Summary
© AP Photo/Candice Choi
When President Eisenhower left office in 1961, over 70% of
Americans trusted the Federal Government. That figure plummeted to less than 20% by the time President Obama exited in 2017. Pundits offer myriad reasons for the decline, but the answer is simple:
Americans are tired of lies. Over the past 60 years, we learned that the moving lips of a politician meant that he or she was either eating or deceiving.
In contrast,
public confidence in the 'scientific community' runs at 40% and has remained stable since the 1970s. This trust, however, turns out to be seriously misplaced when it comes to the government's data on what we eat and drink. The nutrition research methods of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) are based on the
naïve but politically expedient notion that a person's usual diet can be measured simply by asking what
he or she remembered eating and drinking. Only the most gullible citizens would believe the answers yield anything close to the truth, but government agencies selectively slice-and-dice these anecdotal data to support political agendas, control the U.S. food economy, and indirectly determine what you can and cannot eat and drink.
For example, after the USDA began its
"5-A-Day" campaign to convince Americans to buy more fruits and vegetables, the CDC began pushing the boundary of honesty by instructing
survey respondents to exclude fried potatoes from their dietary reports. The CDC then declared that only
"100% PURE fruit juices" were "acceptable" and instructed survey respondents to exclude drinks with less than 100% juice. Given that French fries and potato chips are in fact vegetables that provide essential nutrients, and beverages containing any percentage of fruit juice contain fruit, the CDC's methods are questionable at best. Nevertheless, this data manipulation allowed the CDC, USDA, and the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to claim Americans
were not consuming enough fruits and vegetables, and therefore were at risk for a host of diseases.
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