So we have to ask: What if it doesn’t work? To begin with, anti-obesity crusaders will start looking for the next (and the next, and the next) heavy-handed policy. If national menu labeling mandates can be passed under the name of “healthcare,” a whole lot of supposedly anti-obesity initiatives could see the light of legislation.

Well, the past three years have showed us what those initiatives might look like. We’ve seen aggressive pushes for soda taxes, proposals to create an “administrative Leviathan” to regulate drink portions, and murmurings of bureaucrat-ordered total prohibitions. Oh, and the food police aren’t done messing with menus. The Los Angeles Times reports on a study from the Bloomberg (yes, him) School of Public Health:

How about posting a menu item’s calorie content in “sweat equivalents” (it’ll take you 90 minutes of power-walking to work off the calories in this piece of cheesecake and 30 minutes to work off the fruit-and-yogurt combo)? How about listing food items on the menu in the order of their nutritional density or caloric content (apple slices before fries, nonfat milk before sugary soda)?

The researchers found that listing so-called exercise equivalents for the calories in various meals reduced calorie consumption somewhat, so they called on state or local (that Bloomberg guy again) governments to pass such mandates for chains not preempted by the federal rule.

The most glaring problem with these proposals is that they are downright deceptive. An average person burns roughly 1000-1500 calories just to continue living (scientists call this the basal metabolic rate). Saying that eating a cheeseburger for a meal (when you have to eat to live) would somehow require you to immediately run a 5 K or assume the rotundity of Yale professor and soda scold Kelly Brownell is deceptive. (Physical activity still is a good idea, though.) It’s even more deceptive when you consider that a University of California study found that people compensate for eating big restaurant meals by eating less at other mealtimes.

According to British author Damian Thompson, whose book was recently picked up by an American publisher, just about anything that is remotely modern is essentially heroin for our brains. And, of course, food makers are supposedly nefariously turning the public into junkies. To him, cupcakes are a particular evil and supposedly the cause of bulimia. Huh?

And food scolds seem to like to scold any food. He writes:

Anyone with a rolled banknote up their nose knows that — so long as their dealer hasn’t ripped them off — they’re about to experience the effects of a mind-altering substance. […] In contrast, the tubby young man who demolishes a packet of chocolate digestives while watching the football doesn’t suspect that his eating habits have left his brain unusually sensitive to stimulation by sugar; he just knows that, once the packet’s opened, the biscuits disappear.

Actual scientists disagree with this characterization. Cambridge University researchers found that “criteria for substance dependence translate poorly to food-related behaviours” in a recent investigation. Meanwhile, the author also claims that the iPhone game “Angry Birds” should also fall into the tobacco/alcohol realm. When the idea of “food addiction” was first proposed, a psychologist warned that “The word ‘addiction’ is perilously close to losing any meaning.” Her warning hasn’t been heeded, and while the only winner so far has been the publishing industry, the trial lawyer industry is certainly looking to get in on the fun.

Chasing this year’s well of food-related publishing cash, namely screaming from some New York park bench that food is being made “addictive,” she’s written a book titled Obsessed blaming the food industry for life’s problems. Echoing a political attack ad, she insinuates that food companies are waging war on women by making foods that are, um, easy to prepare, convenient to buy, and pleasing to the taste buds. (Or perhaps companies are simply giving people what they want.) Despite research from Cambridge University finding that “criteria for substance dependence translate poorly to food-related behaviours,” Mika claims that this means all sorts of regulations and lawsuits are needed to punish food makers.

In an interview, Mika points to the fact that she ate Nutella while sleep-walking. Far from making Nutella addictive, this highlights the side effect of a drug she was taking. As it turns out, sleepwalking, sleep-eating, and, scarily, even sleep-driving are reported side effects of the prescription sleep aid Ambien that Brzezinski said she was taking. Oh, and cases of Ambien dependence (i.e. addiction) are frequently reported in the medical literature.

So the food industry is innocent of at least one of Mika’s anecdotal charges. But there’s even more cash behind Mika’s sob stories. When the New York soda ban was announced, some noticed that Mika praised the ban on one hand and appeared to guzzle large quantities of Starbucks coffee (all glory to the latte loophole and Rich People’s Big Gulps) with the other. She did this because Starbucks is the main sponsor of Mika’s show.

No Starbucks cash would mean no show, and no show means Mika would have no soapbox from which to sell books. So obviously some sugary beverage choices are more equal than others, even if they have roughly equal calories. (A Starbucks 20-oz soy caramel macchiato has 300 calories, while a 20-oz regular cola has around 250.) Last time we checked, women drink lattes too.

