The press release drips with dread: “Attention, college students cramming between midterms and finals: Binging on soda and sweets for as little as six weeks may make you stupid.”

So, was this a survey of students’ performance on their final exams after drinking some cola? Maybe it was a randomized controlled trial of a sugar-reduced diet on performance on a standardized test? Wrong and more wrong. No, this study — that a university press office said should lead students to reconsider cola and chocolate — was a study of rats in isolation running mazes. Strike one.

Additionally, the press office’s basic scientific literacy was awful. The press release says that the researchers “zeroed in on high-fructose corn syrup, an inexpensive liquid six times sweeter than cane sugar, that is commonly added to processed foods […].” Of course, the only part of that that’s true is that high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is a fairly inexpensive liquid ingredient.

Oddly for a study ostensibly examining its effects, the terms “high fructose corn syrup” or “HFCS” don’t appear in the full text of the article. A quick read of the experimental methodology shows that the rats were given fructose solution, not high-fructose corn syrup (which is not pure fructose, but 42 or 55 percent fructose, comparable with table sugar). The AFP notes that the authors gave no estimate of the human-equivalent amount of fructose the rats were fed. Strike two for the press office.

And then strike three: the claim that high-fructose corn syrup is “six times sweeter than cane sugar.” The high fructose corn syrup used in soda (the 55-percent-fructose kind) is formulated to be only as sweet as cane sugar (sucrose). It makes sense when you think about it, since the two sugars are almost chemically identical. You’d think they’d have learned from columnist Kathleen Parker.

The real takeaway from the actual study is that a diet high in omega-3 fatty acids is good for memory. Of course, that’s been common knowledge for some time, which is why Americans are encouraged to eat their fish. (Seafood is a good source of dietary omega-3 fats.) But restating stuff people already know isn’t going to snag headlines. Striking out sometimes does.

Without lean finely textured beef, or LFTB, the price of manually recovered lean beef trimmings have skyrocketed while the price of fatty trimmings (the raw ingredients for LFTB) have plummeted. As a result of the scare, 650 American workers have been laid off and US beef imports from Australia, New Zealand, and Uruguay have skyrocketed.

So what are Americans seeing at the supermarket? Retail ground beef prices hit a record high in March. Taking the equivalent of 1.5 million head of cattle out of the food supply won’t help ease that strain. (Not using LFTB wastes the equivalent of 1.5 million cows’ worth of beef over the course of a year.)

It’s also a divine irony that one of the prophets of the local-food movement, Mark Bittman, helped fuel the “pink slime” scare. Now, instead of consuming more meat from each U.S.-raised animal, Americans will get more of their ground beef from the Southern Hemisphere. When elitist food myths face off, it’s survival of the smuggest.

Food snobs may think that LFTB was the “lowest common denominator” (to quote Marion Nestle), but the evidence suggests that mindlessly bashing food processors isn’t helpful. Americans want their ground beef and buy it in spite of the scare. Unfortunately, they’ll have to pay more for it — while hundreds of other Americans have already lost their jobs.

And with an ear to activists’ new crusade to diminish the role of personal choice by concocting the notion of narcotic-esque “food addiction,” Reuters reports that the IOM declared that “people cannot truly exercise ‘personal choice’ because their options are severely limited.” Of course, as evidence on expanding access to healthy foods shows, you can lead people to healthy food, but you can’t make them eat it. It’s up to them to make good choices.

As for the other policies that IOM proposes, the evidence for the soda tax projects everything from mere failure to possible counter-productivity. (Perhaps soda is merely the thin end of the centrally planned diet wedge.) Marketing regulations didn’t help Quebec or Sweden buck the trend of expanding waistlines. And restaurant zoning bans are based on a false premise.

When it comes to children’s menu item regulation, it’s probably not even necessary as both chain and quick-service restaurants have responded to consumer demand for healthier products for their kids. Not to mention that parents can and should exercise appropriate veto power over what their kids eat. (What a concept.)

But the IOM didn’t pass up the opportunity to bash adults’ choices either. The “broccoli mandate” might be a thing of legal hypotheticals for now, but the IOM called for the creation of “strong nutritional standards” and ensuring that foods that meet them “are available in all places frequented by the public.” Does that mean movie theaters must serve carrot sticks—even if nobody buys them?

