Eat, Drink, and be Merry

Great Friday night news here (via Instapundit):

For the last few years Americans have been subjected to an incessant barrage of warnings about the risks of dying from being fat. The most dramatic of these came last year in a study from the US Centers for Disease Control that suggested that some 400,000 lives were lost each year due to obesity and that obesity related mortality would soon overtake tobacco as the leading cause of death in the US.

But in a study released this week by the CDC and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association ("Excess Deaths Associated with Underweight, Overweight, and Obesity"), the public health community has finally owned up to their massive fib by acknowledging that the number of deaths due to obesity in the US is closer to 26,000 not 400,000 as previously reported...

Apart from this huge downward revision in the numbers of people supposedly dying from fat, there are several things in this study which signal the end of any legitimate linkage between obesity and premature death. First, for the merely overweight with BMI's from 25-30 there is no excess mortality. In fact, being overweight was "associated with a slight reduction in mortality relative to the normal weight category."

Speaking of new guidelines, what would your local grocery store look like if people gave a damn about this? Nothing like the one I shop at. Odd that as a military commissary it's run by the same government.

But don't start laughing yet - you see, the whole thing is a right wing conspiracy cooked up to benefit Dick Cheney's Twinkie Cronies:

What most people don't realize is that the USDA's original vision for the pyramid included visual indicators to show people how often they should eat certain foods. Pastries and donuts, for example, would be marked "occasional." But these guidelines are now nowhere to be found in the new MyPyramid, thanks to giant food corporations and their lobbyists.

Perhaps the most glaring evidence of the industry's influence is the government's refusal to recommend which foods not to eat, while putting a strong emphasis on individual responsibility.

My organization is currently supporting national and international regulations that would hold food manufacturers accountable for their contributions to the global obesity epidemic. We are working toward the implementation of the World Health Organization's Global Strategy on Diet, Physical Activity and Health, specifically measures to curtail the promotion of junk food and inform consumers about the dangers of foods high in sugar, salt and fat.

Hey - it's Friday night. Beer time.