Unit 7 Lecture Notes

The second link between nutrition and monetary economics pertains to the role that governments play in the production of food and the impact of their influential dietary guidelines. As discussed extensively in Chapter 7 of The Bitcoin Standard, the move from the gold standard to government money was pivotal in ending the classical liberal era of government and initiating the move toward more powerful government control over ever-increasing facets of an individual's life. It is hard to believe it but in la belle epoque, the most transformative period of human history, governments generally did not issue passports, interfere in food production, ban people from consuming specific substances, or engage in endless military conflict financed by currency debasement.

One of the many aspects of private individual life that governments have sought to manage for their citizens since the inception of government money is food. The rise of the modern nanny state, which role-plays as caretaker of its citizens and attempts to provide all the guidance they need to live their lives, could not have been possible under the gold standard simply because governments who start making centralized decisions for individual problems would quickly cause more economic harm than good (and run out of hard money to keep financing their operation). Easy government money, on the other hand, allows for government mistakes to accumulate and add up significantly before economic reality sets in through the destruction of the currency, which generally takes much longer. It is thus no coincidence that the US government began to issue dietary guidelines shortly after the Federal Reserve's creation had begun turning it into the nation's iron-fisted nanny. The first such guideline, focused on children, was issued in 1916, and the next year they issued a general guideline.

As with all individual decisions enforced through central command by coercive governments, this one did not work out well at all. The history of the US government's meddling in its citizens' diet is extensive, and this bulletin cannot possibly do it justice. A few highlights will be mentioned along with some suggested reading for anyone who wants to go deeper down this depressing rabbit hole.

US government diet policy in the twentieth century has been driven by two main forces: a nineteenth century movement that sought to massively reduce meat consumption for religious reasons, and industrial agricultural interests trying to increase demand for the high-margin nutrient-lite industrial sludge they wanted to convince the world could pass for food.

For some strange theological reasons far above my paygrade, the Seventh Day Adventist church has for a century and a half been on a moral crusade against meat-eating. Ellen G White, one of the founders of the church, had "visions" of the evils of meat-eating, and preached endlessly against it (while still eating meat secretly, a very common phenomenon among anti-meat zealots until today). There is, of course, nothing ethically objectionable about religious groups following whatever dietary visions they experience, but the problems arise when they seek to impose those visions on others. Seventh Day Adventists are generally influential members of American society with significant political clout and many successful individuals in positions of power and authority.

The Soy Information Center proudly proclaims on its website:

Another member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, Lenna Cooper, went on to become one of the founders of the American Dietetics Association, an organization which to this day holds significant influence over government diet policy, and more importantly, is the body responsible for licensing practicing dietitians. In other words, anyone caught handing out dietary advice without a license from the ADA could find themselves thrown into jail and/or financially ruined. One cannot overstate the influence that such a catastrophic policy has had: a government-enforced monopoly granted to a religiously motivated agenda (based on very little science) to determine what is permissible diet advice has completely distorted many generations' understanding of what healthy food is. What's even worse is that the ADA is responsible for formulating the dietary guidelines taught at nutrition and medical schools worldwide, meaning it has for a century shaped the way nutritionists and doctors (mis)understand nutrition. The astonishing consequence is that the vast majority of people, nutritionists, and doctors today think that animal fat is harmful, while grains are healthy, necessary, and safe!

The reader should not be surprised that the ADA, like all other main institutions of progressive government control of the economy and citizens, was established in 1917, around the same time as the Federal Reserve (along with many, many other central planning agencies whose catastrophic consequences we may hopefully discuss in future editions of this research bulletin). Another organization, The Adventist Health System, has been responsible for producing decades' worth of shoddy "research" used by advocates of industrial agriculture and meat reduction to push their religious visions on a species that demonstrably can only thrive by eating animal proteins and fatty acids.

