“Breakfast is Good For You” and Other Dangerous Government-Sponsored Myths
2018-05-01 · Guest: Terence Kealey (Clinical biochemist and author) · 52:01
Government dietary advice and the obesity epidemic
Bob Zadek interviews Terence Kealey, a clinical biochemist and author of Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal, about the history of government-sponsored dietary advice and its negative impact on public health. They discuss how political pressure, corporate lobbying, and government funding of “soft” sciences have led to the obesity and diabetes epidemics, specifically debunking the myth that breakfast is an essential meal.
Topics: Nutrition, Public Health, Government Regulation, Scientific Integrity, Obesity Epidemic, Type 2 Diabetes, USDA, George McGovern, Peer Review
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Terence Kealey, Caller (Michael)
The 1977 Dietary Guidelines and the Obesity Epidemic [00:23]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show in the country. Thank you so much for listening this bright and cheery Sunday morning. We are always the show of ideas, never the show of attitude.
And this morning, we dare to ask the question: if you can’t trust government, then who can you trust? Oh my god, what a scary thought. This morning, I’m happy to welcome to the show a very special guest, Terence Kealey. Terence was a professor of clinical biochemistry at the University of Buckingham, that was, by the way, or is, the only private university in the UK, and he was vice-chancellor there until 2014.
Relevant to this morning’s show, Terence is the author of Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal: Why You Should Ditch Your Morning Meal for Health and Wellbeing, which was published in 2016. And I dare say, by merely reading the title of that book, Terence has already done me a great service. He has saved me an hour of the day. I no longer have to spend an hour eating the breakfast that my government has told me is essential for my life and wellbeing. I now can spend another hour in the morning working, my favorite thing, and I don’t have to waste my time forcing sweet cereal down my throat. So Terence, already, I have benefited profoundly from our relationship. Terence, welcome to the show this morning. And thank you for that gift of one hour a day more of productive life instead of eating breakfast cereal, toast, and jam. So I appreciate, already, I have gotten profound benefits from my relationship with you.
Now, Terence, the subject this morning, in the broadest sense, we’re going to cover two topics. We’re going to learn how the government has been perhaps the leading contributing cause of diabetes and obesity. So the government, rather than being the benign protector of its citizenry, the government actually has done a somewhat massive public disservice, indeed a harm. And it has done so by not only intruding into the personal choice of what we eat and how much we eat and when we eat it—not only that, but once it has made a decision to intrude into that very personal decision, it has intruded in a way that has not been benign, that has not been merely nanny-statish, not merely annoying, but actually harmful. So the country would have been far better off if the government had not taken even that first step. So how and when did the government get involved in telling us or advising us and in some cases compelling us what to eat and what not to eat? It hasn’t always been that way. How did it start?
Terence Kealey: Well, it started because of the heart attack epidemic, which we’re beginning to forget about because it’s now declined. But let me just confirm what you’ve said. It was in 1977 that the federal government for the first time issued dietary advice. And what the federal government said was to eat more carbohydrates and less fat. And if you look at the statistics, it’s very simple. When the government said that in 1977, there was a short pause and people started in a very serious way to follow their advice. And since 1977, people in America and indeed the Western world have eaten more and more carbohydrates and less and less fat. And the obesity epidemic and the type 2 diabetes epidemic started to take off in 1980, just three years after that advice was given. And that three years was a three years by which people started to change their diet, and within three years we see the impact of the increase, the rate of increase of obesity suddenly goes up and the rate of increase of type 2 diabetes suddenly goes up. And of course, they’ve been going up ever since. And that was only three years after the government issued that dietary advice. So I think, although you can’t prove a correlation like that, the evidence is very, very strong. Because it’s carbohydrates that make you fat. It’s not, ironically, fat that makes you fat. Fat doesn’t make you fat. It’s carbohydrates that make you fat.
Political Pressure and Flawed Science [05:19]
Bob Zadek: Now, it’s important for the audience to recall that often on my show, I have observed that the phrase is “correlation is not causation.” The fact that two events or two circumstances happen to occur around the same time does not automatically mean that A caused B. It merely means we can observe two things happen at the same time. But as Terence said, it is pretty clear, most thinking people of science have concluded that this is more than mere correlation; this is in fact causation. Is that not a fair statement?
