But despite his repentance, Bittman simply can’t resist the urge to scaremonger again. After decrying scaremongering, Bittman states that “hyperconsumption of added sugars may lead to more deaths each year than gun killings and will soon lead to more than lung cancer.”

Does he present an iota of evidence to support this radical claim? No. So, while appearing to condemn the fever-dream scaremongering of his “food movement,” Bittman engages in the same habit. It’s as if he’s the columnist version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

And the record shows that evidence doesn’t really drive Bittman much. When confronted with evidence that his caterwauling against meat for causing all sorts of environmental problems was based on false premises, Bittman said it didn’t matter. Bittman’s last screed against sugar, which got the Times snob a ticking off from a Yale dietary scold, was so hyperbolic and filled with errors that the Times was forced to run a correction that basically said the whole premise of the article was wrong.

Dr. Oz first used his column in last month’s Success magazine to freak people out about hormones used in meat production. Before debunking the scare, it is worth noting that the not-so-good doctor didn’t even bother to get his facts right. Dr. Oz asserts:

We know that children consuming the most animal products are more likely to enter puberty seven months sooner than the group consuming the least. Scientists mainly attribute this to hormones such as estrogen and testosterone injected into cows, pigs and chickens, meant to increase weight or milk production.

That’s all very interesting, scary-sounding, and wrong. First, it is actually illegal to use hormones in pork and poultry production. Only cattle and sheep may be treated with such hormones, and the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates veterinary drugs, sets toxicology-based limits on hormone supplementation at a level that is expected to cause no effects on people eating meat from those animals. And there’s no conclusive evidence that any food causes early puberty, Oz’s oddly specific declaration to the contrary (we note that he provided no citation or reference for the claim).

Dr. Oz also hosted Bittman on his television program so the Times columnist could plug his new book, Vegan Before 6, which says we shouldn’t eat meat, fish, dairy, or eggs before dinner. We note, for starters, that Bittman has praised effusively eggs—including ones eaten at, er, breakfast—produced in a fashion acceptable to his posh sensibilities.

Inviting the latest non-scientific fad diet shill on the program is one of The Dr. Oz Show’s stocks-in-trade: In the last 6 months, Oz has sat down with a kook who thinks wheat is literally poisonous, an animal liberationist and former PETA Foundation president who thinks that veganism will somehow eliminate Alzheimer’s Disease, and others who push the dubious hypothesis that foods are just tasty crack.

So we’d say that even though he’s a crank, Bittman fits right in on Oz’s program. And as long as Bittman’s ilk find succor from the good doctor, one can expect more and more people to join a group that already includes commentators from The New Yorker and Slate in wondering if the show promotes more pseudoscience than real medicine.

Read the Huffington Post story about the study, and one might think that only clearing out the makeup bag and replacing its contents with “organic” cosmetics can save someone from terrible diseases. Actually, that’s not even what the study author suggests. As she says, “I don’t think that people should go into a panic, or abandon lipstick.” One possible reason: The study didn’t actually attempt to determine if people had been harmed, but only if the levels of chemicals exceeded an arbitrary threshold.

So who actually makes sure cosmetics are safe? The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has responsibility under the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to regulate cosmetic product safety. Despite claims that no limits are set on lead in cosmetic products, the FDA actually does limit the types of color additives that can be used in cosmetic products based on safety assessments. These regulations include a limit on lead in these additives.

Should cosmetics companies fail to sufficiently demonstrate that their products are safe before bringing them to market, the products must bear a warning label stating that. And if any cosmetic is found to be unsafe, FDA can go to court to take it off the market and companies can be liable for steep damages.

When CSC touted its finding that that some lipsticks contain supposedly potentially dangerous levels of lead (i.e. more lead residue than is allowed in food), FDA responded by conducting two separate rounds of tests. After the tests, FDA ruled that it “[does] not consider the lead levels we found in the lipsticks to be a safety concern.” CSC has a history of overstating risks and is the offspring of a group that toxics experts think overstates risks. There’s no reason to expect these latest findings to be different.

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.

And the story’s quoted doctor, one Dave Ramsey, isn’t particularly credible either. Like other pundit-docs who latch onto a dietary hobby-horse, he possesses a palate for pleasurable popular-press publishing profits. Just look at his forthcoming book’s title — it’s Fifty Shades of Kale (seriously). We might argue that a serious researcher wouldn’t cash in by capitalizing on a bestselling erotic novel.

Left behind in all this is something our Senior Research Analyst addressed in a recent NPR appearance. Rather than looking at elements that really can make a person unhealthy — an imbalance of calories consumed and burned for exercise — too many food and health commentators tout the latest “superfoods” or ideological shill diets (like the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine’s periodic “What veganism cures today” diet books) that are supposedly a magic cure for everything from allergies to zygomycosis. As he argued, borrowing a term from one of food scold Marion Nestle’s rare periods of sensibility:

But let’s not allow them to become “calorie distracters.” […] when we allow corporations that sell foods marketed as extra healthy for us and they say that this is high in one thing or high in another that are supposedly good for us, we lose sight of the fact that those calorie — that those foods may have just as many calories.

The classic example of this is the claim that certain products are “High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) Free” when in reality the HFCS has simply been replaced by nutritionally equivalent sugar (sucrose). These “new” products have the same number of calories as before — but when consumers see the label they might mistakenly get the impression that the product will affect them differently.

