An Amish enclave has an amazingly low incidence of obesity — only 4 percent, compared to 30 percent in the overall American population — according to scientists from the University of Tennessee and the University of Michigan. The authors remarked that the average Amish diet is heavy on “meat, potatoes, gravy, eggs, vegetables, bread, pies, and cakes, and is quite high in fat and refined sugar.” So they suspect that “high levels of physical activity” explain these remarkable numbers. Studies like these put the lie to Kelly “Big Brother” Brownell and his fellow food cops who, in their eternal quest for fat taxes, blithely dismiss the “calories out” side of the obesity equation as a “classic dodge.”