Of course, the report only suggests that the recommendations hold the force of law in government procurement. But we heard similar things recently said about “voluntary” advertising guidelines. True to form, the IOM now calls for those guidelines to be made mandatory if there aren’t enough volunteers. How far off can a national menu czar be? Let’s hope it isn’t Cass Sunstein.

Fundamentally, the IOM panel and its supporters in “public health” think that Americans are lemmings incapable of exercising restraint. (Were it 1899, they might have said we were “half devil and half child.”) Treating Americans as children or “McVictims” is only a recipe for fat-fighting failure.

Who could be in favor of eating “pink slime” or “bug juice”? Those are the clever hooks adopted by activist food snobs who raised ill-conceived firestorms about lean beef trimmings and cochineal red food dye.

Now that America has had a moment to recover from the sensationalism, it’s time to take a more sober look at the facts behind these slime campaigns. Contrary to the overhyped reports, lean beef trimmings make meals healthier, safer, cost-efficient and less animal-intensive. Cochineal food dyes, while derived from bugs, are actually all-natural replacements for artificial colors.

Right off the bat, the emphasis was on beef trimmings’ “yuck factor,” spurred along by a chorus of food snobs like cookbook author and columnist Mark Bittman, who urged the government on Twitter to outlaw lean beef trimmings on school lunch trays. Other activists who want meat off your plate, cream out of your coffee and leather off of your feet hyped up a campaign to get the all-natural dye out of Starbucks coffee drinks. Playing on fashionable prejudices against “processed food,” these people hoped to turn the “yuck factor” into an irrational boycott.

Because trimmings gross out gourmands and bug-derived dyes offend vegans, they feel themselves entitled to take the products away from consumers and even shutter the businesses that provide them.

But in slamming modern methods of food processing, these pundits can ironically contradict their philosophy’s own principles: making food safer, healthier and less animal-intensive.

Beef trimmings are just that: the trimmings left on the bone after primary cuts of beef are butchered. As any butcher will tell you, people have used and eaten trimmings in sausages and hamburger for centuries. Thanks to contemporary innovations, processors now have ways to remove the fat. That’s right: Some of the same food activists who paint Americans as fatty food addicts have turned around and decried a process that makes the oft-maligned hamburger leaner.

What about the safe, germ-killing treatment with ammonium hydroxide that also has come under criticism? The anti-germ process is actually widely used, in foods ranging from cheese to baked goods to chocolate candies.

Where’s the outrage? Nowhere – because ammonium hydroxide is used as an anti-bacterial agent that actually makes our food supply safer.

When it comes to lean beef trimmings, foodies are schizophrenic. On one hand, they generally lament that American farmers raise too many animals for food. Yet the same industries they tar are constantly researching and developing new ways to get more food out of the animals we eat.

By efficiently using more meat from each cow, lean beef trimmings sustainably reduce our environmental impact and our slaughter rates. Ridding trimmings from school lunches alone means food pundits are signing a death warrant for 10,000 cows, the number needed to replace the meat that otherwise might be thrown out. Eliminate trimmings on a nationwide basis, and one estimate says we’ll need to slaughter an additional 1.5 million cows a year.

Food snobs who make a living complaining about modern food processing are thrilled by the speed at which the attack on beef trimmings has gone viral on the Internet. Unfortunately, propaganda that passes for information moves so fast today that experts are handicapped getting the truth out. Meanwhile, rash decisions already have been made. Major supermarket chains, fearing a swift and ignorant reprisal, have announced that they will stop using lean beef trimmings.

It’s often said that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on. The distance traveled by bad information goes much farther and faster today.

J. Justin Wilson is senior research analyst at the Center for Consumer Freedom.

And CSPI took notice. A CSPI lawyer told the Post, “If we could figure out the formula and apply it to serious public health issues, that would be amazing.” Of course, it wouldn’t be “amazing” for our taste buds—much less our sanity—if CSPI’s historical target list is any indication.

