— by Polydamas
Looking back with the perfect hindsight of history, we at The Cassandra Times cannot help but reflect upon the possibly unintended and overwhelmingly tragic consequences arising from the inappropriate intervention of central governments in the lives of its citizens. Thomas Paine wrote that “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.” Governments do best when they provide for the common defense against external enemies, protect from violent domestic criminals, and establish a court system through which individuals can resolve their disputes in a peaceable manner with objective laws to deter individuals from resorting to self-help violence. In short, governments have a legal monopoly on force and violence to prevent lawless anarchy. However, when governments exceed their limited charter — even for ostensibly good intentions — the result is, almost invariably, disastrous to the lives, freedoms, well-being, and happiness of their people.
In his excellent 2005 book “Never Again: Ending War, Democide & Famine Through Democratic Freedom”, Professor R.J. Rummel compellingly described the greatest mass murders inflicted upon citizens by their own governments in the pursuit of some Utopian and unachievable ideal. Some of the calculations of the massive casualties of their governments’ public policies can be found at Professor Rummel’s website at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHARNY.CHAP.HTM.
After 1928, U.S.S.R. strongman Josef Stalin wanted to nationalize by force the small, independent farms of the Ukrainian peasants and transform them into modern and efficient factory farms. By March of 1930, more than 14.25 million farms were sized from their individual owners and made into collectivized communes. The human cost from 1929 to 1935 was five to ten million deaths of farmers, their families, infants, children, and the elderly. From 1932 to 1933, Stalin caused by design a famine in the Ukraine to force the peasants to join the communes which caused another seven million deaths. According to Professor Rummel, during Stalin’s era from 1928 to 1953, U.S.S.R. murdered through collectivization, forced famines, deportations, and purges at least 19.64 million of its own citizens, as many as 91.68 million people, and likely 42.67 million people.
A similar model of collectivization was followed in Communist China under Chairman Mao Tse Tung. In 1958, Mao announced his “Great Leap Forward” policy. The small agricultural farms of individual peasants were subsumed into large collective farms and these peasants were diverted to working day and night in iron smelters. The result was that, between 1959 and 1962, approximately 30 million peasants died in the greatest famine in history. Not counting the 30 million who died in the Great Chinese Famine, from 1949 to 1987, the death toll of the Chinese regime was a minimum of six million of their own countrymen to a maximum of 103 million people, with the most likely number being 35.24 million people.
The communist governments of the United Soviet Socialist Republics and of China could marshal some arguments that the loss of lives was necessary for the greater good (whatever that may mean). They could argue that one cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs. They could claim that the heavy human costs were an unavoidable part of the class struggle and a necessary stepping stone to the achievement of a better world, as foretold by the originator of communism, Karl Marx.
Let us now shift gears for a moment. In the 1950s, a charismatic scientist named Dr. Ancel Keys had an intuitive hypothesis that Americans suffered from heart attacks that were caused by artery-clogging cholesterol that, in turn, was the result of eating dietary fat from animal sources. Dr. Keys tested his hypothesis by conducting studies that lacked the required scientific rigor and that purported to prove that the total fat from meat, eggs, and dairy products was the cause of heart disease. He ignored evidence that did not agree with his hypothesis, which made it flawed science. He disregarded and viciously attacked any alternative explanations that sugar was the cause of heart disease. In short, he did what every scientist must not do. The details are cogently presented and convincingly argued in Nina Teicholz’s superb 2014 book “Big Fat Lie: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet”.
Dr. Keys’ hypothesis, which was misrepresented as scientific fact, landed him on the cover of Time Magazine in January of 1961. Through his connections with the American Heart Association (AHA), his hypothesis gathered greater and greater momentum. It reached the point that Keys’ hypothesis became the only accepted explanation to which a consensus of scientists subscribed. In other words, it was much like the contemporary scientific “consensus” on global warming that seeks to marginalize and eradicate dissenting points of view.
Nina Teicholz’s book then describes what happened when the federal government became involved and entrenched in the matter. A relatively small group of influential scientists went to Washington, D.C. and started a “heart lobby”. The National Heart Institute (NHI) was established and national conferences on heart disease were conducted in Washington, D.C. Congress, together with the AHA, established the Regional Medical Programs Service as part of the NHI which then formulated the standards for cardiovascular care. The AHA and the NHI doled out massive government research grants for cardiovascular research whose underlying axioms and financial incentives were to find additional support for Dr. Keys’ already forgone conclusions.