But in the end, there just isn’t an easy way out. There’s no magic law, no magic food, and no magic diet that will bring happiness or cure obesity. Only by building up people’s personal responsibility and guiding it towards the correct — albeit difficult — path can dieters improve their health. Doing that might even make us feel better.

Of course, real scientists—like those at the Food and Drug Administration—find these food colorings perfectly safe. And periodic anti-scientific scares are as predictable as the rising sun. Just last year the nation freaked out about a perfectly safe, healthier ground beef product, causing higher prices and job losses.

This latest unscientific pressure campaign follows a trend epitomized by elite foodie Michael Pollan and articulated recently by former Times food reporter Melanie Warner. These efforts to stigmatize so-called “processed foods” are completely arbitrary and based on snobbishness and anti-scientific sentiment rather than health. To point out one of Warner’s loopholes, aged cheese is supposedly unprocessed. But there are no cheese trees. Before people, cheese did not exist. After the apocalypse, cheese will cease to exist.

Cheese is a human creation that does not exist in nature, designed (quelle horreur) to appeal to our taste buds, our senses of smell, and even our eyes (that aesthetic thing). That doesn’t make it bad, just like food dyes don’t make packaged ready meals bad.

Both books share a fatal flaw: They lay the blame for assorted maladies at the feet of “food processing,” and call people back to the supposed foods of the ancestors. For their intended audience of Upper West Side posh elites, Berkeley university students with their parents’ money in hand, and Boulder hippies working on their “novels,” this is right up the alley. For the rest of us, a lot of our paychecks are at stake.

Consider the humble loaf of bread. Regular sandwich bread costs a couple of dollars and lasts roughly a week, making it a staple of family lunches. The “artisan,” handmade breads of the Learjet and Prius crowd cost double that and don’t last as long. And while Moss, Pollan, Warner and their legions can afford to waste food and spend extra money to satisfy their “food rules,” the majority of Americans can’t, especially with the current poor economy.

But is food processing really the evil these authors make it out to be? We might start listening to them if they ever give up the “Holy Trinity” of “foodie” goodness: fine wine, fancy sausages, and stinky cheese. All three (despite Warner’s desperate protestation to the contrary in cheese’s case) are processed. There are no wine lakes, cheese trees, or animals made of charcuterie. All are manipulated by humans, have added ingredients, and have been so forever. Before people, they did not exist.

And — quelle horreur — all three have been refined to taste very good! Just ask noted vintner Leslie Rudd, benefactor of the Rudd Center for Professional Wine Studies as well as the “food addiction” think tank, the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. Eons of trial and error, science, and plant engineering  have left Mr. Rudd with a vintage that rates 99 out of 100 possible wine-tasting points. And like they have with wines, the French most famously perfected the tastes of cheese and charcuterie meats (although other cultures made similar efforts).

Additionally, all three have as a benefit a property that Warner uses to bash modern food processing: preservation. Wine keeps longer than grapes. Cheese keeps longer than milk. And almost every meat-eating culture has used sausages as a method to keep meats edible.

These benefits now have been made available to everybody, and only now do our elites think it’s a problem. (Old-time doctors didn’t worry incessantly about a ruling-class “gout epidemic.”) But America is still democratic in character, and recent polling shows that most of us don’t share the jet set’s desire to take away our choices.

• British newspaper The Guardian brings us a gem of unintended consequences from the so-called “sustainable” food movement (that wins a striking lack of converts). Vegans and vegetarians looking for meat substitutes have turned to a South American grain, quinoa, and that decision has made life difficult in Bolivia, where quinoa is a staple. The increased interest in quinoa from “ethically conscious” Western one-percenters has apparently caused ruinous food inflation. Some ethical consciousness. Next thing you know, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) will be killing animals. Oh, wait.
• The New York Times’s resident herald of the limp “food movement” (and sometimes very amateur epidemiologist) Mark Bittman is not happy with Coca-Cola’s advertising addressing obesity. You see, Bittman knows that Coke “makes its money selling sugar-sweetened beverages” and is “still selling them.” Of course, Bittman’s most famous book, How to Cook Everything — no stranger to high-calorie meals, including a hamburger more loaded than a Big Mac — is still for sale. So, Mr. Bittman, before criticizing soft drink companies, shouldn’t you renounce cheese and all its works (since your epidemiology-by-Internet-commenter says that it’s evil) by taking that book off the market and offering full refunds to anybody who bought it?
• Our Senior Research Analyst is telling Alabamans and Coloradans that they should make a New Year’s Resolution to use personal responsibility, rather than government regulation, if they want to lose weight. He writes, “Food activists seem to think that a little tax here, a warning label there, and a few banned appetizers will make us resemble swimsuit models by summer. But the research demonstrates that diet ‘nudges’ can have the exact opposite effect.”
• CCF in the News: Our Executive Director is calling out the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) for getting itself embroiled in an alleged racket with donors’ doggie dollars in the New York Post and Washington Examiner. Our Senior Research Analyst is criticizing the self-commissioned food police Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) for attacking “life’s simpler pleasures” for Baltimore and Los Angeles readers and PETA in its hometown for killing over 90 percent of the pets in its care. He also sat down with Reason TV to discuss a Washington, D.C. suburb’s misguided proposal to use the zoning code to reduce food choices.
• CCF This Week: In our daily posts this week, we’ve taken PETA to task for posing as a shelter pet advocate while killing pets left and right, objected to CSPI attacking restaurant dishes while ignoring that restaurants offer healthy options, used Coca-Cola’s new ad campaign as a teachable moment for activist goalpost-moving, and looked into the election returns to find that food freedom is a bipartisan desire.