When it isn’t promoting unfounded cancer scares, CSPI too has attempted the “rebranding” strategy, calling soda “liquid candy” in an erroneous 1998 report (although the moniker probably made fizzy drinks more appealing, if anything). They tried to label tapioca “chemically modified food starch,” which also didn’t catch on.

And just as the “pink slime” scare may backfire (the lean beef trimmings are made less fatty and are misted to kill pathogens, which last time we checked were good things), so too can a CSPI “serious public health issue.” Lest we forget, it was CSPI’s Nutrition Action Healthletter that claimed, “All told, the charges against trans fat just don’t stand up” before CSPI changed its tune and branded the oils a killer.

We can imagine the lengths to which CSPI might go to replicate the “pink slime” formula. They could call colored coffee drinks “beetle juice,” but some angry vegans already beat them to that. They could try to call sodas “liquid cocaine.” Perhaps gyros meat will become “grey slime.” Will chocolate milkshakes become “brown goop” in CSPI press releases? Whatever “formula” CSPI tries, it’s probably best to consider their history and ignore the scaremongering.

Today the Center for Consumer Freedom is firing back against Sunday’s “60 Minutes” segment by Dr. Sanjay Gupta that calls sugar “toxic.” The segment is based off of a recent Nature commentary piece by Dr. Robert Lustig that calls for sugar to be heavily regulated like alcohol and tobacco.

J. Justin Wilson, Senior Research Analyst at the Center for Consumer Freedom, released the following statement disputing the “60 Minutes” piece:

Dr. Robert Lustig’s argument to regulate sugar like alcohol and tobacco is social engineering at its absolute worst. Obesity is a complicated issue with myriad solutions. Suggesting that simply cutting out one ingredient is essentially the cure-all to diseases and weight loss in America shows just how out-of-touch Dr. Lustig’s harebrained proposal truly is.

Study after study demonstrates that targeting a single ingredient as the primary cause of obesity is the wrong approach to weight loss. Weight gain is a function of simple mathematics: calories “in” (food) exceed calories “out” (exercise). But food scolds, like Dr. Lustig and many others, concentrate their policy-making largely on only one side of the equation, calories in.

Americans are already making voluntary changes necessary to stay healthy. A newly published study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutritionfound that Americans are eating 3.5 percent fewer calories today than they were in 2000, and have cut their sugar intake by six teaspoons per day.

Responsible professional advocates should focus on promoting eating in moderation and holistic approaches to healthy living, not scaring and confusing the public with hyperbolic attacks on a single ingredient.

Lustig didn’t say anything he hasn’t said before. But is his view part of mainstream scientific thought? Hardly. When his original commentary came out in February, responsible researchers and commentators pooh-poohed it.

A professor of pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine noted that “there is no evidence that … [obesity and diabetes] … are caused by a particular food or nutrient.” A dietician at Sydney University in Australia was “disgusted” that the piece was published. An American Dietetic Association spokesperson noted that obesity has causes on the “calories out” side of the equation, too. Cornell University researcher Brian Wansink noted, “Restrictions on behavior often lead to unintended consequences.” Sure enough. Remember Prohibition?

Additionally, research published in the Annals of Internal Medicine completely refutes the “fructose is poison” hypothesis that undergirds Lustig’s policy agenda. Fructose isn’t the culprit; using fewer calories than you ingest is.

Even Marion Nestle, who initially dubbed Lustig’s commentary a “wake up call,” doesn’t buy the headline-grabbing theory. While arguing for more labeling disclosure in a new U.S. News and World Report piece, she concedes, “Sugars—plural to include all forms of caloric sweeteners—are not poison.” When the queen of the food cops thinks you’ve gone too far, you probably have.

Of course, the principal objection to the recovered beef, which is essentially scraps that might otherwise be wasted, is that it is “the lowest common denominator.” And while nobody is calling ground beef the pinnacle of culinary achievement, perhaps grossness isn’t the right measure by which to judge safe foods. For instance, gelatin snacks are made from ground up animal bones, yet kids always seem to have room for them. Or should these also be removed from the cafeteria?

