Reblogged:Dietary Lysenkoism

[Gus Van Horn blog]

It's bad enough that the government is so entrenched as a substitute brain for so many that nobody bats an eye at its constant dietary hectoring or its improper regulatory powers. On top of that, even when officials make an honest effort to set objective standards, they have been and will be thwarted by the shakinessof dietary science. But now, all bets are off as far as taking anything the government says seriously about nutrition is concerned:

"Moving forward, we hope the agencies will continue to focus on the clear science highlighting the wide variety of nutrition benefits of all meat and poultry products to develop a Dietary Guidelines for Americans best suited to achieve healthy outcomes for all Americans," Barry Carpenter, president and chief executive of the North American Meat Institute, said in a statement.

The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee had recommended in February that Americans be kinder to the environment by eating more foods derived from plants and fewer that come from animals. Red meat was deemed particularly harmful because of the amount of land and feed required in its production. [bold added, link dropped]

So much for your health being a government standard for nutritional choices.

Call it dietary Lysenkoism, if you will. The meat industry may have stopped some nonsense this time, but it is now inarguable that, when you hear the government touting nutritional advice, your health is not the top priority. Any advice will be good by accident at best.

Draw your own conclusions.

-- CAV

[url={url}]Link to Original[/url]

[dream_weaver]

In the ongoing quest for integrating the data of our senses, it is often the materials from the more objective sources that serve to provide key principles, such as this quip from Andrew Bernstein's book Capitalism Unbound, where the opening of chapter six provides:

The governments, the school systems, the universities, and the churches in concert may be thought of as "The Moral Establishment"—the entrenched social institutions formulating and propagating men's moral codes. For at least two millennia the Western world's Moral Establishment has relentlessly urged in some form, the creed of self-sacrifice.

This is concrete example of the criteria to be used as a standard sacrifices your health to your kindness to the environment, ignoring how human beings have the power to alter our environment to best fit our needs as human beings, as Miss Rand makes explicit in For The New Intellectual:

Man's unique reward [with having a volitional conceptual consciousness], however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself. If a drought strikes them, animals perish—man builds irrigation canals; if a flood strikes them, animals perish—man builds dams; if a carnivorous pack attacks them animals perish—man writes the Constitution of the United States. But one does not obtain food, safety or freedom—by instinct.

Whether discovered via natural calamities such as drought, floods, or carnivorous packs, the survival of man qua man depends those who live by the mind considering it neither impotent nor regarding there to be values higher than it.