If you keep up at all with matters of diet and health, you have no doubt noticed the thriving cottage industry in revisionist dietary history, from big fat lies, to big fat surprises, to sugar conspiracies. A consideration of cars, Keys, and Karelia will lend some much needed perspective.
From what I know courtesy of friends and colleagues who work there, it’s always busy at the FDA. Still, the agency seems to be in the midst of a particular flurry of activity. Even if the activity has not picked up, the profile of it certainly has. In quick succession of late, the FDA has made headlines for updating food labels, revisiting the definition of “healthy,” and now, shaking up the salty status quo.
In all of biomedicine, spanning clinical care, medical research, and public health practice- we subscribe to the “precautionary principle.” Basically, it says: if there is a chance something can be harmful, assume it is. The burden of proof is in the other direction. You are not obligated to prove something is dangerous; you have to prove it is safe. That is precautionary, because a default assumption in that direction protects people. Or, at least, it’s supposed to do so. There are inevitably gaps between the principle and practice, such as when a doctor is reckless, a vaccine tainted, or a drug rushed to market by a manufacturer disclosing only the positive data.
Given the almost dizzying frequency of diet-related headlines, the one true revelation about nutrition is superficially the least likely: there is no real news about nutrition.
We are a species. Perhaps that’s a bit of a blow to our modern, so-over-biology, Homo sapien arrogance; but it’s true just the same. Like every other inter-breeding group of organisms on the planet with common ancestors, corresponding expanses of DNA, and offspring who survive, thrive, and pass it all along to yet another generation - we are a species.
I concur with the New York Times Editorialists who, among others, declared former President Obama’s speech in Dallas July, 2016 a rhetorical highpoint of a presidency rightly known for oratorical gifts. I could not hope to improve upon Obama’s words of wisdom, solidarity, compassion, and pain- and would not presume to try. But I brave an addendum just the same. Not by aiming higher, but lower; by digging deeper, through the sediment of shadows piled up over the ages. By seeking for bedrock.
New Guidelines: No Need for Kids to Cut Back on Running with Scissors for Their Good Health. (Except, again…not really.)