The research that is used to tout the benefits of meat-avoidance has always been based on poor statistical techniques interpreted with cavalier motivated reasoning which would be laughed out of any freshman statistics class. The main problem with these studies is that they are observational studies, and there are always many confounding factors to take into account. The most popular studies promoted by Seventh Day Adventists focus on comparing Seventh Day Adventists to the general population. They find that since Seventh Day Adventists are healthier, it must be the reduction in meat consumption that's responsible. But that ignores that Seventh Day Adventists also avoid smoking and drinking, are more affluent than the general population and thus able to live in cleaner and healthier environments, and usually have a stronger sense of community, all of which are factors that are very helpful for longevity. These studies also rely on self-reporting of food intake, and it is well-established that this is not an accurate way of assessing food intake, as people generally report what they would like to have eaten, not what they have actually eaten, particularly when the religious group to which you are reporting has strong stigma around the consumption of meats.

More general observational studies, such as the terrible ones relied upon by the bureaucrats at the World Health Organization, find that people who eat more meat suffer from more diseases than people who eat less meat, and therefore conclude that meat must be to blame. But on a population level, the consumption of meat is very strongly correlated with the consumption of all other kinds of foods. In other words, the same people who eat a lot of meat also eat a lot of sugars, grains, flour, and all manner of industrial sludge. A proper statistical observational study would try to control for these factors, but anti-meat studies never do that, because they are based on trying to validate religious visions, and not the scientific method. Yet, even an observational study that controls for many factors cannot be viewed as definitive. The "gold standard" for establishing causality remains in making very well-specified randomized control trials. The most famous of these studies is The China Study, which has been thoroughly and comprehensively debunked.

The mention of laughably poor research techniques appropriately leads us to Ancel Keys, who in my mind is the John Maynard Keynes of nutrition: a man as politically skilled as he is intellectually vacuous, who knew how to play politics to serve the special interests that have popularized and mandated his juvenile and borderline criminal "research" as gospel in universities around the world. Making nutrition science a closed guild protected by the state, and tasked with peddling state propaganda, has allowed it to be easily captured by special interest industries who used it to promote their products unopposed, as all dissenting voices were silenced and marginalized by not having access to the government's printing presses.

The work of Ancel Keys and many generations of Harvard "scientists" was the Trojan horse with which agro-industrial businesses managed to inject their poisonous industrial sludge into the bodies of billions around the world, resulting in the disastrous consequence of the spread of diabetes, obesity, cancer, heart disease, and many other fatal ailments which most people accept as a normal part of life, completely oblivious to the fact that they are only a normal part of a life spent consuming industrial "food". It is one of the most shocking and discomforting realizations of one's life to realize that, arguably, Keys and the scientists who peddled his ridiculous research have likely been responsible for more deaths around the world than anyone, even more than all Communist regimes combined.

Keys' ridiculous research was based on travels he did around Europe after World War II. He collected unreliable data on the consumption of meat across seven countries, and then plotted that against rates of heart disease. After inexplicably eliminating France from the data, Keys found a correlation between heart disease and meat consumption, which he interpreted as being evidence that meat causes heart disease, and from that was born the famous Seven Country Study, popularized to the heavens by mass media and mass education as the definitive and final word on nutrition. Conveniently enough, Keys had also ignored data from 15 countries that would have made his study lose its significance. That France has low rates of heart disease in spite of consuming large quantities of meat is still viewed as a paradox by modern nutritionists, when there is nothing paradoxical about it except if one buys Keys' unsubstantiated conclusions.

Keys also popularized the ridiculous idea that a Mediterranean diet is one low on animal fats and high on plant fats, which has been used to heavily market poisonous seed oils (like "heart-healthy" canola oil which no human would feed to their dog, let alone eat). Keys' travels came after the destruction of World War II, during a time in which people were severely impoverished and relied heavily on olive oil. But the people of the Mediterranean, like all homo sapiens, rely on animal fats primarily for cooking, resorting only to plant-based fats after calamities like World War II or Harvard nutritional advice have befallen them.

The role of Harvard University in this debacle can not be forgotten of course. The New York Times reports:

In 1965, Mr. Hickson enlisted the Harvard researchers to write a review that would debunk the anti-sugar studies. He paid them a total of $6,500, the equivalent of $49,000 today. Mr. Hickson selected the papers for them to review and made it clear he wanted the result to favor sugar.