Terence Kealey: Well, you’re absolutely right. I mean, you couldn’t be more right. Correlation is not causation. However, the discipline we call history is based on the concept that someone does something in time A and then something happens in time B, and we assume some sort of causation or we wouldn’t have the discipline we call history. And this is history. In 1977, the federal government made these dietary advices. We know those dietary advices cause type 2 diabetes and obesity, and lo and behold, three years later, type 2 diabetes and obesity take off. So it is only correlation in a formal sense, but it’s also history. And history is a discipline we can put a lot of confidence in.
Bob Zadek: Now, just to humanize a bit the decision of the government—the government, of course, is an abstraction. Just to humanize it, I believe it was Senator McGovern. He was a presidential candidate, some of you may recall. George McGovern was a progressive in the Senate. And it was, I believe, Senator McGovern who made a decision. It was kind of almost comical. We often have heard the phrase “don’t just stand there, do something.” So tell us a bit about what was going on so that government decided, George McGovern and others decided somewhere around in 1977, not to just stand there but do something. How did they decide what exactly to do? And we would expect, we would hope, that before the government puts the weight and majesty of its edicts before the public, it would have been sure those—that advice, that guidance—is correct. So tell us the circumstances. How did the government come about offering and persuading us and offering guidance about bad advice? Or that bad advice?
Terence Kealey: Well, it is a sad story, actually. What happened is that there was this terrible epidemic of heart attacks in America after the Second World War. And to this day, by the way, this gets a bit complicated, we still don’t really know what caused that. It wasn’t just America; it was also in Western Europe and other rich countries. It was probably caused by, the way this gets a bit complicated, by a condition of insulin resistance or the metabolic syndrome. But forgetting that for now, no one really knew what caused it. And unfortunately, as H.L. Mencken said, for every complicated story, there is a solution that is simple and wrong.
And what the government did in 1977, under the leadership of George McGovern—don’t forget George McGovern was a deeply bruised man. He’d lost badly against Richard Nixon. He was in fact going to lose his senatorial reelection campaign three years later. He could sense that he needed something to help him with the American people as well as his own electorate, of course, in his own state. And he looked for something simple that could capture the interest of the American people. He wasn’t looking for a complicated story. He was looking for something simple so he could present himself as a hero protecting the American people from some terrible condition, in this case, heart attacks.
And he looked at what the debates were going on in the scientific community, and there was a very straightforward debate in the scientific community. On one hand, there was a professor from Minnesota called Keys, Ancel Keys. And Ancel Keys came up with a very simple story. He said, “Look, heart attacks are caused by fat in the arteries. Therefore, if we eat less fat, there’ll be less fat in the arteries. Therefore, we should avoid eating fat.” Against Ancel Keys was an army of thoughtful, intelligent, resourceful professors of biochemistry and nutrition and physiology and health, all of whom said, very sensibly, “Look, we don’t know the cause of heart attacks, but we do know that it’s naive and simplistic to say it’s simply fat in the diet.”
Corruption and the Sugar Industry [10:18]
Terence Kealey: What we also know, and this is a very sad story, is that Mark Hegsted, the Harvard professor who advised George McGovern and advised the Committee on Nutrition, the Senate Committee on Nutrition that he created, we now know that Mark Hegsted was being bribed secretly by the sugar producers. They gave him $50,000, which wasn’t a trivial sum of money in those days, to promote carbohydrates in general and sugar in particular, all secretly, of course. This couldn’t possibly come out. So we know that even the scientific advice that McGovern and his Senate were receiving was corrupt as well as wrong.
But what McGovern did, he looked at the debate in the scientific community and he said, “Here is a simple story: fat in the diet gives you fat in the blood vessels, which give you heart attacks. That is a story my electorate will understand, the media will understand, we can go with that.” And when he presented the Select Committee advice in early 1977, he was immediately challenged—and this is very interesting—he was immediately challenged by the media even at the press conference in which they basically said, “You just don’t have enough facts to justify this. Look at all these other scientists who say the opposite.” And his response was very revealing. He said, “We have a crisis in America”—and that was true, a third of all Americans were dying of heart attacks, twice as many Americans were dying from heart attacks as from cancer, say. It’s now all very different. But in those days, a third of all Americans were dying of heart attacks. He said, “We have a crisis on our hands. We cannot wait for all the data to come in. If we wait for all the data to come in, we’ll have let the American people down because they need advice from the government. Therefore, we’re going to give advice even though we don’t have all the facts in.” He actually said that. He didn’t make any disguise. He couldn’t. “We’re going to give advice even though we don’t have the facts in.” And of course, we now know he gave exactly the wrong advice, which is a very, very interesting revelation that governments can sometimes do things that are very, very stupid.
