February 19, 2006 -- If Mayor Bloomberg still can't figure out why he should keep his nose out of New Yorkers' refrigerators, maybe the results of a huge new study will give him some clues.
Bloomberg — and his health czar, Tom Frieden — have been nagging groceries and restaurants and corporate cafeterias in the city to cut down on the selection of fat-heavy foods they offer.
But a federally sponsored study — an eight-year, 49,000-subject comparison of low-fat versus normal diets that cost nearly half a billion dollars — has found: no difference at all.
Not in terms of health risks, anyway.
Subjects whose diets were low in fat had the same rates of colon and breast cancer, heart disease and strokes as those who ate whatever they wanted.
Are the results definitive?
Well, little in science — especially when based on any one, individual study — ever is.
But this time, the undertaking was so large and so carefully designed, it's findings are expected to prompt a major shift in thinking about diets and health.
In any event, one conclusion is crystal clear: What's known about diet-based health risks is far less than scientists, nutritionists — and some public officials we know — would have you believe. And trying to manipulate eating behavior on a broad scale makes little sense.
The study, says Rockefeller University's Dr. Jules Hirsch, who has spent most of his professional life studying health-diet links, should put an end to "this era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy."
Indeed.
Let's be clear: Even if the study had proven beyond a doubt that, say, butter and oil and ice cream and other fatty foods will absolutely make you sick one day, it's still none of Mayor Mike's business whether you eat those foods.
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Two things; first there's the obligatory "indeed". This lends an air of credulity and seriousness to the written word and MUST be employed by both the pompous and they who would be pompous. Secondly, the nannystaters such as Bloomberg will of course poke their noses into EVERYTHING because gosh, gee, they are just so much smarter than the rest of us and where would we be without their help. Big government, high taxes, and anti-gun. Calls himself a Republican. Indeed.
And thirdly, for chrissake enough already with the diet nonsense. It changes persuant to what's new, what's hot, what can generate sales for up-to-date books about the subject. And all of these studies...ALL of them are seriously flawed because the researchers REFUSE to listen to the geneticists. The gene guys and dolls say...whoa now hoss, hold on thar. Any dietary study MUST take racial characteristics into consideration because different races, and even some inbred ethnic groups, are location-specific with regards to how the body stores and uses caloric intake.
So why don't they listen? Because scientists are as bombarded by the loons on the left as much if not more so than by the wackjob righties. People MUST be the same or the liberals threaten to hold their collective breaths until they drop en masse, taking their study monies with them.
We as a people DO NOT WANT reality. We want assurances. Fast-fixes. And the promise that everything will be okay if we adhere to a certain regimen. Be it religion or science, we need to know that there's a warm place awaiting those who follow the rules.
Conservatives want nothing to do with being ANY monkey's uncle, and Liberals simply won't tolerate the premise that all fat cells are not created equal.
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