Seven Events That Made America America (20 page)

The fact that government—through its very public-health agenda—might be more responsible for the rapid rise in obesity apparently never crossed the mind of the dietary fat-equals-heart-disease crowd. Yale’s Kelly Brownell, who headed the school’s center for weight disorders, complained that American culture “encourages overeating and physical inactivity.”
⁶⁵
He never considered that Americans’ work—largely relegated to the office instead of the field—was becoming more sedentary. At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control offered evidence that Americans were “no less active at the end of the 1990s than they were at the beginning of that decade. . . .”
⁶⁶
More than 40 million Americans belonged to health clubs (which had revenues of some $16 billion by 2005), and as early as 1977
The New York Times
noted an “exercise explosion” and three years later
The Washington Post
proclaimed a “fitness revolution.”
⁶⁷
Sporting goods sales in America topped $52 billion. Nor was it the case that Americans had “supersized” everything: from 1971 to 2000, average caloric intake only rose by 150 in the United States, while men’s intake of fat decreased and women’s intake increased only slightly.
⁶⁸
What had changed was the nature of the foods consumed, not their caloric count.

Buried beneath the obesity hysteria was a deep hatred of capitalism and prosperity. Health problems of all sorts, especially cancer, continued to be blamed on capitalism, industrialism, and the West. The WHO and its International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), beginning in the 1950s, had studied cancer rates in Africa and compared them to those in the United States and some European nations, concluding that “most” human cancers were caused by environmental cancers and were preventable.
⁶⁹
Precisely because the American food industry expanded worldwide, it became a target for consumer advocates and health zealots, resulting in the demonization of such fast-food companies as McDonald’s. Leading the charge were polemics such as
Fast Food Nation
, aided and abetted by such supposedly public-interest firms as Michael Jacobson’s Center for Science in the Public Interest. By the 1990s, tort lawyers had joined the crusade, bringing suits against food corporations for causing obesity. Congress passed legislation protecting companies from such frivolous suits before any tobacco-type pattern could set in. According to
Science
magazine in 2003, “Our culture’s apparent obsession with ‘getting the best value’ may underlie the increased offering and selection of larger portions. . . .”
⁷⁰

This fit well with the notion that the United States consumed too much of the planet’s resources, long a canard regarding the issue of energy use. In 2003, nutritionists David and Marcia Pimentel lent academic credibility to the war on meat by claiming in the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition
that meat-eating and use of fossil fuels were inexorably intertwined, and the salvation of the planet lay in a vegan diet.
⁷¹
Basing their analysis on American
overpopulation
(at a time when the world was already reaching its population peak and most nations had a more serious
underpopulation
problem to deal with), the Pimentels gave academic cover to the radical vegan movement, which was already partly supported by the antifat, heart-disease lobby. Then came
Scientific American
, which had already signed on to the bogus global warming theories with its alarmist article “How Meat Contributes to Global Warming.”
⁷²
Cow flatulence, farms that “give rise to greenhouse gases,” and the process of raising just one pound of beef for the dinner table (which requires ten pounds of plant protein), they argue, all contribute to the dangerous warming of the planet.

Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine picked up the point and in 2009 said that “Food production accounts for about one fifth of greenhouse gases,” and that “moving about in a heavy body is like driving a gas guzzler.”
⁷³
Published in the
Sun
newspaper under the astoundingly honest (from the perspective of the study’s authors) headline, “Fatties Cause Global Warming,” the study claimed that each fat person was responsible for emitting a ton more of climate-warming carbon per year. Studies such as these merely constituted the natural convergence of the antiautomobile, anticapitalism, vegan, and environmental movements—a call to limit all human freedoms (indeed, all human characteristics) as “dangerous to the planet earth.”

At the root of all this hatred of meat was a hatred for humans, for the authors of such polemics were always quick to point out that even asparagus absorbed a “CO
₂
equivalent of 3.2 ounces.”
⁷⁴
Clearly, even mandating a meatless diet wouldn’t be sufficient for the zealots, who would then attack vegan diets as “un-earth-friendly.” (You can just hear the critics discussing how plants “scream” at this point.) If people were the ultimate target, “Big Food”—capitalism embodied in caloric intake—was the immediate villain. Books such as
Fast Food Nation
began the assault on “Big Food” through implausible diet regimens and selective hysteria-ridden “facts.” Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary
Super Size Me
followed the filmmaker as he consumed only McDonald’s food for a thirty-day period and gained about 24 pounds. Later, however, a college student named Jared Fogle—who weighed in at 425—developed a “Subway diet,” based on the Subway sandwich chain’s turkey hoagies, and lost a total of 240 pounds. When a fellow student wrote a story about his weight loss, Subway hired him as a spokesman. Meanwhile,
Fast Food Nation
, Eric Schlosser’s diatribe against fast food and conservatism in general, became mandatory reading on college campuses as faculties attempted to propagandize via freshman orientations that required students to read the book. Even Schlosser had to admit that no scientific study had established a relationship between fast food and obesity, but insisted that there was a connection nonetheless.
⁷⁵
Like Barbara Ehrenreich’s attack on entry-level jobs in America (finally successfully challenged by none other than Adam Shepard, a college student who, after being dropped in a large southeastern city with only $25 and a sleeping bag, had a full-time job, a car, an apartment, and money in the bank at the
end of a year
),
Fast Food Nation
demonized all fast food as though it were eaten three times a day, seven days a week.
⁷⁶