Of course, in the world of diet police trying to restrict your food choices, taking sugar money in one hand while cashing in on bashing sugar is simply par for the hypocritical course. Whether it’s New York Times commentator Mark Bittman, who wants us all to be vegans before dinner while he finishes his two-egg breakfast; Kelly Brownell, who demands fat taxes while he is himself extremely rotund; or the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which sues food companies for doing something similar to what it also does, many food cops are known hypocrites. That Mika is among them isn’t surprising at all.

Case and point is this month’s issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry, which is publishing a series of articles purporting to prove “food addiction.” Headed by a letter from Kelly “Big Brother” Brownell and a colleague, the journal lists articles providing “evidence” that some foods are basically crack. According to the authors of the articles, since the human brain releases a chemical called dopamine in both drug administration and eating, eaters can be food addicts (unless they’re eating kale). So, are people hiding in the back-alleys behind restaurants jumping fry cooks on grease-disposal duty for another hit of fat, sugar, or salt? Not exactly.

The chemical dopamine is the leading brain chemical associated with any pleasurable experience. Having sex? Yep, that releases dopamine.  Listening to music? Same thing—dopamine releases in the brain. Shoot, even watching football? Indeed—more dopamine.

So, does that provide a clear and convincing case to seize every satellite T.V. dish, every copy of Madden NFL, and every replica jersey from kids under 21? Of course not. The immediate effects of real addictions are well-established and destructive; foods cause no such things (neither does watching sports). That—and inconsistency in the brain scan results—caused Cambridge University neuroscientists to restate a warning not to engage in policymaking based on unproven and conflated claims of “addiction.”

The European Food Information Council recently released a synopsis of two Cambridge University efforts to scrutinize the existing data ostensibly supporting the theory, which we have noted before. The researchers’ overwhelming conclusion is that the theory that foods are little more than socially acceptable heroin is full of holes. The more recent Cambridge article is available for free here, if you’re inclined to read the whole thing.

These articles are yet more evidence that people are beginning to question the “war on food” that has characterized the anti-obesity movement over the past decade. We noted a recent article in a policy journal that expressed skepticism that blaming food companies would reduce obesity.

Since that plan, long advocated by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), Kelly “Twinkie tax” Brownell, and Marion Nestle, isn’t panning out, activists who would regulate anything we eat or even do need a new tactic. Many of them think “food addiction” is the key. But while they hope it will “change the legal landscape” to enrich their trial lawyer pals, it hasn’t changed the scientific one.

Combine the two and you have a debate now playing out in the nation’s capital, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture considers what foods to ban from snack lines and bake sales. The Washington Post reports:

Across the country, school lunch directors, nutritionists and parents like Devitt are asking the same question as the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) crafts new federal nutrition standards limiting sugar, fat and sodium for school snacks and drinks. The rules would be the first update to school snack guidelines in more than 30 years and would come as first lady Michelle Obama continues to take aim at childhood obesity.

Our Senior Research Analyst also weighed in, noting that hungry school-kids are quite resourceful when it comes to skirting whatever bans schools impose. Texas kids’ surreptitious peddling of chocolates created an atmosphere that a reporter characterized as “Willy-Wonka-meets-Casablanca.”

As radical nutrition activists work ever harder to demonize food that isn’t un-seasoned, butter-free cauliflower, pay very close attention to school lunch debates. RAND Corporation researchers openly wrote that any foods banned from school lunches might be banned from sale to youths generally.

It’s a short march from there to the portion-size prohibitions recently invalidated in New York City, if not to food item prohibitions recently proposed in California. (No, seriously.) Today it might be cupcake cops and tomorrow gummy-bear G-Men. But with each passing day, it becomes clearer that if the anti-food movement and animal liberationist hangers-on get their way, next week might bring cheeseburger Prohibition.

To Walter Willett, soda prohibitionist, meat scaremonger, and potato basher extraordinaire of Harvard, and the “public health” community in general, this outcome (if—officially—not the means) is just dandy. Willett wrote that the effect of the intense material suffering of a population already living under the dictatorial Castro regime amounted to “powerful evidence that a reduction in overweight and obesity would have major population-wide benefits.”

While the authors claim to sympathize with the suffering Cubans, their concerns are merely of process, not outcome. If a Board of Health (like New York’s) were to create an “administrative Leviathan” (to quote New York Judge Milton Tingling) to accomplish the same end, Willett would presumably be hunky-dory. After all, Willett wrote that cutting obesity by taxes and regulations is “perhaps the major public health and societal challenge of the century.” Communists apparently have a way, but it would be inconvenient and an offense against human dignity — not that food scolds are immune to such things — to openly call for it.

We joke about public health officials secretly desiring a “North Korean food policy,” but we never thought we’d see them practically openly pine for one. The closest that the food cops had previously come to confessing their true desires was Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) president Michael Jacobson’s praise of the 16^th century peasant’s “pound of bread, a spud, and a couple of carrots per day” as “basically a wonderfully healthy diet.” Feudal monarchies are no longer in vogue, but would the public health community approve of a Dear Leader?