Harvard's Dr. Hegsted reassured the sugar executives. "We are well aware of your particular interest," he wrote, "and will cover this as well as we can".

As they worked on their review, the Harvard researchers shared and discussed early drafts with Mr. Hickson, who responded that he was pleased with what they were writing. The Harvard scientists had dismissed the data on sugar as weak and given far more credence to the data implicating saturated fat.

"Let me assure you this is quite what we had in mind, and we look forward to its appearance in print," Mr. Hickson wrote.

The role of Harvard in spreading this criminal mendacity cannot be chalked off as a private institution being corrupt. Harvard, like most American universities, is primarily funded from government research grants. It maintains its prestige and importance through the very heavy influence it exerts on public policy. The founder of Harvard's Fredrick Stare, was practically a living breathing advertisement for Coca-Cola and all the worst junk that American food producers have concocted in the twentieth century. An article from 1978 on his school is absolutely mind-blowing in the level of downright shamelessness with which he enjoyed getting rich by using his name and his government connections to ram industrial junk down people's throats. Wikipedia summarizes some of the most shocking facts about this man:

It's important to note that this new paradigm of nutrition science is based on popularizing the managerial state's attempts at economically and efficiently mass-feeding soldiers during the Second World War. After the success of British and American soldiers in defeating Nazism, the managerial state in both countries sought to apply the successes in managing the wartime effort to man aging civilian life, and the result was the modern dietary guidelines. These are written with the aim of producing the cheapest way of feeding masses of humans. Instead of allowing nutrition to be an individual choice and food production a free market process, modern governments have treated their societies as industrial lot-feeds, and tasked third rate scientists and terrible statisticians with devising the cheapest way of feeding them enough calories. Humans' natural instincts and delectation were to be overridden by government-employed charlatans profiting from telling them how much to eat of each kind of food, and whose prime directive (as in the war years) was economy. Consequently, the biggest beneficiary from government nutritional guidance were the producers of the cheapest sources of calories and proteins: grains and pulses. But the nutrition mandarins failed to notice, or mention, is that grains are essentially nutrient-free, while pulses contain inferior nutrients to those contained in animal meat.

A monetary system built on a pyramid of unsound debt money gave us a food system built on a pyramid of unsound grains and carbohydrates. In one of the most catastrophic scientific errors of all time, detailed thoroughly in the work of Nina Teicholz and Gary Taubes, carbohydrates were given a free pass and became the foundational basis for nutrition while animal meat and fat, the highest quality and most nutritious food available, were vilified as the cause of modern diseases and illnesses. Modern medicine took the word of slimy politicians pretending to be scientists like Ancel Keys and Fredrick Stare and spread the gospel worldwide. Astonishingly, to this day, even the least health-conscious people still worry about their consumption of animal fats, while finding nothing wrong with eating large quantities of ‘healthy' grains, sugars, processed foods, and soft drinks.

The result of this catastrophic mistake has been that people the world over have massively increased their consumption of cheap, nutrient-deficient grains, and all manners of toxic industrial "foods" while drastically cutting down on meat and animal fats. Grains may be more abundant in our modern world but they are not more nutritious, and eating them does not satisfy people's nutritious requirement, but instead causes more hunger and cravings, motivating them to eat more and more. The obesity of the modern world has its root in a very real lack of necessary nutrients in favor of eating highly-addictive and non-nutritious junk, while the truly nutritious food, fatty meat, has been deemed dangerous by modern governments' diet dictators. The reason that the obese of today eat too much is not that they are affluent, rather, it is that they are utterly deprived of nutrients and are constantly hungry, and the grain and sugar which forms the vast majority of today's diet provides close to no nutrition.

The role of the government as the nanny responsible for dictating the diets of the entire population is a natural outgrowth of the totalitarianism that fiat money engenders. When government has the ability to generate any money it needs for whatever purposes it deems necessary, any nice-sounding ideal will eventually come to be viewed as a prerogative of the state. What started off as a well-meaning religious attempt to save people from the 'envisioned' damages of eating meat devolved into a government bureaucracy captured by large agro-industrial food interests motivated to sell food that can easily scale industrially and provide the highest margins.