A Food Police Review

Food activists are all jeer, no cheer
Published: 01:00 a.m., Friday, December 11, 2009
By J. Justin Wilson

'Tis the season -- for eating. But while the holiday season offers us an excuse to indulge in our favorite culinary fantasies, some activist groups are killing the joy with doomsday proclamations about our food. It's time to carve up their myth-making and set the record straight about which dietary do-gooders deserve to be on Santa's "Naughty" list.

Just in time for holiday feasts, a new report spotlights spinach, eggs, cheese, tuna and even tomatoes as some of the supposed top 10 "riskiest" foods regulated by the Food and Drug Administration. The report's author is the notorious Center for Science in the Public Interest, commonly known as the self-anointed "food police" for its overzealous prosecution of any food, drink, or ingredient that might possibly be bad for us.

Interestingly, some of the foods CSPI now deems "risky" were previously featured by CSPI in a top 10 list of "Super Foods for Better Health." So a food is good for us until CSPI decides it's actually bad for us and can breathlessly fuel a media scare campaign saying so. Flip-flopping CSPI surely will find coal in its stockings.

It's not the first time CSPI has been a dietary Scrooge. In the mid-1980s, CSPI launched an all-out assault on fast-food restaurants and encouraged them to drop saturated fat-laden oil and replace it with partially hydrogenated oil containing trans fats. Not long after, however, CSPI's executive director, Michael Jacobson, was calling for restaurants to dump them.

PCRM shares the vegan agenda with PETA, meaning no cheese, no dairy and definitely no hot dogs or grilled chicken.

In reality, however, PCRM is only dressed up as a respectable group of doctors: Less than 4 percent of the "Physicians Committee" members graduated from medical school. PCRM president Neal Barnard ridiculously writes that "to give a child animal products is a form of child abuse" and has hysterically argued that cheese is tantamount to "morphine on a cracker." (If these vegans had a little eggnog, they might not be such Grinches.) Read More

There is no doubt that the groups mentioned in this article have a goal to change the way we produce and eat food in our society. The article correctly points out how these food police regularly flip-flop on their recommendations. That’s why the most simple nutritional advice is still the best. If you eat a balanced diet that includes meat and dairy products in the proper amounts, you will be just fine. Every fad in eating that comes along tells us we should shun certain food groups. That lasts for a few years and then the next fad comes along. Eating a balanced diet is not a fad. That’s the lesson all of us need to learn and teach to our children.