The Director of the IRS division implicated in using the improper targeting, Lois Lerner, is (or at least was) an “active member” of HSUS. In her official capacity, could Lerner have been in position to run interference for HSUS, the nation’s richest anti-agriculture animal liberation group?

That’s a serious charge, but the question is being raised in the media today. In 2011, six U.S. Representatives concerned that HSUS was using its tax status for improper political activities wrote a letter to the IRS Inspector General asking for a thorough investigation of HSUS’s political spending to determine if it fell within allowable levels under federal tax law. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer, a Missouri Republican, wrote a letter to Lerner the year before asking that HSUS’s political spending be scrutinized.

Lerner took no public action. In response, Rep. Luetkemeyer wrote another letter to the Treasury Secretary and the Inspector General for Tax Administration on Friday renewing his call for an investigation of HSUS, in light of Lerner’s connections to the group and her rapidly diminishing credibility. Fox News’s Fox and Friends covered the issue this morning (in a clip you can see below), and we only expect the volume of questions on this matter to grow.

Given the source, it’s remarkable that the IOM team acknowledged that redoubling the anti-salt crusade wouldn’t help. Instead, the team found based on new, more rigorous evidence that people should aim for the 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day currently recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans for people not at risk. The team members noted that there simply isn’t any evidence that on a population level making everybody eat less than that amount of sodium actually helps anyone be healthier.

The New York Times             , a University of Pennsylvania professor, who says, “As you go below the 2,300 mark, there is an absence of data in terms of benefit and there begin to be suggestions in subgroup populations about potential harms.” So, not only are excessive reductions in salt not helpful for the population, they might hurt some people.

So much for a cocaine-like “deadly white powder.” The lesson on salt, like so many other food issues, is moderation, not prohibition, is key.

They neglect to acknowledge the Congressman’s more important points: Not all the grants went for true education about choices. Some may have gone to backhanded lobbying for policies most Americans don’t support. Evidence suggests that the CDC took money allocated to it by the fiscal stimulus and gave it to local authorities to push states and local governments to impose steep taxes on soft drinks.

Even the supposedly “educational” spending often went to propagandistic attack ads rather than factual information. Federal taxpayers subsidized gross-out ads that put safe, legal products in the cross-hairs. (New York City’s scientifically dubious anti-soda ads were among them.)

The CDC’s campaign proved not to be about putting the facts before the public and letting people make responsible decisions (or accept the consequences of irresponsible ones). Instead it became agenda-driven activism, and until the CDC learns the difference it might just need to told the difference by the people’s representatives.

British researchers now demand that the government put “cigarette-style” warning labels on soft drinks. But as Canada’s largest national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, noted when a similar hysterical proposal—which also applied to pizza, snacks, and fruit juices—saw the light of day in the Great White North, the comparison is incorrect and misleading.

For one thing, smoking actually causes smoking-related illnesses. On the other hand, over-consuming any product with calories or being a couch potato—as opposed to simply drinking soda—can lead to obesity. (Soft drinks provide only seven percent of our daily calories, according to government data.) That’s to say nothing of other small choices that reduce physical activity and also contribute to potential calorie imbalance. If the government is going to put vomit-inducing obesity warning pictures on sodas or pizzas, it should also logically put them on sofas, computers, televisions, chairs, and automobiles too, no?

Warning labels are a classic food activist fever dream straight from mid-2000s Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) propaganda. (CSPI itself has moved on to Prohibition.) It’s also a ploy used by animal liberation “nutrition” activists who want people to associate lean meats with unseemly things.

The precedential possibilities of this proposed government overreach are endless. But Americans are justly skeptical of government overlords in their pantries, since the remedies the Yale-and-Bagels elite have chosen for them violate personal freedoms (and won’t work to boot). As some of the commentariat are beginning to recognize, it might just be time for a new approach, not a bad idea rehashed from old copies of CSPI’s bulletins.

The bill’s supporters hope the tax will “eradicate” obesity, to quote one particularly enthusiastic San Franciscan blog headline. Science says it will do no such thing, however. A recent commentary in a scold-friendly policy journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned, “Evidence suggests caution in enacting sugar-sweetened beverage taxation legislation with a core purpose of obesity reduction.”

Instead of switching beverage choices to zero-calorie drink scold-approved water, scientific studies and lived experience indicate that people respond to soda taxes by fleeing jurisdictions to shop elsewhere or replacing soft drinks with equally caloric juices, milks, and even alcoholic drinks. Multiple studies confirm that these effects render any reduction in calorie consumption—and therefore obesity reduction—trivial at best.

Even if California (which just passed a massive tax increase last November) is strapped for cash, the tax has more problems than benefits. The tax falls on the poorest Californians with the most severity, which is why Kelly “Twinkie tax” Brownell’s colleagues are desperately seeking to “reframe” that particular issue. Combine that with a lack of health benefits, and you get a terrible proposal that eats the grocery budgets of the working classes to salve the consciences of the latte loophole crowd. (Paging C.S. Lewis.)

And a recently conducted Harris Poll shows that Americans are also livid with the suggestion that Yalies and billionaire mayors should dictate beverage choices. Respondents objected to the idea of a soda tax by a 2-to-1 margin. Over half also didn’t think that a soda tax would reduce obesity. (Evidence shows that they’re right.)

As our Senior Research Analyst told HealthDay News, “[P]eople prefer incentives to penalties.” Indeed, the general Bloomberg-style idea of food choice regulation proved even more unpopular than soda taxes in this most recent poll, with over two thirds of Americans actively opposed.

These results confirm a longstanding trend in the national conversation: Only a small group of self-appointed elites have any desire to regulate their fellow Americans’ food choices. (Not their own, of course, as the Rich-People’s-Big-Gulps-excluding latte loophole in Mayor Bloomberg’s invalidated soda prohibition shows.) An analysis of an Associated Press poll showed that Americans of all political stripes balk at the effort to seize control of our dinner plates.

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.

The bill initially required any the manufacturer of any consumer product that “significantly contributes to a public health epidemic” recognized by the Centers for Disease Control and costing the state at least $50 million per year to pay for developing a “public health impact report” (PHIR). Even worse, the state would have the authority to restrict or ban the sale of products if state health officials didn’t like the PHIR. If that remit wasn’t bloated enough, the latest round of amendments increased the costs that companies would face and extended the bureaucrats’ reach by enabling them to collect even more fees from companies to implement the PHIRs. If sucking consumers and companies dry for every drop of possible revenue were a “public health epidemic,” Sacramento would be quarantined.

If you stretch the meaning of the word, then just about anything can “contribute” to killing. The law could apply to almost any product that is labor-saving, recreational, or a foodstuff—footballs “contribute” to football injuries, foods “contribute” to overeating, and chairs “contribute” to sitting. The possible absurd regulations are endless and bounded only by the unaccountable will of capricious California bureaucrats. (And you thought New York was an “administrative Leviathan.”)

For California consumers, this proposal would lead to one of two effects: Either higher costs comparable in effect to highly regressive “fat taxes” that hurt low-income consumers’ wallets or private-sector prohibitions like those of some companies that do not ship products to California to avoid liability under the similarly over-broad Proposition 65 cancer-scare law. Another possibility is that this proposal exists to provide “cover” for the proposed soda tax (it’s the PETA to the tax’s HSUS). Either way, it can only serve to engorge state coffers and crib consumer choice.

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?

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.