The Problem with Government-Funded Science [12:34]
Bob Zadek: And the listeners of this show and the followers of libertarian writing will recognize this principle: that we have this incredible hubris of people who are elected to public office dare to place their reelection and to use the weight and power of their office to impose policies where screw the facts, the facts will come later. Facts will only complicate matters. And for sure, the facts would have made McGovern’s reelection bid more complicated. So McGovern decided, given he was on the wrong side of so many issues, he’ll be on the right side and he will run on an anti-heart attack platform. That’s kind of a winner. And so McGovern, shrugging aside the facts, put the government down a path of intruding into our diet, in giving us health advice, and started a process that, as Terence will explain, continues even to this day to damage the health and wellbeing of Americans.
So Terence, so now the government is in the game, if you will. And now the government enjoys its role as being nutritionist-in-chief. And now it doesn’t stop there. It doesn’t stop with heart attacks as a single event. But now, as everything, once they have the power and the attention and they’re in the game of nutrition, it doesn’t stop there. And not only does nutritional advice not stop, but bad nutritional advice doesn’t stop. And Terence, before you respond, I’d just like to remind our listeners who we are welcoming calls, the lines are open at 424-BOB-SHOW, or if you wish to send a tweet @BobZadek or Facebook bob@bobzadek.com. Now Terence, now the government is in the game, and does the bad advice continue? Does it get worse? What happens from McGovern’s dipping his big toe into the water of nutrition?
Terence Kealey: The trouble is it gets worse, and the government makes it worse because science is a surprisingly fragile activity. What we now know from the work of researchers such as Ioannidis in Stanford or Nosek in Virginia is that scientists—and this is a very distressing fact—scientists will bend the facts they publish to meet the expectations of people who fund them, the expectations of people who might publish their papers, the expectations of the deans in their universities that might promote them. I.e., if you want to get a successful scientific career in America, you’ve got to publish, publish or perish. And therefore you’ve got to get funded.
And unfortunately, because a science like nutrition is such an imprecise science, it’s so easy to use bad statistics to get whatever result you want. And what we saw after 1977 is that once the federal government had decided that the anti-fat scientists were right and the anti-carbohydrate scientists were wrong, they put the money of the NIH and the NSF behind the anti-fat scientists. And so they then created more and more facts to support their theory because they funded only those scientists who used the statistics that they could use to produce the results that got them more publications. And so the government actually corrupted science.
Let me just talk about something very relevant today, which is what we’re seeing at the EPA with Scott Pruitt. I am not going to defend Scott Pruitt. I’m not going to take a view on Scott Pruitt. It would be inappropriate for me as a Briton to comment on American politics. That would be bad manners. But I can say one thing about Scott Pruitt’s science policies, which is he’s saying that the EPA from now on should accept only scientific papers where all the data is available to the reader and which is infinitely more transparent than is currently happening in the world of science today. And there, Scott Pruitt is right. The trouble with science is, except for the very hard sciences like physics and math and chemistry, but then once you get to the soft sciences, the social sciences, it’s only too easy for researchers to apply poor statistics to get the result they want rather than the result that reflects the truth. And that’s what the government did in nutrition. They took a science—nutrition is a very weak science. The numbers of papers in nutrition that are well-written are shockingly low. Look at newspapers. Every week, something that was dangerous last week is good this week, and you know it’ll be dangerous next week. That speaks of a very weak science. And the government made it a hundred times worse by backing one horse against the other because it sounded simple for the electorate and therefore distorted science and took this vulnerable science and made it much worse to produce the facts they wanted.
The Peer Review Myth [18:11]
Bob Zadek: Now, we know in science, the gold standard is a peer-reviewed paper. That is, a paper that is written by one scientist or a group of scientists and then independently reviewed by a second or even a third group of scientists to confirm the findings. Peer-reviewed by other scientists is kind of the gold standard. That helps us laypeople give the appropriate level of credibility to scientific discoveries or scientific conclusions. But here we have a system—if there is an opposite of peer-reviewed, it is a scientific paper that is reviewed for acceptability by Congress. Can you imagine? And Congress doesn’t do it as scientists. They do it as people who desperately want to keep their job. So their motivation is as nasty as a motivation can be. And as Terence pointed out, science is expensive and somebody has got to pay. And when government pays, the piper gets to call the tune. And the government buys its scientific facts. “We would like to buy these scientific facts. Who’s going to pay to us?” And therefore, the objectivity, the fact part of it is gone forever. Is that an overstatement, Terence, or is that pretty much how it works?