One author, from the Boston University School of Public Health, acknowledged some of the procedural and political problems that culminated with Judge Milton Tingling’s ruling and the peevish mayor’s appeal. Bloomberg didn’t go through the City Council and his regulation was so riddled with political loopholes that Jon Stewart of The Daily Show could easily mock the boneheaded ban by saying, “It combines the draconian government overreach people love with the probable lack of results they expect.”

However, another author from Columbia University demanded that the journal’s readership shoulder arms in Bloomberg’s continued crusade. In typical activist fashion, the ridiculous analogies flow like liquid into a Big Gulp. Apparently, soft drinks are now to be considered “industrial pollution,” as if drinking a perfectly safe, refreshing beverage is going to give people a third arm.

This sort of anti-choice thinking and hyperbolic argument is typical for the Journal. Much to the chagrin of activists who predicted in its pages that fatness would lower the average lifespan, that hasn’t happened, and we continue to live longer and better than ever. The Journal also published research preposterously claiming that obesity could be passed on second-hand, as if food decisions were germs and people helpless to do anything about “catching” an obesity “contagion.”

A cartoonist (whose work we republish here) once referred to a “New England Journal of Panic-Inducing Gobbledygook.” With each passing scare from the Journal’s pages, the line between reality and satire gets ever more blurry.

We’ve made similar arguments here at CCF. The article retells the history of how the “public health” establishment moved obesity from a personal matter to a national “epidemic,” and how a fundamental misunderstanding of another issue led policymakers down the wrong path. But it’s good to see openness and willingness amongst the elite to critique the reflexive anti-choice positions that some of their partners in upper-class moralism — think New York Times columnist Mark Bittman — have staked out.

The article has garnered the attention of the chattering classes. Left-leaning columnist Marc Ambinder of The Week notes:

Liberal activists should read it. It’s uncomfortable because it suggests that our beliefs do not comport with the science, and our preferred solutions are tied to a conception of the good life, rather than a realistic appraisal of how life is actually lived.

Meghan McArdle of The Daily Beast takes a related but subtly different approach. Against those like Michael Tomasky who say that freedom to choose should not exist or those who claim that we have somehow “evolved” a need to be controlled, McArdle argues:

But though overweight people are choosing what to eat in the face of genetic differences in hunger and metabolism, that doesn’t mean we can say that they are not making a choice—that  in some sense, they would really like the rest of us to take away their pasta and keep them on a diet of cabbage and carrots.  Nor that they are victims of a broken food distribution system, or advertising mind control. 

But don’t expect the anti-food view to die quickly. At the conservative National Review, policy writer Reihan Salam posits that the author “neglects the idea that carbohydrates [sugar and starch] might actually have addictive properties.”

Researchers from Cambridge may have found “no conclusive evidence of a human withdrawal syndrome for foods” and that “criteria for substance dependence translate poorly to food-related behaviors,” but don’t expect evidence that the activist crusade is misguided to stop it. No matter what Americans of all political persuasions — from Democratic judges from Manhattan to former Republican national nominees from Alaska — may think.

The article even claims that the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and the American Association of Pediatrics endorse veganism for kids. They don’t — they actually say a vegan diet can work if properly planned — and they refrain from endorsing it for very good reason. Without Vitamin B12, found almost exclusively in foods of animal origin, kids can suffer severe nutrient deficiencies. In some cases, nutrient deficiencies in vegan-raised kids were reportedly fatal.

The article’s errors go on. The reporter attempts to cite polling by the Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG) — an advocacy organization for vegetarian eating — as evidence that more kids are turning vegan. However, the article doesn’t get the numbers right. While the paper states that 3 percent of kids in a 2010 survey were vegan, VRG’s website states the actual number was 2 percent. Additionally, the paper claimed that in a 2012 survey, VRG found that 5 percent of U.S. adults were vegan. Not true: VRG’s website says the true value was 1 percent.

And, in a lesson from 4^th grade geometry, you have no evidence of a trend in kids without two data points. So the claim of “growing popularity” is simply asserted without evidence — the lame attempt at justifying it is quoting a VRG spokesman who says he “suspects” there’s a higher number of vegan kids.

Putting aside the errors, let’s remember that we’re still talking about 1 or 2 percent of the population being vegan. Whoop-tee-doo.  We see stories all the time about celebs who “went veg” giving it up and going back into the meaty fold. (In recent weeks, Ozzy Osbourne and R&B singer Ne-Yo have rejoined the 99 percent after a vegan experiment.) Maybe the real question should be, after all the years of propaganda from PETA, the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), and other vegan animal liberation activists, has the public concluded that it just doesn’t agree?