Tyranny begins with a scolding

When Ron Paul recently asked “why is it we can’t put into our body whatever we want?” he was speaking in the context of the war on drugs. But the war on drugs might have merely supplied the pretext, and set the stage for a much broader application of the question.

These days, what Ron Paul said applies every bit as much to food.

A radical vegan advocacy group called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is showing up in the news lately. Twice in one day, which is too many times for my comfort. Seriously, I don’t like public scolds of any sort, and this outfit does nothing but issue public scoldings. They seem to especially enjoy scolding people who just want to have fun and enjoy life, like the people trying to enjoy Iowa’s Blue Ribbon Bacon Festival:

A group of vegetarian doctors has been skewering Iowans over the event for months. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, says he wants to publicize the flip side of bacon.

He says the PCRM plans to hand out fliers with warnings about how bacon “rotting in your mouth” potentially has various health risks, including cancer and diabetes.

“With so much attention focused on this most unhealthful food, we want to make sure our message is there,” says Dr. Barnard.

The group had already sizzled up trouble in advance of the event, starting with a billboard that made graphic reference—with skull and crossbones—to the potential health risks of eating bacon.

PCRM doesn’t limit itself to bacon-bashing: It also has taunted cheeseheads with a billboard near the Green Bay Packers’ football stadium and hot-dog lovers at a Nascar race in Indianapolis.

Still, the anti-bacon campaign is proving to be an uphill battle. After canvassing the state, the doctors’ group has so far enlisted only six volunteers, and has been locked out of the event’s official schedule.

The WSJ does not mention the group’s close connections with PETA; for years Dr. Barnard was on the Board of the PETA foundation.

So, for starters it is unclear to me whether the goal is animal rights or protecting human health. According to the Journal piece, Barnard maintains that heart disease is caused by bacon:

Growing up in Fargo, N.D., even Dr. Barnard chowed down on bacon.

Both his father and grandfather were cattle ranchers. His palate changed, though, when he went off to Washington, D.C., for medical school.

A pathologist told Dr. Barnard, then 22 years old, to unlock a morgue freezer, pull out a body and help him examine the patient, dead from a heart attack.

The patient’s arteries were “hard as a rock,” Dr. Barnard recalls. The pathologist replied: “There’s your bacon and eggs, Neal.”

Except the evidence does not show that. In a post titled “Why I Eat Saturated Fats,” Rand Simberg linked a very thorough review of the evidence to date, and while there is an association between high blood cholesterol and heart disease, there is simply no solid evidence to back the common belief that dietary fat causes heart disease.

Now let’s turn to the first contention, the hypothesis that dietary saturated fat increases serum cholesterol. This idea is so deeply ingrained in the scientific literature that many authors don’t even bother providing references for it anymore. When references are provided, they nearly always point to the same type of study: short-term controlled diet trials, in which volunteers are fed different fats for 2-13 weeks and their blood cholesterol measured (2)*. These are the studies on which the diet-heart hypothesis was built.

But now we have a problem. Nearly every high-quality (prospective) observational study ever conducted found that saturated fat intake is not associated with heart attack risk (3). So if saturated fat increases blood cholesterol, and higher blood cholesterol is associated with an increased risk of having a heart attack, then why don’t people who eat more saturated fat have more heart attacks?

I’ll begin to answer that question with another question: why do researchers almost never cite observational studies to support the idea that dietary saturated fat increases blood cholesterol? Surely if the hypothesis is correct, then people who habitually eat a lot of saturated fat should have high cholesterol, right? One reason may be that in most instances, when researchers have looked for a relationship between saturated fat intake and blood cholesterol, they haven’t found one. Those findings have essentially been ignored, but let’s have a look…

Study after study is examined, and lo and behold, the evidence simply does not exist. Yet people cling to this belief that fat is the culprit in a quasi-religious manner. Because they have been told to. If Barnard wants to harp about animal rights, that is one thing, but telling pork eaters that they’re hurting their hearts when the evidence is lacking is hardly “responsible” medicine.

The other news item I saw today shows that PCRM also has no sense of humor.

A Washington, D.C.-based anti-meat advocacy group is asking the owner of a Las Vegas restaurant that prides itself on unhealthy meals to shut down after a customer suffered a medical episode and was hospitalized.

Officials for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine said Thursday they sent a letter to Heart Attack Grill owner Jon Basso, asking him to “declare moral bankruptcy” and close the restaurant.

Susan Levin, the group’s director of nutrition education, says the incident should be a wake-up call that bypass operations aren’t funny.

Whether bypass operations are funny is a very different question than whether meat-eating creates the need for them. And even if the evidence was there, isn’t PCRM being highly judgmental in its approach? Would they accuse a gay bathhouse of “moral bankuptcy” if a patron died of AIDS? Are not adults capable of deciding what risks they want to take? The Heart Attack Grill sounds like a Go To Hell parody of the whole busybody approach engaged in by groups like PCRM. Like Drinkers Against Madd Mothers or something.

The first step to tyranny is when scoldings are tolerated. Scolds should be ridiculed at every turn. Because groups like PCRM don’t merely want to demonstrate their concern. They do everything they can to create a beaten down mindset that first allows, and finally invites government bureaucrats to invade our lives and our homes. A perfect example is PCRM’s program to tell schools what to make children eat, which issues regular report cards.

The biggest problem with all this scolding and nanny state advocacy is that the activists win. And when that happens, people lose the right to decide what their children can eat.

Glenn suggests tar and feathers, and I agree.

But where to start? Who are the tyrants?

History shows that these tyrannies begin with systematic scoldings by activists. When people are intimidated, the next stage is reached, and demands of activists become bureaucratic edicts, and eventually even laws.

BOTTOM LINE: I know it will sound like a circular truism, but I want to restate something that should be painfully obvious, but which somehow is not.

Any government that can tell you what you can’t put in your body can tell you what you can’t put in your body.

And:

If the government has a right to tell you what you can’t put in your body, then the government has a right to tell you what you can’t put in your body.

Many people think it’s perfectly OK for the government to tell people they can’t consume Substance A, yet when they are told they can’t consume Substance B, they yell about “freedom.”