Terence Kealey: It’s even worse than you think. The next person who says to me, not at the other end of a phone line but in person, that peer review is the gold standard for good science, I shall personally strangle. What people don’t understand is that scientific papers are not definitive statements. What a scientific paper is, is like the arguments made by a lawyer in court for one side or another. Scientists are always clashing in their ideas, or you hope they’re clashing in their ideas and trying to prove one argument against another. It’s only years later, when we see all the evidence on one side and all the evidence on another side, that we can finally begin to conclude what is happening and what is not happening.
All that peer review says is that one group of scientists look at another group of scientists and say, “Well, you know, they work at a good university. I met them at a conference and they seem perfectly reasonable people. There’s nothing here that’s grotesque. They haven’t said that it’s the alignment of the stars. Therefore, it must be all right.” Peer review cannot do what people think it does. You can do peer review in pure math because if you have a paper for review, you can actually sit with a piece of pencil and a paper and actually revisit all those calculations and see if it’s true or not. Peer review in something like epidemiology or nutrition, you haven’t got a hope. For a start, you don’t have access to the raw data. This is the whole Scott Pruitt argument. You don’t have access to the raw data because these disciplines do not insist that scientists give you the raw data. So all you can do is take the word of other scientists. And that, of course, is a very, very vulnerable thing to do because you don’t actually know how honest or accurate they’ve been. And of course, the statistics—and there’s a convention in many areas of science, there’s a convention that everyone agrees to, to use poor statistics because everyone knows that papers need to be published for careers to be pursued. So peer review is not the defense the public thinks it is. Only time is that defense. But government makes it worse by funding one side against another and therefore—let me give you an example of how scientists are dishonest, sometimes in the good way.
For example, we all believe, everybody in the world believes, there is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation. Even one bit of radiation increases the chances of your getting cancer. We now know that’s not true. We now know that the scientists who said that knew it wasn’t true. They even won Nobel Prizes for saying things they knew were not true. But what the scientists were trying to do at the time of the radiation scare was to stop the Americans and the Russians producing so much nuclear explosions that we really would move into very dangerous areas of radioactivity. And so to scare the world into thinking the right thing, they said there is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation because the scientists knew that if they said there was such a thing as a safe dose of radiation, then the Americans would blame the Russians and the Russians would blame the Americans and we’d really would move into a dangerous area. Those are scientists lying for what they think is the public good, and indeed it may even have been the public good. But it makes the point: you can’t trust scientists. They have their own agendas. When I look at a piece of nutrition research—and nutrition is about the worst area of science I’ve ever come across, and breakfast is one of the worst—when I look at a piece of nutrition research, I have learned that the only way to read that paper, even if it’s been peer-reviewed, particularly if it’s been peer-reviewed, is to ask myself, “Why and how are these lying bastards lying to me?” And the fact it’s peer-reviewed is no protection because if you are supporting a particular scientific point of view that you want to push, like for example there is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation, and you secretly know there is, and your peer reviewer secretly know there is, but you both think we’ve got to push this because we’ve got to stop the Russians with their nuclear tests, then peer review actually simply becomes collusion. Ultimately, it’s only time and an informed general public. But the government will make it worse by backing and funding one side against another.
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m spending a wonderful morning talking to Dr. Terence Kealey. We are discussing the government’s role in advising us what to eat, especially or not especially, but including breakfast. Now, given the time of our show, I suspect most of our listeners are about to go to breakfast. Do not, do not leave to go to breakfast until you hear what Terence has to say about breakfast, the most dangerous meal of the day. We’ll be back in 60 short seconds. Cancel your breakfast reservations until we come back after break and we’ll take some callers when we come back. Please stay tuned.
[Ad Break]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thanks so much for listening this morning with my guest Terence Kealey. Dr. Kealey is a professor of clinical biochemistry. He taught at the University of Buckingham, the only private university in the UK, and he was vice-chancellor there until 2014. Terence has recently written a book last year, Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal: Why You Should Ditch Your Morning Meal for Health and Wellbeing. Before we go on to discuss breakfast, Terence, our listeners are standing by waiting to see if they should cancel their breakfast reservations. I’d like to take a caller or two. Michael, welcome to the show this morning and what’s on your mind?