Larger food giants, though, soon found themselves in the crosshairs. Food corporations marketed foods low in nutritional value, duping children into buying cereals for the toys. (Unstated in these claims that Americans were getting fatter was a fundamental contradiction, given that most of the “experts” believed in evolution: if evolution meant for people to be less active and use their brains more, weren’t heavier people “natural”?) With renewed concerns about the cost of health care came a fresh assault on obesity, zeroing in on “unhealthy restaurants.” In 2009 the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council issued a report detailing strategies for local government to combat an “epidemic” of childhood obesity by using zoning and land-use regulations that would “restrict fast food establishments” near schools or public playgrounds.
⁷⁷
The report, called “Local Government Actions to Prevent Childhood Obesity,” naturally encouraged higher taxes on foods it deemed harmful or of “minimal nutritional value” and similarly called for caloric information on all menus from restaurants with more than twenty stores. Already, some governments had taken actions, such as Los Angeles, which placed a ban on opening any new fast food restaurants in East Los Angeles. Astoundingly, the report even discussed restrictions on advertising for “physically inactive services and goods,” such as cars and video games!

Given the politicization of diet, it is not surprising—in fact, now it seems entirely predictable—that the government began to politicize climate with “global warming,” one of the biggest scams in history that, conveniently, dovetailed with the war on meat. But this crusade didn’t come as easily. As early as 1975, when the government was still learning how to dictate dietary choices,
Newsweek
ran a major article by Peter Gwynne called “The Cooling World.”
⁷⁸
Gwynne saw “ominous signs” that the “Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically,” with horrific consequences for food production. The “great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R.” were “destined to feel its impact,” he predicted. Farmers had seen growing seasons decline in England, and the “most devastating outbreak of tornados” in recent memory had struck the United States. All this, readers were told, was the result of global cooling.

Were it not so sad, the hysteria generated by the media on matters so out of human control as the weather would be laughable. Yet within a matter of years after Gwynne warned of an impending “Little Ice Age,” liberal environmental activists jumped ship to warn of another catastrophe, the warming of the planet due to human influences. Scientists had already identified a “greenhouse effect” as one of the results of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This “discovery” stemmed from efforts by regulators to control smog in the late 1960s and early 1970s by reducing auto emissions. The theory was that carbon emissions in the atmosphere would trap heat, causing the earth to warm. Yet equatorial sea surface temperatures had remained within plus or minus one degree for centuries—perhaps billions of years.
⁷⁹
Studies even showed that a
doubling
of the earth’s CO
₂
cover would have a small effect on temperatures.

A complete history of the war on the automobile would require its own book. B. Bruce-Briggs and John Heitmann, among others, have documented the attacks on cars that have persisted for decades.
⁸⁰
“Green” parties in Europe had already been formed as early as the 1970s, mostly by the Socialist Left, as a more palatable cover for opposing economic growth, and the concern in the 1980s was less a warming planet than the loss of the ozone layer over the earth. When this proved a phantom threat, the environmentalists turned to temperature variance as evidence that humans were hurting the planet.

Tom Paine once said, “He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression.” In the decades after Eisenhower’s heart attack, intrusions on economic liberty were common, and during Vietnam, many claimed that their political liberty was in jeopardy. But perhaps the most insidious threat of all was the erosion of freedom in the name of “a person’s own good.” At the very time that some well-meaning, but myopic, Americans sought to limit everyone’s freedoms—to choose what to eat, what to drink, even what to drive—under the auspices of “helping” them become “healthier,” Paine would have screamed, “Someone guard them from oppression!” Edmund Burke seemed to have the government’s diet police and global warming in mind when he wrote in 1784, “The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.”

In this case, the delusion was that medical science had settled on what constituted healthy diets, and that big government needed to protect us from Twinkies or Humvees. Yet in both cases—even if the science firmly established the dangers of either—no individual should surrender personal liberty to the discretion of faceless bureaucrats who can
never
have an individual’s best interest at heart. Of course, in neither the case of the dietary fat hypothesis (note the key word,
hypothesis
) nor that of global warming is the science anywhere near settled. Quite the contrary; recent studies are increasingly suggesting both are wrong. But that is a matter for science, not government. When Jefferson said, “It behooves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself to resist invasions of it in the case of others,” he no doubt was referring to political issues. Yet what have food and transportation in our day become but political issues? If Ike knew what he’d started, he’d likely have had another heart attack!

JAMES MADISON TO CONGRESS, APRIL 20, 1789

 

 

 

 

A
s the picks and hammers began chipping into the Berlin Wall in November 1989, “People Got to Be Free” by the Rascals blasted out from nearby boom boxes.
¹
The fall of the Wall was primarily the result of eight years’ worth of economic and military pressure from President Ronald Reagan, with important moral support from Pope John Paul II and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Yet lost amid the flying cement and cheers of onlookers was the fact that a thoroughly American institution, rock and roll music, which the Beatles had revitalized more than twenty-five years earlier, had made a significant and quite overlooked contribution to defeating communism. When, on November 9, the checkpoints opened and border guards didn’t fire on the tens of thousands of East Berliners who stormed the entry points to West Berlin, the beat of a new generation behind the Iron Curtain, largely influenced by American rock, became truly audible for the first time.