Spikes
What I still keep wondering is why Kennedy thinks he knows better than the people who have actual education in the subject. He does not have that education.
The Trump administration announced new dietary guidelines on Wednesday, including an inverted food pyramid that places red meat and whole-fat dairy at the top alongside fruits and vegetables.
“We are ending the war on saturated fats,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during a press conference at the White House this week. “My message is clear. Eat real food.”
But saturated fats—>cholesterol. Why is Bad Kennedy telling us to up our cholesterol?
The new guidelines encourage research-backed practices like eating more whole foods including fruits, vegetables and whole grains, as well as reducing intake of highly processed foods. But it also offers different guidance [from] what health experts say about eating large amounts of red meat, whole milk and cheese.
Why does it? Why does he think he’s qualified to ignore what health experts say? He is not a health expert. He’s what’s commonly known as a crank. He has crank ideas about diet. He also has a job that empowers him to enshrine his crank ideas in government health advice. That’s bad.
Having too much saturated fat in your diet can lead to spikes in your cholesterol levels and increase your chances of heart disease and stroke, according to the American Heart Association. Full-fat dairy tends to be high in saturated fat.
Why is Bad Kennedy so happy to urge 340+ million people to increase our chances of heart disease and stroke? Why does he feel so entitled to take that risk? Why doesn’t his lack of actual education in the subject give him pause?
My husband is a meat and potatoes man, but he told me about this and recognized the dangers of it (yes, he has high cholesterol). He was suitably horrified, because he knows his diet isn’t actually good for him. Kennedy doesn’t know even as much as he does, and he majored in history, not science or nutrition.
I suspect that much of these bizarre ideas are motivated by a kind of nationalism. There’s this perception that American foods are high in fat and salt and sugar, and everything American is good, so deep-fried ice apple pie must be healthy, right? (And red meat is a manly food, so it will help solve the masculinity shortage that has been weakening the country.)
Even the ‘good’ part of the guidelines are so much crap if you don’t address the problems with our food system. The reason we have so much highly processed food is that it has ridiculously long shelf-life. If we remove those ‘stablizers’ from our food without taking precautions, then a number of other issues, like food deserts and food instability, will get much, much worse. Of course, these are problems that mostly affect poor communities, and Kennedy clearly doesn’t care about those at all.
This might be a good place to recommend Anne Applebaum’s excellent podcast Autocracy in America, currently on its 3rd season. The latest episode, featuring Ruth Ben-Ghiat, is specifically about the latest assault on science and education.
The dirty truth of skepticism is that – even among self-professed “skeptics”- acceptance of science ultimately has more to do with trust than “following the facts” or “letting the evidence speak for itself”. Life is too short, and the brain capacity of even the smartest, best educated person who ever lived is too limited to figure out everything we need to know to get through life the “right” way. In his book Rationality Steven Pinker makes the point that acceptance vs. rejection of science has less to do with education, let alone general intelligence, than whether or not you trust the experts or see them as just another self-appointed priesthood or arbitrary authority. Motivated reasoning, working in service of ideology and the “My Side” bias, does the rest. Indeed, as Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott point out in The Cancelling of the American Mind, being an expert is one of the things that will automatically get you locked out from the “Efficient Rhetorical Fortress”* of the MAGA Right, meaning anything you say can safely and conclusively be dismissed in advance. And, of course, anyone who has spent a lot of time arguing with cranks online will be familiar with the obligatory attempts to frame one’s lack of expertise as a virtue (makes them free to “think outside the box”, challenge the “dogma” that the experts are unwilling to question etc.).
* The Right’s answer to the “Perfect Rhetorical Fortress” of the Woke Left.