What happened next is best described by Bryan Walsh’s June 2014 article titled “Ending the War on Fat” in Time Magazine (http://time.com/2863227/ending-the-war-on-fat/?pcd=hp-magmod), more than 50 years after Time Magazine featured Dr. Keys on its cover:
In 1977, . . ., a Senate committee led by George McGovern published its landmark “Dietary Goals for the United States,” urging Americans to eat less high-fat red meat, eggs and dairy and replace them with more calories from fruits, vegetables and especially carbohydrates.
By 1980 that wisdom was codified. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued its first dietary guidelines, and one of the primary directives was to avoid cholesterol and fat of all sorts. The National Institutes of Health recommended that all Americans over the age of 2 cut fat consumption, and that same year the government announced the results of a $150 million study, which had a clear message: Eat less fat and cholesterol to reduce your risk of a heart attack.
The food industry and American eating habits jumped in step. Grocery shelves filled with “light” yogurts, low-fat microwave dinners, cheese-flavored crackers, cookies. Families like mine followed the advice: beef disappeared from the dinner plate, eggs were replaced at breakfast with cereal or yolk-free beaters, and whole milk almost wholly vanished. From 1977 to 2012, per capita consumption of those foods dropped while calories from supposedly healthy carbohydrates increased — no surprise, given that breads, cereals and pasta were at the base of the USDA food pyramid.
With the weight of the federal government’s authority behind Dr. Keys’ hypothesis, strongly telling the American public that it was “not only a good idea, but the law”, the American people complied. They opted to consume sugar and carbohydrates in place of the disallowed meat, eggs, and cheese, but with disastrous consequences:
New research suggests that it’s the overconsumption of carbohydrates, sugar and sweeteners that is chiefly responsible for the epidemics of obesity and Type 2 diabetes. Refined carbohydrates–like those in “wheat” bread, hidden sugar, low-fat crackers and pasta–cause changes in our blood chemistry that encourage the body to store the calories as fat and intensify hunger, making it that much more difficult to lose weight. “The argument against fat was totally and completely flawed,” says Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, and the president of the Institute for Responsible Nutrition. “We’ve traded one disease for another.”
Those sugars stimulate the production of insulin, which causes fat cells to go into storage overdrive, leading to weight gain. Since fewer calories are left to fuel the body, we begin to feel hungry, and metabolism begins to slow in an effort to save energy. We eat more and gain more weight, never feeling full. “Hunger is the death knell of a weight-loss program,” says Duke’s Westman. “A low-fat, low-calorie diet doesn’t work. Because as this process repeats, our cells become more resistant to insulin, which causes us to gain more weight, which only increases insulin resistance in a vicious circle. Obesity, Type 2 diabetes, high triglycerides and low HDL can all follow — and fat intake is barely involved. All calories, it turns out, are not created equal. “When we focus on fat, carbohydrates inevitably increase,” says Ludwig, who co-wrote a recent JAMA commentary on the subject. “You wouldn’t give lactose to people who are lactose intolerant, yet we give carbs to people who are carb intolerant.”
After 35 years of government-enforced dogma, Bryan Walsh further describes the dire consequences:
Nearly four decades later, the results are in: the experiment was a failure. We cut the fat, but by almost every measure, Americans are sicker than ever. The prevalence of Type 2 diabetes increased 166% from 1980 to 2012. Nearly 1 in 10 American adults has the disease, costing the health care system $245 billion a year, and an estimated 86 million people are prediabetic. Deaths from heart disease have fallen — a fact that many experts attribute to better emergency care, less smoking and widespread use of cholesterol-controlling drugs like statins but cardiovascular disease remains the country’s No. 1 killer. Even the increasing rates of exercise haven’t been able to keep us healthy. More than a third of the country is now obese, making the U.S. one of the fattest countries in an increasingly fat world.
The statistics about diabetes are very grim. According to the Center for Disease Control’s 2014 National Diabetes Statistics Report, 29.1 million Americans suffer from diabetes, of which 21 million have been diagnosed and 27.8% or 8.1 million are undiagnosed. 28.9 million people or 12.8% of the population of Americans 20 years of age or older have diabetes. Of this number, 16.2% or 13.4 million people between the ages of 45 and 64 and have diabetes. 11.2 million or 25.9% of the people over 65 years of age suffer from diabetes. 7.6% of Caucasians, 9.0% of Asian Americans, 12.8% of Hispanics, 13.2% of African-Americans, and 15.9% of American Indians have diabetes. To make matters worse, the Center for Disease Control reports that, from 2009 to 2012, 37% of adults over the age of 20 have pre-diabetes as well as 51% of adults 65 years or older.
