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.

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.

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.

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.

According to British author Damian Thompson, whose book was recently picked up by an American publisher, just about anything that is remotely modern is essentially heroin for our brains. And, of course, food makers are supposedly nefariously turning the public into junkies. To him, cupcakes are a particular evil and supposedly the cause of bulimia. Huh?

And food scolds seem to like to scold any food. He writes:

Anyone with a rolled banknote up their nose knows that — so long as their dealer hasn’t ripped them off — they’re about to experience the effects of a mind-altering substance. […] In contrast, the tubby young man who demolishes a packet of chocolate digestives while watching the football doesn’t suspect that his eating habits have left his brain unusually sensitive to stimulation by sugar; he just knows that, once the packet’s opened, the biscuits disappear.

Actual scientists disagree with this characterization. Cambridge University researchers found that “criteria for substance dependence translate poorly to food-related behaviours” in a recent investigation. Meanwhile, the author also claims that the iPhone game “Angry Birds” should also fall into the tobacco/alcohol realm. When the idea of “food addiction” was first proposed, a psychologist warned that “The word ‘addiction’ is perilously close to losing any meaning.” Her warning hasn’t been heeded, and while the only winner so far has been the publishing industry, the trial lawyer industry is certainly looking to get in on the fun.

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.

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.

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.

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.