Michelle Obama, may she live a hundred years, brought hunger to America’s schools. Her school lunch initiative took ‘lunch’ out of school lunch. In one remarkable achievement, Michelle by herself created a black market in forbidden sweets; enterprising youngsters everywhere realized there was money to be made by pushing candy onto their sugar-addicted classmates.
European leftists have in recent years advocated for a ‘sin tax’ on meat consumption. They believe that meat consumption is bad for Gaia and bad for you. The punishment that the tax represents, much like the tax on tobacco products, is for your own good. Experts assure you we’ll all be better off consuming less meat, or even giving up meat altogether.
I find at least one major problem with their program: no one knows enough about human nutrition.
Science is Hard
To paraphrase Barbie, “science is hard”. Nutrition science is harder. The main problem with studying nutrition in human beings is, well, the humans. Laboratory studies that rely on study subjects’ honesty take an immense gamble. Almost all of us want to appear virtuous, so ‘truth shading’ is always a danger. Retroactive large-scaled studies are worse, because we tend to remember ourselves vastly more virtuous than we ever were.
Since humans are hard, we come to where most of those ‘ground-breaking studies’ come from: animal studies. These consist of feeding laboratory animals whichever diet a twisted mind concocted, for a specific time trial. The animals—usually tame rats—suffer and die from science, often very shoddy science. But aside from John Podesta, human beings are not rats. Animal studies that make headlines may as well be tossed. Specially since most results in Social Science cannot be replicated at all.
Perhaps the biggest problem in social science research, is that using data either from flawed human recollection or flawed animals studies, a statistician can find links between virtually anything. Aspartame and cancer; rice consumption and thinness; a “Mediterranean diet” and longevity. (All of these were wrong, or at least wrong in their conclusions). I’m certain that if I tried, I can find a correlation between a Vegan diet and sanctimonious smugness.
Entrenched Interests—With Machine Guns
When it comes to the power of entrenched interests, imagine the trenches in a World War I movie, full of machine gun nests. Self-serving research pops everywhere. The Aspartame study I mentioned above was financed by the sugar industry. The “Mediterranean Diet” survey was conducted by a loud anti-fat advocate. Worst of all, the biggest financers of nutrition studies are Western governments, which make contradicting official government policy a potential career suicide. A researcher reaching the wrong conclusion may find his next grant doesn’t come through.
What European anti-meat activists are trying to do is a giant irreversible experiment based on shoddy science. They plan to curtail human liberty for their own ends. They should be opposed on those grounds alone, but they don’t even have the privilege of being right on the facts. They don’t know because nobody knows. When it comes to human nutrition, the science is not settled.
