The health police

National Review, Oct 19, 1992 by Linda Bridges

IF YOU get a kick out of seeing a highly trained, highly motivated police force swing into action, the place to watch is the newspaper health columns in the days following any report that questions the conventional dietary wisdom. Snipers mount the rooftops to pick off the source of the report, while the crowd-control experts gravely warn the populace that there's a lot we don't know, so better play it safe ...

Most of the offenders have been medical researchers, though the most prominent in recent years was Julia Child. And she fought back. Mrs. Child has no use for the sort of food writer who tells you chirpily that strawberry shortcake made without shortening or sugar and served with yogurt instead of whipped cream is every bit as good as the original. (Burnham's Third Law: "Just as good, isn't.") Her cri de coeur: "If fear of food continues, it will be the death of gastronomy."

From Mrs. Child's point of view, the battle pits eight hundred years of -French culinary development, plus the forty years she herself has spent bringing that heritage to the American cook, against a campaign to blame all our health woes on the ingestion of certain foods. Her opponents--some of whom have actually mounted picket lines against her during her speaking tours--see any gustatory indulgence, whether in haute cuisine or in Fritos and Coke, as a deliberate attack on your health, and the health of anyone you might lure to joint you in excess. Or rather, not even excess: the health police wouldn't care if a single pat of butter topped a mound of broccoli; butter defiles the temple of the body.

For the food fanatics have made their deftration of purity a secular religion. I place-in evidence the menu of a takeout-food shop near our offices. It offers, e.g., "health pita of the day," "no crust quiche muffin" (I don't know and don't want to), and "Power Lunch: smoked turkey breast, watercress w/honey mustard on whole grain bread and brown rice supreme salad ... the perfect balanced protein, carbohydrate, fiber, and low cholesterol desktop meal." (Italics and ellipses theirs.) But what tops their list of cakes? "Sinful chocolate cake."A piquant syllogism: Things that taste good have calories and fat; calories and fat are bad; therefore bad is good.

If the faddists kept it to themselves, no outsider would have a right to complain. But they are evangelists, and they want to gain not only external conformity but internal assent. They want to make Americans feel so guilty about butter and cream, salt, sugar and eggs, that eventually we'll just give up and reach for a bean sprout. They would not understand at all the tradeoff made by a friend of mine who had been advised by her doctor to cut back on fats. Dessert is the food group she cares most about, and so she eats the plainest grilled fish and unbuttered vegetables--and then has two desserts.

One might expect that, convinced of the rightness of their cause, they would be eager to have the fullest possible information presented to the public. But no. Every new study that confirms the link between, say, dietary fat and heart attacks is trumpeted; but if a study suggests that other factors might modify that link, or points out some unexpected consequence (as, for example, that the polyunsaturated fats we were urged to substitute for animal fats have been strongly linked to an increase in cancers), they don't want to hear it --and they don't want us to hear it.

Thus the New York Times's Marian Burros: "Now that research findings make their way into the popular press while they are still preliminary, the public has become both increasingly sophisticated and increasingly confused. Today's news does not always become tomorrow's advice. Increasingly, as more research is conducted, there are additional interpretations of dietary recommendations with which the public is forced to deal." That sounds a lot like Senator Al Gore saying that people who want to study global warming further before we take costly and perhaps counterproductive action are "hurting our ability to respond," and that press attention to the skeptics "undermines the effort to build a solid base of public support."

To be sure, food enthusiasts, too, often hear what we want to hear. It was fun to read about the studies in southwestern France which found that people there who eat lots of foie gras and goose fat and drink red wine with it do not have elevated cholesterol levels-but I fear that adding foie gras to most of our diets would not lower our cholesterol. There are too many other elements of life in that mostly rural, fairly poor part of France that might have affected the result for example, the high proportion of beans in the region's diet; or the extent to which the people get their exercise, not by running for an hour a day or working out in the gym, but because they have never purchased the labor-saving devices that make artificial exercise necessary.

An urban American looking at the average Swiss table might sigh, "A short life and a merry one": cheese and salami for breakfast; sausages galore; the national potato dish, roesti (potatoes grated, formed into a cake, and fried in butter); all the melted-cheese dishes (fondues, raclettes, croutes au fromage); liver-dumpling soup; veal cooked with cream and/or cheese; and I haven't even mentioned chocolate yet. Heart-attack city, right? Fifty-year-olds dying of strokes right and left? Wrong. In life expectancy, Switzerland is second only to abstemious, raw-fish-eating, heavy-on-noodles-and-rice Japan. I can't pretend to know what genetic factors might be involved. But I think I get an inkling of what the Swiss are doing right when I see people in the well-off village of Gstaad walking up a steep slope to their home carrying their parcels, instead of using a snowmobile or cutting an automobile road to their front door. And despite the Calvinist background of part of the country, I have never seen a Swiss look guilty as he raises fork to mouth.