Two of the main newspapers on opposites side of the country contained articles ostensibly on nutrition that were in one case an ideological jihad and in the other a panic reaction.
The West Coast.
The Los Angeles Times carried an editorial yesterday from one Karen Dawn, a PETAphile if there ever was one. I’m quite sure that still warmly aglow with the thrill of having her editorial picked up by such a prestigious paper, she kicked back, turned on Comedy Central last might and watched the Pamela Anderson roast.
The premise of her misinformation-filled ranting is that because many people drink milk and consume dairy products, the cows that provide this milk are victimized and exploited. She starts by railing on the California dairy industry’s mistreatment of dairy cattle using editorials in both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as her data. She spends the rest of her ink commenting on a few cherry-picked studies in reputable journals showing some negative benefits to milk and dairy consumption. She doesn’t bother mentioning the scads of other studies providing data that counters her argument.
She even turns to America’s favorite (if misguided) pediatrician, Dr. Spock, to bolster her argument that milk is just plain bad:
In the last edition of his “Baby and Child Care” bible, Dr. Benjamin Spock made it clear that cow’s milk is for baby cows, not for human children. He wrote that it was “too rich in the saturated fats that cause artery blockages” and that it “slows down iron absorption.”
Saturated fats are artery clogging, eh? I didn’t go to the original source, Dr. Spock’s book, but assuming Ms. Dawn quoted him correctly, I’m afraid that Dr. Spock (posthumously of course) gets my idiot of the day award.
MORON!
The East Coast.
Gina Kolata’s piece in the New York Times was basically a chorus of so-called dietary fat experts squawking that the saturated fat sky is falling. These Chicken Littles have come to life as result of the New York City health department’s request to restaurants to remove trans fats from their food. Trans fats have certain cooking properties that can only be found in saturated fats, and the fear of these avowed low-fatters is that, God forbid, trans fats might be replaced with more natural saturated fats.
An idea of just how far off base these anti-saturated fat pinheads are is that Michael Jacobson, a low-fatter, no-fatter if there ever was one, appears to be the voice of reason in this debate.
New York City “deserves a medal,” said Michael Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group that has warned against trans fats. “The evidence really indicates that there is nothing worse,” he added. “Switching to butter, palm oil, anything else would be an improvement.”
This example is tantamount to Michael Moore defending George Bush against the Far Left. Were that to happen, you would know just how far left the Far Left would have to be. When Michael Jacobson says that butter is an improvement over trans fats and the “experts” disagree, you realize just how unreasonable these people are.