2020 is the year that turned all of public health into an endless series of fad diets
"the science is scrambled"
just a reminder that the same class of “experts” who, in opposition to a century of evidence and well functioning societal practice, made up 27 draconian new pseudoscientific health interventions to intrude upon your life last year
and
abandoned every fundamental tenet of drug trial design and safety to fling insufficiently tested and poorly validated new pharmaceuticals at you (while railing against any that were known and safe) are the same people who have been unable, over 20 years, to figure out whether or not eating eggs is good for you.
they ginned up a new idea of stay home to stop the spread of a respiratory virus. “hey, it never worked before, but i’ll bet we can sell it!” we’ve got some great slogans! “2 weeks to flatten your curves on the new fauci fad plan of “sit home and do nothing!”
but that was too damaging. they needed a new fad that was easier to follow.
so they made one up.
in march, you should never eat cranberries. by summer, if you don’t eat a cranberry every time you go out in public, 100’s of thousands will die.
(i refer here, of course, to masks)
and then they just kept on coming.
“only avocados can stop covid spread!”
“well, OK, they don’t stop spread. at all. but you should still eat avocados! i just bought a huge grove so somebody better eat this stuff…”
the caliber of studies being made up by the CDC to try to validate vaccines (and WOW were THEY a bunch of TOTAL FAILS) is on par with
“the celebrity pomegranate diet: eat all you want, lose your belly flab!”
it’s like watching the 80’s clowns take all the fat out of food and replace it with sugar because they thought that was good for you.
this stuff would get you sued for deceptive advertising if you tried it in a “regain your youthful skin tone” nutraceutical.
![The Associated Press on Twitter: "Dr. Anthony Fauci is recommending masks at Thanksgiving gatherings if the coronavirus status of people is unknown. “Even if it's a very small group, to the extent](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff2ee9588-6637-41eb-a6d3-44d966c2f8e7_473x307.jpeg "The Associated Press on Twitter: "Dr. Anthony Fauci is recommending masks at Thanksgiving gatherings if the coronavirus status of people is unknown. “Even if it's a very small group, to the extent")
yet it now seems the very marrow of public health policy: make stuff up, push it as gospel, and when you turn out to be wrong, manufacture bespoke data distortions to keep the rubes coming into the tent.
gone are simple health ideas like “eat moderately, get a lot of variety, be sure you get fresh vegetables and fats and fiber” and their the place is “EAT 27 GRAPEFRUITS A DAY AND NEVER WORRY AGAIN!!!”
this is hucksterism, not health policy.
it’s informercials, not information.
try flipping the claims they make into some adjacent space (like food) and it gets obvious.
imagine anyone pushing a diet with the fervor and mandates with which these people push vaccines while having as little evidence to support it.
imagine shrilling that fat people should be denied access to hospitals because they refuse to get fit and stop hogging health resources.
trust in these public agencies to be either competent or trustworthy to manage public health and especially public health information programs was always ill-founded.
read the history of the USDA food pyramid some time.
it was MADE UP. there was no science. there were no studies. it was a clownshow of convenience and cronyism.
it was also badly wrong.
but this did not stop it from becoming the bedrock canon of nutritional education for decades. (this was written about 20 years after pyramid adoption)
this is EXACTLY what’s being done with nonsensical and broadly debunked policy on masks, lockdowns, distancing, schools, and increasingly with untested and obviously problematic vaccines that
stop neither contraction nor contagion of covid,
may well be making it worse,
and may well be rekindling a pandemic by selecting for hotter variants just like getting the “less fat more carbs” nutrition wrong kindled an epidemic of ill health and obesity.
it was put in place on no or shoddy science. and people fell for it look line and stethoscope.
there seems to be some deep societal reservoir of trust in these federal agencies.
“there must be an expert who knows!”
“they’d never let people do this without a good reason!”
“they would never act this reckless!”
no, there isn’t. and yes, they would.
there are no checks on this system. it’s an ad hoc weasel circus full of politicians and marketing people. the scientists barely even get a look in on policy.
look how badly wrong they got (and continue to get) nutrition, look what happened when they tried to take over school lunches and the appalling one size fits none results.
that’s an EASY one. there was no panic, no time pressure. and they still got it totally wrong.
do you think they’ll get it right under huge pressure, short timeframes, and with the biggest pharma-cash bonanza in human history on the line?
because if you do, i have a “sharpen your mental acuity by eating durians” diet to sell you.
want some?
it’ll still smell better than what they’ve been feeding you…
I have long been involved in health related issues since my profession involves exercise. I also advise clients on diet (which is where fat loss happens, not via exercise to any significant degree) and I noticed early on that the smarter people in the diet and exercise space were, with perhaps a few exceptions, some of the first to question all the nonsense in the Spring of 2020. This is because we had been swimming against the tide of BS regarding things like the food pyramid, fear of saturated fat, the efficacy of statins, the non-importance of LDL when in the presence of a healthy HDL to triglyceride ratio, etc. for years. We new how pharma and processed food corporations had captured entire fields of research. Ancel Keyes is the mid-20th century Fauci in so many ways. A skilled bureaucrat with an amazing ability to accrue power and authority. So it was no surprise when Ivor Cummins (who I have followed for years regarding cardio respiratory health) had guests on his podcast that spring of 2020 who were not necessarily epidemiologists, but data savvy outsiders pointing out the impossibility of the exponential growth that computer modelers were then promoting.
We who know how to actually maintain proper metabolic health have always known that the mainstream advice was terrible. And we did and do our best to educate who we can. But it never seemed as dire as this, because ultimately, if people chose not to listen, the only outcome was their own ill health. (You don’t know how many obese doctor clients of mine tell me, 5 foot 10, 147lbs, that all that red meat I eat is going to kill me). I could swim against that tide, as could my family and simply pity their ignorance and reliance on authorities who had so terribly mislead them. But now, that same terrible top down advice is coming in the form of mandates that limit my freedom and possibly my ability to make sound choices about my own health. Well, fuck that. I am not eating “healthy whole grains” and I’m not going to be part of a pharma annuity plan, whether for Covid or heart disease. Pass the steak and eggs…
Baby, that "deep societal reservoir of trust in these federal agencies" has run COMPLETELY dry in this house. I'd be skeptical if they told me the sky was blue at this point.
(Responses explaining that the sky isn't actually blue, actually, are as welcome as a hemorrhoid, and I hope someone punches you in the face while wearing a ring with "DICK" printed on it backwards. Happy Halloween!)