rancid sitting on the shelf.

  Many consumers embraced the convenience of fake foods that didn’t spoil. They also tended to enjoy the fact that margarine, unlike butter, did not need to be kept well chilled in the refrigerator. So there was no need to soften margarine before spreading it on bread.

  But undoubtedly the biggest driver of the move away from butter and cream toward a diet low in saturated fats was the Big Fat Lie—the carefully cultivated conviction that saturated fat is bad for the heart and unsaturated fats, particularly polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acids, were a much healthier alternative.