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.

With the activists looking to whip up a whirlwind against the pleasures and conveniences of modern food, in steps economist and university professor Jayson Lusk with a dollop of common sense. In his book The Food Police, Lusk challenges the mythmaking of Michael Pollan and his so-called food “movement” (that doesn’t win many converts or ballot-box contests, we would add).

Whether the foodies and their allies want to make everyone eat “organic” or “local” foods, to ban or severely restrict the use of biotechnology in food production, or enact “fat taxes” to make foods they don’t like cost more, Lusk stands athwart the effort to reduce choice. Using economic thinking, Lusk debunks claims that the food elite’s views of health, food fashion, and people’s inability to choose should be extended by law to everybody.

The problem Lusk describes isn’t that some people like to eat organic food, avoid GMOs, or not drink cola. Instead, the “food movement” wants to use the law to make people who have different preferences and make different choices follow those same preferences. To a regular reader here who has followed the developments in food cop politics over the past decade it might be a re-hash, but to newcomers who want the story of how a few cranks took over how a country thinks about food, The Food Police provides an excellent primer.

The 1,647 cats and dogs PETA employees killed last year bring the animal rights group’s total body count to 29,398 since 1998. PETA has committed this slaughter despite the fact that the group’s president, Ingrid Newkirk, has claimed that “We could become a no-kill shelter immediately.” The self-described “press sluts” are more interested in lettuce-clad “lobster liberation” and offending Holocaust survivors than finding adoptive homes for the pets in its care. PETA even bought a walk-in freezer to store the bodies. That’s probably not the “forever home” most people would hope for.

What makes it scarier for pet owners is that this highest of hypocrisies isn’t completely out of character for PETA. Newkirk has said that in her ideal world, “companion animals [what the rest of us call “pets”] would be phased out.” A PETA staffer wrote in a Florida newspaper that the community should become “no-birth,” putting puppies and kittens on the path of the dodo bird. And — perhaps desperate not to be shamed by the performance of city dog catchers — PETA stood in the way of an ordinance to reduce pet killing in its hometown.

If you are outraged by PETA’s shameful, lethal behavior, please go to PETAKillsAnimals.com and sign our petition asking the Commonwealth of Virginia to strip the group of its status as an animal shelter.

You might say PETA has a deadly habit of hypocrisy. And since PETA’s hypocrisy excuses the group’s own animal killing, it should not shock anybody that PETA’s celebrity endorsers are excused from PETA’s proscriptions against eating or using animal products.

The latest celebrity to strip for PETA while wearing animal products in his real life is rock musician Dave Navarro. While Navarro lent himself to PETA’s anti-fur and anti-cosmetics campaigns, a leather designer in Los Angeles is quite happy to promote that Navarro wears his stuff. Indeed, leather is the singer’s signature look, and apparently it’s the real McCoy.

It is a longstanding tradition for PETA endorsers to join the self-described “total press sluts” in advertisements while refusing to follow the PETA lifestyle. Pamela Anderson, who appeared in countless PETA ads, even opened an omnivorous restaurant in 2006. Given the chance, PETA would ban meat, cheese, and even dairy creamer (for the rest of us, at least).

However, some prominent entertainers see through PETA. Jennifer Lawrence of The Hunger Games fame said “Screw PETA” in a recent interview. By their deeds (if not their pin-ups), many PETA celebrities agree.

This is utter hokum. An examination and commentary by researchers from Cambridge University found “no conclusive evidence of a human withdrawal syndrome for foods.” Most claims of “food withdrawal” are based on subtle changes in brain chemistry, but that is a misappropriation of the concept. Diners waiting for their hamburgers don’t get “the shakes,” “coke bugs,” or stick up the drive-thru to get their fix. Ultimately, the researchers concluded that clinical “criteria for substance dependence translate poorly to food-related behaviors.”

We suppose such shoddy advice should be expected from a guy whose show runs alongside Rikki Lake, Jeff Probst, and the People’s Court. A recent article in Slate pointed out that Oz has a habit of advocating unproven “miracle” weight loss speculations. The article focuses on shameless and unsubstantiated advocacy for nutritional supplements, but the sentiment equally applies to some of Oz’s bolder claims about diet. For example, he has written that high fructose corn syrup—a sweetener nutritionally equivalent to sugar—is uniquely bad for people. Ditto for his hosting diet-book shill William Davis, who laughably claims that wheat is “poisonous.” Oh, and he’s also hosted ex-PETA Foundation president Neal Barnard of the 90-percent-doctor-free Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine to promote the animal-rights diet. Whether it’s green coffee bean extract or garcina extract, it seems every week Oz has found a new “holy grail” of nutrition (or shipment of snake oil, depending on your perspective).

Ultimately, what makes good science does not necessarily make good television. Slate quoted one of Oz’s P.R. representatives saying,  “An adjective like ‘miracle’ is used as an editorial device to describe anecdotal results, as exemplified by the guests on our show. Our audience are not scientists, and the show needs to be more lively than a dry scientific discussion.” Translation: We put showmanship ahead of medical credibility.