Reductionism in Nutrition [27:00]
Caller (Michael): Oh, thanks Bob. Thanks for having an interesting subject and a well-informed guest. A problem I have with the government’s advice and with your advice, Terence, is it’s based on reductionist science. It looks at the elements in the foods rather than the foods themselves. It’s like saying there are 500 B-flats in a Beethoven symphony, so if you have 500 B-flats in your symphony, it’ll be great. And advising people to have more or less fat or more or less carbohydrates is like advising people to have more or fewer B-flats in your symphony. That’s reductionist science.
Terence Kealey: Well, let me just—sorry, well, you’re quite right, by the way. You are quite correct. And you sound a very informed person, so I think you know what I’m about to say. What you’re describing is the so-called nutritionist error. Is that what you’re trying to get at?
Caller (Michael): I’m getting at recommending whole foods and looking at population studies. What do healthy populations eat? What foods do they eat? Not what elements of foods, how many micronutrients or phytonutrients they eat, but the whole foods. And all this research is based on this reductionism. So that’s my problem with it.
Terence Kealey: Well, you’re quite right. Let me just say this. You’re quite right. And actually, if you look what the American Heart Foundation and the other big charities are now saying, they’re now talking about the Mediterranean diet or the DASH diet. I.e., they’re not going down the reductionist route; they’re going on the holistic route. Science is fundamentally reductionist. One shouldn’t despise reductionism. Reductionism has been a very important aspect of science. But when it comes to diet, you do have to look holistically. The best dietary advice these days is holistic, it’s not reductionist. It talks particularly about the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet, and you are right and we are all in agreement with you. It was the government that introduced this reductionist about carbohydrates and stuff, and what we’re showing is all that’s wrong. But you are quite right. You need a healthy diet, you need to look at it holistically, you need a Mediterranean diet, and you are correct.
Bob Zadek: Michael, thanks so much for your call this morning.
The Breakfast Myth [29:06]
Bob Zadek: Now Terence, your book and part of our show will be devoted to, especially given the time that I broadcast, to the subject of breakfast. Now, I of course am one of those vulnerable millions who kind of believed what the government and what my mother told me, and that is: don’t dare start the day without a good breakfast. And I had my sugar-coated whatevers and my jam on my bread. I guess I felt better for it, not that sure. But maybe that wasn’t such great advice, was it Terence? And the advice originated from government, if I am not mistaken.
Terence Kealey: Well, actually, here you are mistaken, but you’re forgiven because government reinforced it. I’m afraid your mother was—
Bob Zadek: Ah, it was the breakfast cereal companies.
Terence Kealey: It was, yes. All you have to do and all your readers and listeners have to do is to go on Google Scholar—not Google, because that covers everything—Google Scholar. I.e., what scientific papers are published in this field. Go on Google Scholar, anybody can do this, you just go into Google Scholar, put in “breakfast” and look at the people who paid for the first 10 papers on breakfast. I.e., look at the 10 most popular, recently published scientific papers on breakfast, go to the bottom of the paper and see who funded them. I’m not going to name any of the names on this show because I don’t want to be sued by anybody, but you will discover that all the papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature telling you how important breakfast is were funded by the breakfast cereal manufacturers and sometimes by the bacon or egg manufacturers.
And there’s a reason for that. If there’s ever been—we don’t believe in conspiracies, only naive people believe in conspiracies—but my god, there’s such a thing as collusion. And there’s total collusion to push the idea that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and you should eat like a king. And that is the collusion between the breakfast manufacturers and, I regret to say, naive nutritionists funded by the government. It is a wholly dangerous meal because you eat it at the time of day when your body is most naturally resistant to glucose and insulin. I won’t go into all that now, why. But even more dangerous, once you eat breakfast, then you get hungry at 11:00, and then you eat something at 11:00, and then you’re hungry for lunch, and then you’re hungry in the middle of the afternoon. Breakfast precipitates, particularly if you eat carbohydrates for breakfast, it precipitates hunger for the rest of the day. Whereas if you skip breakfast, you’ll find, unless you’re very, very unlucky, the vast majority of people find they can go all the way through to lunch without feeling hungry. They won’t need that mid-morning snack, and of course they haven’t eaten those calories. And then they can eat their lunch and then they can eat their dinner. They’re eating many fewer calories in a much shorter time window. Breakfast is a dangerous meal, and the only people who say otherwise are those who are funded by the cereal companies.
