Nanny State: How Food Fascists, Teetotaling Do-Gooders, Priggish Moralists, and other Boneheaded Bureaucrats are Turning America into a Nation of Children

by David Harsanyi

Check out the website for the book. David Harsanyi has a great blog and shares some excerpts from the book.

http://www.davidharsanyi.com/

"The CDC has a new agenda: the peculiar job not only of discouraging folks from engaging in avoidable habits but of becoming part of a propaganda war that shocks Americans. That’s what happened when the CDC held a well–publicized news conference in March of 2004 to announce a new troubling study that alleged overeating was responsible for an extraordinary death toll: 400,000 Americans in 2000—a 33 percent jump from 1990. According to the report obesity was well on its way to surpassing smoking as the nation's top preventable cause of death. “Our worst fears were confirmed,” claimed Dr. Julie Gerberding, the CDC’s director and an author of the study.

The significance of the study was bolstered by the presence of then-secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson. “Americans need to understand,” he grimly noted, “that overweight [sic] and obesity are literally killing us.” As a matter of fact, the federal government promised to lend a helping hand to stop the madness to the tune of $400 million in research.

Imagine what sort of good that $400 million might have done in research on, say, cancer. Instead, the CDC had taken the first step toward creating an environment where intrusive public policy thrives. They vowed to revise food labels and to launch a public-awareness and education campaign to stop the mess—but that was only the beginning. Food was “literally” killing us by the hundreds of thousands each year, which called for more action.

To help perpetuate an atmosphere of panic, doom-and-gloom headlines blared across newspapers nationwide. (Leave it to the histrionic New York tabloids to excel at jolting the public: “Digging Graves with Our Teeth: Obesity Rivals Smoking as Killer” read the New York Daily News, and “Dying to Eat—Weight Woe Nears Cigs as Top Killer” countered the New York Post.) Journalists detailed the catastrophe french fry by french fry. The report sparked hundreds of opinion pieces that examined various ways the government—federal, state, and city—could step in and rescue us from this eruption of fat.

The problem was that the report wasn’t exactly true. And although Americans hear distraught commentary from pundits, nutritionists, and nannies, there were many scientists and statisticians who were more skeptical about the CDC’s extraordinary claims. Soon enough, these intellectually honest men and women began jabbing holes in the report. "