There are no real-world weight-loss miracles, so leave the fad diets and crank pills behind and follow the plan in the “World’s Shortest Diet Book.” It’s the only one that really works.

Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Mark Bittman thinks that celebrities ought not to endorse sodas because they’re comparable to cigarettes or guns. They aren’t, obviously, but when activists have to cram down policies Americans don’t support, accuracy takes a backseat to hyperbole. So, commentators take to creating myths just as real as the childhood Boogeyman.

Lustig’s screed, Fat Chance, would be just another in a series of fad diet books targeting single foods and ingredients that waste away in the bargain bin if it didn’t come with a bunch of proposed regulations. And carding people for soda is just the tip of the iceberg: Lustig wants to apply the whole gamut of alcohol control policies to sugar. He’s not alone in that desire, either.

Of course, just like the fad diet books from years past, it won’t make anybody thinner. Neither will Bittman’s ban on singers promoting beverages. On the other hand, a doctor from Richmond, California writing in the Contra Costa Times advocates a more promising approach:

Attitudes about healthy nutritional choices cannot be made through political mandates; city councils aren’t equipped to address the complexities of obesity. […] Taxing soft drinks won’t do a darn thing to convince young people that they are valuable; that their bodies are valuable; that they need to respect themselves by eating the right foods and exercising.

People have to make their own decision to lose weight and keep it off. As the experiences of the National Weight Control Registry participants — people who successfully lost weight — demonstrate, dieting frequently fails without physical activity. There’s only one “diet book” you’ll ever need, which we have provided here free of charge.

[H]e launched the American Academy of Family Physician’s 2012 convention by telling fellow doctors that they could help Americans most by starting a grass-roots effort to ban sugary drinks, pharmaceutical advertising and break up the medical industrial complex.

The article in the Philadelphia Inquirer reminds us why we might recognize Weil’s name:

Weil, 70, has become well-known in the health-care community for his advocacy of integrated medicine, meaning a mix of conventional medicine, natural remedies, yoga and novel concepts like regular exercise and healthy eating.

So scientific medicine is not Weil’s strong suit. In an article in the Huffington Post, Weil rejects the science behind eating less and exercising more as “too simple” of a solution. He’s a proponent of “alternative medicine” that rejects tested treatments. It’s a good thing that most medical doctors understand that “well-known” does not mean “based on science.”

As a critical 1998 article in The New Republic by Dr. Arnold Relman explains:

There are not two kinds of medicine, one conventional and the other unconventional, that can be practiced jointly in a new kind of “integrative medicine.” Nor, as Andrew Weil and his friends also would have us believe, are there two kinds of thinking, or two ways to find out which treatments work and which do not. In the best kind of medical practice, all proposed treatments must be tested objectively. In the end, there will only be treatments that pass that test and those that do not, those that are proven worthwhile and those that are not. 

Looking at who gives Weil glowing reviews should give anyone greater pause. His latest book True Food has been hailed by Marion Nestle, a proponent of the “Twinkie” tax, and Alice Waters, who got under the skin of Julia Child thanks to her “endless talk of pollutants and toxins.”

In 2006, even the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) (not exactly friends of ours) said Weil was “hardly an objective expert” in the way he promoted vitamin supplements.

Dr. Relman notes:

Like so many of the other gurus of alternative medicine, Weil is not bothered by logical contradictions in his argument, or encumbered by a need to search for objective evidence.

So attacking “sugary drinks” (including fruit juice) is all part of the game. Weil does well for himself as a restaurateur and author of books such as his 2001 hit “Eating Well for Optimum Health.” Soda is something that Weil must think he can’t market himself–whereas playing the food nanny is something that he’s quite accustomed to. And now, he’s calling on doctors to pursue for a grassroots movement–doctors who could better spend their time using science to study ways to improve health.

As for Weil, he rejects science like water rolls off a… well you get the idea.

The radical Waterkeeper Alliance, no stranger to dubious lawsuits, might soon find itself neck-deep in chicken litter. The group, run by the “very reckless” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. — you might remember him for his dangerous claims against childhood vaccines — is slated to go to trial next week in its war against a family farm in Maryland.

The suit alleges that the Hudson family, owner of Romarlen Farms, violated the federal Clean Water Act (CWA) by storing poultry manure in a pile on their property. The Waterkeeper Alliance went after both the Hudsons and Perdue Farms, which contracts with the Hudsons.

There’s only one small problem: there wasn’t a pile of chicken litter. It was a pile of natural fertilizer for crops legally purchased from the authorities in Ocean City, Maryland, which, although improperly stored, was not what the trigger-happy plaintiffs initially said it was. The Hudsons complied with a state order and moved it. Nonetheless, Waterkeeper Alliance went forward with its suit, claiming that the water pollution it found in a ditch couldn’t have come from anywhere else but the Hudsons’ farm.

We will keep you posted as the case goes on, because this is going to be a watershed case.