Bob Zadek: When I get calls on Monday from Battle Creek, Michigan, I’m going to direct them to you, Terence. I just—I don’t want to get—I don’t want to get all the heat. But your point is well taken. And there’s a subtext here that I don’t want to have lost on our listeners. And that is, once again, we have advertising dressed up in the imprimatur of science. So science has now become an advertising tool, and junk science at that. And so we have once again, we have George McGovern using science to personal advantage, or junk science to personal advantage. We have business using science or junk science to economic advantage. So it’s so clear from what you have explained to us that science or and facts, facts can be purchased. Scientific, quote, “facts,” close quote, can be purchased, which means consumers who are the victims of the alleged science, the alleged facts, the junk science, have a difficult task in sorting out what can and who can we believe. And I guess the problem all comes about with who pays for science. And you have written a lot and spoken a lot about how science is funded. And tell us your thoughts on that, because that seems to be the root of the problem.
Science vs. Technology [33:55]
Terence Kealey: You are so correct. You’ve got it absolutely right. By the way, we’re all libertarians, we all believe in the market. But libertarians also know that markets often need protection against individual companies. I just wanted to get that in there. We believe in markets, not in individual companies and their interests. But you’re absolutely right. The best way of understanding the problem of science is the very nice phrase: “It’s technology that keeps science honest.” I.e., there’s no question, unless you’re one of those lunatics, that NASA managed to put several men on the moon. They got those rockets out there. That is technology; you can trust it. Go to your garage, get in your motorcar, turn it on. That’s technology; you can trust it. And you can get into your car and you can compare it against a Model T, and you can see that over the last 50, 80 years, whatever it is, the technology of cars has improved. We can all judge technology. That is what keeps science honest.
Science is very, very hard to judge because scientific papers are very hard to read even for fellow scientists, let alone for non-scientists. And what the government has done is a catastrophe. Until 1940, all science in this country was paid for by industries or medical charities like American Heart or American Diabetes. I.e., science was always paid for by the people who wanted ultimately to turn it into technology, and it was that technology that kept the science honest. But after the Second World War, the federal government said, “No, we’re not going to do that anymore.” Although it’s a model that’s made us the richest and most successful country in the world—1890, the Americans became the richest country in the world, all without the government funding of science—after 1940 and particularly 1950, the American government said, “No, the model to follow is the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and Kaiser’s Germany, which funded lots and lots of science.” Why on earth the federal government thought the Kaiser’s Germany or the Soviet Union was a model to follow is really mysterious. But anyway, that was the decision they took. And they started in 1950, the National Science Foundation is created, and the American government started to fund science for the specific purpose of removing scientists away from technology, away from the market, away from the big charities and the hospitals, away from anything by which science could actually be judged by technology. And now they said scientists are to be judged and science is to be judged only by fellow scientists through so-called peer review, which just meant that science became a corruptible and corrupted activity by which scientists started to produce data and findings that satisfied the government and their funders. Science in isolation, which is what the federal government produces, has gone wrong, badly wrong. And even scientists recognize this; it’s called the reproducibility crisis. Half of all papers in psychology can’t be reproduced. Half of all papers in the social sciences can’t be reproduced. It’s unbelievable what’s going on in science at the moment. And this is because the government consciously uncoupled science from technology. We can all judge technology. Only a handful of specialists can judge science. And by leaving science to be judged only by scientists, thanks to the federal government, we have corrupted science.
Bob Zadek: Of course, not only did we copy Kaiser Germany’s—Germany’s Kaiser in science funding of science, but also in Social Security. But that’s a story for another day. We’ll go back to that some other time. But Social Security didn’t work out that great either.
The Food Pyramid and USDA [37:42]
Bob Zadek: Now, going back to nutrition, I remember growing up with this food pyramid, which told me at the top of the pyramid what you should eat a little bit of, and at the bottom of the pyramid was the good stuff, and you worked up the pyramid to the bad stuff at the top. And that was all the government was promoting. There were cartoons everywhere. I was taught that in grade school. We were all taught about the pyramid. Tell us the story of the pyramid, then replaced by the plate. And was that yet another example of the government not only intruding but intruding and giving bad advice?
Terence Kealey: Well, two things. First of all, who produced the pyramid? The Department of Agriculture. This wasn’t produced by a group of doctors; this is the Department of Agriculture. And who are the Department of Agriculture the big cheerleaders for? They’re the big cheerleaders for farmers. The food pyramid was created to help the farming profession, to help farming lobbyists. The food pyramid is a scandal. Actually, it’s quite a useful pyramid. If you turn it upside down and do the exact opposite of what the Department of Agriculture tell you to do, it’s actually not bad advice. You just have to say to yourself, “What does the Department of Agriculture tell me to do? That’s really helpful, thank you very much. I’ll do the exact opposite and I’ll be fine.” So the food pyramid is produced by the Department of Agriculture to protect farmers. Oh, there’s a consumer out there? Well, that’s someone else’s problem; we’re the Department of Agriculture. And it is, if you think about it, a shocking, shocking conflict of interests.