Indeed, one of the cheerleaders of this latest scare, Mark Bittman, once touted a cookbook called (in French) Yuck! It’s Good: Delicious Cuisine from Repulsive Foods. Haven’t heard of it? The book was written by a French chef who prides himself on making traditional foods from otherwise refused foods, including less commonly eaten meats. Based on the article, Bittman himself appears fond of cow’s tongue, hardly an everyday food free of “yuck factor.”

So what’s the difference between a “real butcher” and a beef processing company? Both use whatever meats they can get off the cow without compromising food safety. The butcher surely sells his “artisan” products for more money, enabling food snobs to smirk over their acquired tastes for ox tongue and blood sausage. The company uses machines to pick the cow clean of meats that even the most precise butcher can’t get, and then uses a technique to make the trimmings healthier by decreasing the amount of fat.

Apparently one of these things is good, and one is so bad hundreds of workers must lose their jobs and a million more cows must die. The foodie world expects no less.

But how much scientific weight do claims that you can “maybe” get addicted to ice cream hold? According to three Cambridge University researchers, they don’t hold the weight Brownell hopes they do. Reviewing existing literature in an editorial in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, the researchers find “several fundamental shortcomings in the [food addiction] model.”

Among the problems with the “addiction” hypothesis noted in the article — and ignored by scary news stories — is the inconsistency of the results. (“Cookies aren’t cigarettes, just like we thought” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Ice Cream: A New Heroin?”.) With drug addiction, the results of brain imaging studies are clear and consistent, suggesting an addiction process. With obese people, they aren’t. Additionally, the Cambridge reviewers found no consistent evidence of withdrawal symptoms from food. To put it more generally, clinical “criteria for substance dependence translate poorly to food-related behaviours.”

The reviewers end their article with a warning, advising researchers against hastily adopting an addiction model in light of conflicting evidence. They argue that holding to a broad, Twinkies-are-crack model of food dependence in spite of the evidence will lead to “misguided” policy recommendations. “The vast majority of overweight individuals have not shown a convincing behavioural or neurobiological profile that resembles addiction,” they conclude, dealing a major blow to the theories of folks like David Kessler.

The last time “food addiction” hit the headlines, lawyers used it to threaten food companies with lawsuits. Now, Kelly Brownell sees “food addiction” as a legal game-changer. Unfortunately for him and the John Banzhafs of the world, this personal-responsibility poison pill doesn’t seem to be a scientific game-changer.

Consider, for example, that the data in this study comes from a questionnaire mailed out once every 2 years to a sample of people asking them about the kinds of foods they ate. I don’t know about you, but I have a hard enough time remembering what I ate last week, much less what I was eating last July.

Indeed, the results of the “latest study” conflict with other studies. An Oxford University study published last year, for instance, showed no association between any of the animal products examined and colon cancer. And a large Harvard study also found that red and processed meats were not associated with colon cancer. So for now, Americans can evaluate the combined weight of all the science for themselves (even if they have to see it filtered through hype-addicted media message machines).

Of course, government policy may soon take risk-benefit assessment out of the hands of individuals and put it into the hands of activists and bureaucrats. After all, the healthcare reform law empowers bureaucrats to make sweeping mandates, as seen in the recent brouhaha over birth control pills. We wonder where that logic might stop:

Imagine then that the government decides, after enough weak studies, that being a vegetarian or vegan is healthier than being a meat-eater. Can it force tofurkey and soy “chik’n” on every office cafeteria in the name of public health? Can it ban milk from school lunches?

Or imagine the opposite — if enough studies show that beef is found to improve health, will Hindu employers be forced to provide hamburgers?

For now, people can ignore the hysterical ravings that hot dogs cause “butt cancer” from the misnamed Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (only ten percent of its members are medical doctors) or choose diets that fit their worldviews. But if government bureaucrats, having read a couple of dubious associational studies, get involved, we all might lose our freedom to choose what to eat.

Don’t think it can happen? Take a look at salt. After a perennial scare campaign from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Food and Drug Administration is considering regulations to wean Americans off the white mineral. Of course, all this effort comes after recent studies have shown no benefits from salt reduction.

The lesson from all this is that inviting the government into our health can create a plethora of unintended consequences. You can read the full article at The Daily Caller.