The U.S. is becoming a nanny state.

• Author: DiLorenzo, Thomas J.

"In crusade after crusade -- whether -- it is against tobacco, DDT, ethnic food, alcohol, or whatever product the self-appointed national nannies disapprove of -- facts are not important. Once a target has been chosen, all that matters to them is the moral superiority, of their position."

What seems to matter most to public advocacy groups is frightening headlines that draw publicity to their cause, regardless of the truthfulness of the reports. This appears to be especially true in the case of those who routinely attack virtually every kind of food Americans enjoy, from Chinese, Mexican, and Italian fare to coffee and fast food, in waging propaganda campaigns against myriad "unhealthy" foods, organizations such as the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Science in the Public Interest argue that they lead to heart disease, cancer, and other ailments that drive up Medicaid costs.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) was founded in 1971 by a trio of self-styled "consumer advocates" -- Michael Jacobson, Albert Fritisch, and James Sullivan. Jacobson, the organization's executive director, has overseen an expansion of CSPI's budget from $414,632 in 1987 to more than $13,000,000 annually by 1997, most of which seems to come from direct mail fund-raising. It also receives foundation funding and profits from the CSPI Gold Mastercard through MBNA America bank.

The center's agenda essentially is prohibitionist -- to restrict, ban, or regulate various foods it believes Americans should not be permitted to taste. The word "prohibition" is never mentioned, of course, because of the negative impression most people have of it. Thus, CSPI cloaks its agenda in the rhetoric of "public health."

In its bimonthly publication, Nutrition Action Healthletter, CSPI has condemned pot Haagen-Dazs ice cream, buffalo wings. chicken, cheeseburgers, donuts, pizza, bacon-and-eggs breakfasts, pancakes, sausage, waffles, salt, and margarine, among a number of "killer" foods. CSPI seems especially incensed about eggs, even though some medical researchers now believe they are highly nutritious and, for most people, pose no health risk at all. Despite the complete lack of evidence that eggs cause dangerously high cholesterol levels, negative publicity campaigns against them by groups such as CSPI have led to a decline in annual U.S. consumption from 402 per capita in 1945 to 238 today.

In the early 1990s, CSPI decided to attack ethnic foods, starting with Chinese. The center coordinated a Chinese-food study, which involved purchasing take-out portions of 15 popular dishes from Chinese restaurants in Washington, D.C., and shipping them to a lab where the contents were analyzed for calories, fat, and sodium. The media broadcast the results of the "study" nationwide for weeks: Kung Pao chicken has an "outrageous 76 grams" of fat: stir-fried vegetables were said to be loaded with sodium; and moo shu pork should not be eaten, says CSPI, unless you roll it in a napkin to sop up the grease."

The Chinese-food study received so much publicity that Washington-area restaurants reported a 25% decline in business in the month after the study. Yet, like so many other alarmist studies produced by self-styled consumer advocates in recent decades (asbestos, Alar, dioxin, power lines, cellular phones, global warming, the ozone layer, "nuclear winter," acid rain, DDT, cyclamates, and saccharin, to mention a few), they contain fatal methodological flaws.

Washingtonian magazine food critic Robert Shoffner was particularly critical: "From their attack on Chinese restaurants, the only conclusion the public could reach is that all Chinese restaurants serve unhealthful food. There were no distinctions made. What they did was grab X number of restaurant samples ... of moo shoo pork, and instead of testing them individually, they threw them all in a blender and analyzed the fat content.... When I had a CSPI representative on my radio show, I asked him, `Tell me, have you ever eaten in a Chinese restaurant that served greasy food?' He said yes. Then I asked, Have you ever eaten in a Chinese restaurant where the food is so drained of oil you can't tell it's fried?' He answered yes. `Well,' I said, `if you throw all the samples in the blender, how can you possibly judge the good from the bad?' ... He said that was the way the government tests the content of various foods -- which tells us something about the value of government tests." Nevertheless, the absurdity of the study never made the news, and millions of Americans were exposed to the virtually unanswered negative propaganda put out by CSPI.

Moreover, CSPI ignored all the criticism by people like Shoffner and proceeded to duplicate its blender approach to measuring the fat and sodium content of Mexican and Italian food. The results were similar: Virtually every major newspaper, television, and radio news outlet cited the "dangers" of Mexican food...