So to answer your question, the food pyramid is a scandal. The advice it gave is completely wrong. It was very good for farmers, very bad for the consumer. What we actually know is the Mediterranean diet. The Mediterranean diet, which of course comes from the Mediterranean, is a diet low in things like red meat, low in bread, absolutely no margarine and those horrible trans fats. I mean, one of the terrible things the federal government did is to stop us eating healthy butter and start eating unhealthy margarine. And it’s—I mean, that was a pretty terrible thing that the federal government did. Margarine is really bad for you compared to butter. But what a healthy diet of all is full of legumes and nuts and vegetables and fish and olive oil, low on—very, very low in fact—on any form of processed food, low on processed bread, and that is basically the diet that you need. And the pyramid should be burned down. Remember, pyramids are for corpses. That’s why pyramids were invented by the ancient Egyptians: to promote the interests of corpses. And we don’t want to promote the interests of corpses. We don’t want the Department of Agriculture telling us what’s good for farmers. We actually want health for ordinary people, which means a Mediterranean diet and no processed food.
Salt, Sugar, and Regulation [40:52]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek. I’m spending a wonderful morning speaking with Terence Kealey. We are talking about the government’s intrusion into nutrition, what is good for us, what is bad for us, and the government encouraging us to do what is bad. The government, through its own selfish motives, is increasing the occurrence of obesity, perhaps type 2 diabetes as well, and in general messing us up in a pretty bad way for pretty bad purposes.
Now, I remember, it was probably a decade ago when Mayor Bloomberg was the mayor of New York City and he went out on a tear about salt. Oh my god, did he hate salt. If you served salt in a restaurant, you went to jail, you had to disclose how much salt. Everyone was encouraged not to eat salt. And shortly thereafter, we had another condiment, sugar, which was in the crosshairs. Tell us about salt and sugar. Was Bloomberg a superb nutritionist in giving those mandates and imposing that very, very onerous regime upon restaurants in New York City?
Terence Kealey: Well, it’s an interesting question. Why do we not increasingly believe in the death penalty? It’s not that we don’t believe that bad people should be executed. Of course bad people might well be executed. The trouble is that innocent people are sometimes found guilty. And so people are pulling back from the death penalty, not because they don’t believe in the death penalty as such, but because they understand that courts are run by human beings, human beings make mistakes, and sometimes innocent people get convicted. And it’s the same with salt and sugar. If we knew absolutely and for certain that these were dangerous, then of course you might reasonably have legislation. For example, we know that cyanide is very dangerous, and we would all support the restaurant regulators in saying that restaurateurs may not put cyanide in the food because we know that cyanide is dangerous. The question is, are salt and sugar dangerous? And the answer is we don’t know.
The reality, the best answer we can come up with, by the way, is that salt most certainly most probably is not dangerous. The big myths of salt being dangerous have largely now been exploded. And salt was like cholesterol. People thought that salt was the cause of heart attacks. They came up with apparently convincing science, which has been largely discredited. Salt, actually too little salt is as dangerous as too much salt. And most of us are very good at regulating our salt, so in the main salt’s probably not dangerous at all. Sugar probably is dangerous. My own personal belief is that it probably is dangerous. However, the data’s very strange. We know, for example, that countries like Australia and Britain, their incidence of consumption of sugar has gone down really quite a lot, and yet their incidence of obesity and type 2 diabetes continues to go down. So even sugar is actually a difficult thing to quantify. So by making these things illegal or by taxing them or by regulating them, you are making decisions based on imperfect knowledge. Just like when you send someone to the death—to be sentenced to death, you may well be making a mistake. My own personal feeling is that we should leave this to consumers and restaurateurs to make up their own minds. It’s not for the government to get involved unless there was certainty, like in the case of cyanide. Transparency, yes. If someone like Bloomberg were to say, “Look, on every menu you have to give the salt content, the sugar content, the carbohydrate content,” like when you go to the supermarket and you buy something, that’s fine. Transparency of information, fine. Transparency of regulation in the absence of certainty, well, you’re going to be making mistakes, and who wants mistakes?
