Anti-soda activists are out in force blaming the simple pleasures for Californians’ love handles and medical bills, despite little evidence that extracting more money from people’s pockets will slim them down. Indeed, a research team from Yale, Emory, and the University of Washington warned in a recent commentary that “evidence suggests caution in enacting sugar-sweetened beverage taxation legislation with a core purpose of obesity reduction.” Evidence shows that people faced with soda taxes don’t switch to water but instead get their tasty liquid in the form of equal-calorie off-brand sodas, milks, juices, and even beer in response. And it’s not like calorie consumption from soft drinks is surging: A Centers for Disease Control study released last week found that Americans are consuming roughly 40-70 fewer calories from soft drinks per day than ten years ago.

The bait-and-switch comes from promises that a “children’s health promotion fund” will guarantee that revenues will lead to increased healthcare and anti-obesity spending. Unfortunately for California consumers, the evidence from the state’s lottery—by law, profits are put in a fund for education—indicates that new fund contributions will replace, not supplement, general revenue contributions to those programs.

Politicians are able to hide the special interest pet-project games behind the veneer of the “fund,” even if they don’t openly raid it, which they might. Promises of a “health promotion fund” can be undone by a future legislature, and politicians in other jurisdictions have taken expansive views of what basic government services can be paid for by similar “funds.” The proposed tax now will be analyzed by state number-crunchers before being voted on and possibly receiving a vote in the full Senate. Supporters of beverage freedom should watch closely.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 lesson of the pyramid is one that home kitchens and restaurant line cooks have heard for years: Handle food correctly and cook to the proper temperatures. (You don’t have to become a militant vegetarian to avoid food poisoning, and recent outbreak evidence suggests that going veg might not even help avoid foodborne illness.) The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) provides guidance on proper handling of food that can reduce the risk of food poisoning. Either way, the U.S. food system is still very safe: Since the CDC began monitoring food poisoning infections in the mid-1990s, infections caused by the six key pathogens are down over 20 percent.

What’s more interesting is what’s at the base of the pyramid (the lowest risk): Sausages, ham, and chicken nuggets. What do these humble meats have in common? Processing, which has been the bane of the foodie’s existence since foodies first appeared.

Indeed, food safety and preservation (safer food generally keeps longer) is a key reason to process, which is why every meat-eating culture since time immemorial has developed sausages  and why companies tried to make ground beef (which CSPI lists as “Highest Risk”) safer. One processor used a misting process with an ammonium hydroxide solution generally recognized as safe for food use by Food and Drug Administration regulations to effectively kill pathogens before the ground beef left the factory. It was a clever idea that freaked out the foodies, who ginned up a scare and a gross-sounding name to de facto ban it, much to the delight of Aussie and Uruguayan beef exporters. (So much for “eating local.”)

So, did CSPI defend beef processors for reducing risk against anti-science snobs? Nah. Instead, CSPI looked on the foodies’ sloganeering with envy. It—and the rest of CSPI’s record—is enough to make someone think that CSPI has an anti-food-pleasure agenda.

To promote the new book, Pollan sat down with his comrade at The New York Times, Mark Bittman. Needless to say, Bittman raves about the work, praising it and the act of cooking as ways to stick it to “the corporations” supposedly ruining everything.

Pollan’s “solution” to the non-problem of people occasionally eating out is raising taxes on restaurant food, since in the Church of Foodieism not cooking is a sin. However, before Michael Bloomberg decides to mandate purchase of the book in advance of banning restaurants, there are a few problems with Pollan’s approach.

First, Bittman and Pollan simply deny that some people think cooking is a chore, not an enjoyable pursuit (especially after a hard day’s work). The Mark and Mike brigade’s approach to dealing with these problematic preferences is to pooh-pooh them, only stopping to ensure that both sexes labor equally. There’s nothing wrong with home cooking and quite a lot to be said for it, but ultimately it takes time and effort that some people simply don’t have or would rather spend on other things. Punishing restaurant eating would unfairly target low-income people who work physically demanding jobs over long hours.

Second, the essence of Pollan’s pro-local, anti-corporate ideology is based on a fallacy. Because of comparative advantage, it can be better for everyone—including the planet—to produce and ship foods from where it is most economical to grow them. Regardless, doing things Pollan’s way is much more expensive (even before any new taxes), which in a time of economic struggles is far from appealing.

Finally, Pollan’s default claim that cooking for yourself is healthier than going out to eat or taking advantage of a prepared ready-meal isn’t necessarily true. He could have found that out from Bittman, whose cheeseburger recipe in How to Cook Everything has more calories and fat than a Big Mac.

Cooking, like many other activities, is enjoyed by some and hated by others. Many of the people who enjoy it will buy Pollan’s book—those who don’t enjoy it can only hope they stick to their own kitchens and avoid the food policing instinct to mandate their preferences for everybody.

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.