Dr. Keys rejected sugar and complex carbohydrates as causes of heart disease. However, the evidence is that diabetes is also correlated with other diseases. 71% of adult diabetics have blood pressure of greater than 140/90 or used prescription medication to lower their blood pressure. 65% of diabetics have high blood LDL cholesterol of 100 mg/dl or used cholesterol lowering medications. Death rates from cardiovascular disease are 170% higher for diabetics than non-diabetics. Hospitalization for heart attacks is 180% higher for diabetics than non-diabetics. Hospitalization rates for strokes are 150% higher for diabetics than non-diabetics. 28.5% of diabetics over 40 years of age had diabetic retinopathy, which is damage to the small blood vessels in the eye, that can lead to loss of vision. 4.4% of diabetics over 40 years of age had advanced diabetic retinopathy that can lead to severe loss of vision. In 2011, diabetes was the primary cause of kidney failure in 44% of the cases. In 2010, approximately 73,000 non-traumatic amputations of lower limbs were performed in adults with diagnosed diabetes.
According to the Center for Disease Control, in 2010, diabetes was the seventh leading cause of death in the United States, based upon 69,071 death certificates that listed diabetes as the underlying source of death. Diabetes was a cause of death in 234,051 deaths in 2010. Diabetes is likely an under-reported cause of death because only 35% to 40% of diabetics had diabetes listed anywhere on their death certificate and only 10% to 15% of diabetics had diabetes listed as the underlying cause of death.
If we were to posit, for the sake of round numbers, that diabetes-related deaths due to the over-consumption of sugars and complex carbohydrates is approximately 200,000 per year, then 35 years of the USDA’s mistaken dietary guidelines and its famous “Food Pyramid” have resulted in a conservative estimate of seven million preventable deaths of American citizens. Deaths attributable to heart attacks, strokes, and obesity, which are strongly correlated, with the government-mandated high carbohydrate diet may drive this number much higher.
Additional negative consequences are unsurprising. For the past 35 years, ever since the USDA’s “Food Pyramid” was unveiled and with medical practitioners unaware of the deleterious long-term consequences, trusting doctors, nurses, and nutritionists have been forced by government and medical standards to prescribe a high carbohydrate and low fat diet to their patients. At best, their patients’ health remained the same. At worst, their patients’ health deteriorated further. A high carbohydrate and low fat diet was incapable of reversing on its own their patients’ conditions, which resulted in a reliance upon a plethora of prescription medicines and a bevy of other medicines to counteract the harmful side effects of the former medicines.
Also, extremely troubling is the fact that the USDA’s “Food Pyramid” was also the cornerstone of school lunches for children. The high carbohydrate and low fat diet became imprinted on the taste buds of American children so that, as adults, they craved the same unhealthy foods that they ate as children. Worse yet, the high carbohydrate content of school lunches resulted in a “sugar high” that caused America’s children to exhibit certain behaviors that caused their teachers to label them as unruly and hyperactive. What followed was the dramatic rise in medical diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) which led to the wholesale prescription of psychostimulants and methamphetamines like Ritalin, Adderall, and similar Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors. The long term consequences include a life of dependency on prescription medications and severe side effects, which, in some affected individuals, may even result in psychotic behavior and mass murder, as detailed in previous articles here in The Cassandra Times.
Josef Stalin and the commissars of the U.S.S.R. wanted to create a socialist workers’ paradise. Mao Tse-Tung and his successors wanted to propel Communist China forward, to become a modern superpower. The exorbitant cost in human lives was both intentional and acceptable to them. In contrast, in the United States, Dr. Ancel Keys and his followers in the medical profession and in academia were bound by the Hippocratic Oath and did what they thought was right. Their costly mistakes were unintentional and born of ignorance and hubris.
Mistaken theories, whether in the economic realm or in the realm of public health, have a limited reach and a far more modest cost in human lives when they are not backed by a central government’s military forces, powers, laws, and regulations. When the intended as well as the unintended consequences of the government’s use of coercive powers to prescribe economic or health policies are so far-sweeping and likely calamitous, just governments must restrain themselves from exercising their prodigious powers outside their narrowest functions. While it may not be possible to prescribe to a government the Hippocratic Oath and to do no harm, a just libertarian government does the least harm by remaining true to its most minimal duties and abjuring all other temptations to inject itself into the lives of its citizens.