Bob Zadek: My only comment on transparency is there is a difficulty. First of all, there is a cost. There is a cost that is passed along to the consumer. And to in effect force a consumer to pay for something that is utterly useless is transparency in a bad way. It comes up with GMOs, a fight we are having today. Your native continent, Western Europe, has not good feelings about GMO, genetically modified foods or organisms. And Western Europe as a whole is fearful of GMOs based upon no science whatever. Indeed, any science there is says that GMOs are benign, but they help productivity and they help feed the world and things of that nature. So to some degree, disclosures are not free and may be harmful in the sense that it imposes a cost that nobody benefits from.
Terence Kealey: Yes, well, Western Europe is mad about GMOs. I mean, just insane. It’s ridiculous, the anti-GMO feeling in Western Europe, and it’s a form of anti-scientism. It’s a way of saying we no longer trust the food companies. And America’s got this right. America’s got that thing right. I mean, you know, America has other things wrong as well, but in that area—one, I mean, basically you and I aren’t going to disagree. I mean, you could argue that there is a cost and perhaps in a completely free market individuals will say, “Well, I want to go to restaurant A rather than restaurant B because they’ll give me the ingredients and I’m prepared to pay an extra dollar for my dinner for the cost of that.” And actually, if you think about the quality of food advice we’ve received over the last 50 years, that might be perfectly rational to say, “Actually, I don’t want the information because actually I don’t know what’s good and bad for me, and the very fact that you’ve got the information on, say, sugar implies that sugar’s bad and that implication may in fact be false.” So I’m with you all the way on that. I would say I completely respect your point of view. Speaking for myself, I personally would be prepared to pay an extra dollar to the restaurant that gives me the information. But if you were to say it’s not for the government to impose it as a central dictat and fiat, I would respect your point of view. I think the market would then give me the sort of restaurant that I would want, but I respect your point of view. After all, we’re both libertarians.
Final Advice [48:11]
Bob Zadek: I think yesterday, if I’m not mistaken, yesterday or Friday, a new regulation came into effect requiring all restaurants to disclose on printed menus the calorie content. And of course, the pizza industry is insane with this requirement because when you order pizza, as you know, there are maybe 11 million combinations of pizza you can have, and they have to calculate the calorie content for each of those 11 million pizza orders. And so we have this issue about calorie content, which seems kind of benign. Why not be told the calorie content of the triple bacon cheeseburger you’re going to order? Well and good, except I believe, Terence, that the evidence seems to be that when restaurants disclose calorie content, it has no effect on consumer choice. That consumers consume the same foods they would have consumed without the information about calorie content. And that is industry-wide, quite an expensive disclosure.
Terence Kealey: Yes, well, I’m very happy to take your point of view that we can empirically look at the benefits of these decisions and work out they’re not empirically valuable. I can also take your point of view that we’re both libertarians and that we therefore don’t, you know, we believe that individual customers can be trusted to make their own decisions and we can leave it to markets. But I also believe in transparency, and sometimes fellow libertarians can agree on all these different principles and they’re not mutually exclusive. You can’t have all these principles all happily working together. And libertarians, and we are the only really civilized people, libertarians, we can agree to differ as friends. And actually, we’re not differing, you and I, because actually I don’t know the answer to these things. All I’m saying is I would always be interested to hear the argument that there should be transparency, certainly in science there should be transparency. And I’m very happy to be told I’m wrong, but unlike you, I think I’m more interested in the argument before dismissing it. But we’re both libertarians and we both basically agree on the same premises, we’re trying to reach the same conclusions, we might just have different emphases one way or another.
Bob Zadek: The challenge you have, Terence, now as we have a minute left: what’s the big change you would advocate for to fix all of the evils we have covered in our hour together this morning? You have about a minute to solve huge problems. What’s your message to our listeners?
Terence Kealey: My message with nutrition has to be: don’t believe anything you’re told by government or industry. And actually, and it’s very difficult this, look at the populations that seem to live longest and healthiest, and they seem to be around the Mediterranean. Go for the classic traditional—look at what Ancel Keys himself did. This man who gave us such terrible advice, what did he do with his life? He lived to be 101. Why is that? He emigrated to Italy and he ate a Mediterranean diet until he was 101. He didn’t even follow his own advice. So don’t do what Ancel Keys said, do what he did. Go and live just south of Naples in a lovely warm climate and eat—
Bob Zadek: Terence, we’re running out of time. I have to say, have a good Sunday and enjoy your breakfast. This is Bob Zadek. I’ll be back next Sunday. Thanks for listening.