President Trump’s pick of RFK Jr. to be the Health and Human Services secretary puts a lot of Public Health advocates on edge. He certainly has a lot of unconventional beliefs professed by the quack doctors of the world, usually selling products like Grundy MD’s Low Lectin Olive Oil. The problem the Public Health advocates have isn’t that they are wrong, but often their advocacy and public is misguided and twisted by industry.
The classic example of the twisting of Public Health advocacy has to be the marketing of filtered cigarettes and low-tar smokes. Both now banned, at one time, they were the tobacco industries’ response to advocate’s very legitimate concerns about the health impacts of smoking. The problem was that filtered and low-tar cigarettes are somewhat healthier, but still involve breathing in large amounts of carbon monoxide and partially burned carbon which is has carcinogenic properties. The solution though to the harms of cigarette smoking, isn’t to tell smokers of filtered and low-tar cigarettes to go back to unfiltered, high tar cigarettes, but to quit smoking all together. Or at least dramatically cut back. Whether you smoke filtered or non-filtered cigarettes is a personal choice, though the prior is somewhat safer but hardly safe!
Advocacy for Fast Food restaurants to phase out the use of frying foods in saturated fats followed a similar course. Fries cooked in saturated fats — namely beef tallow taste a hell of a lot better then canola or corn oils. You have to mask the inferior quality with more salt and other compounds to cover up the bad taste of cooking oil-cooked fries. But the truth isn’t totally that public health officials were endorsing seed-oil cooked french fries that taste like crap and are still junk food. It’s that the cooking fries in vegetable oil is cheaper then cooking in lard, which can be sold for other purposes. Increasing consumption of saturated fats won’t make you healthier, but neither does eating fries cooked in vegetable oil.
The truth is there is no healthy french fry or cigarette. Going back to lard-fried french fries or unfiltered smokes won’t make America healthy again. If anything, it’s a step backward. But what will improve our country’s health is eating less french fries and smoking less reds and any other kind of cigarette. I am not a prohibitionist, and I won’t knock you for an concessional drag on a cigarette or a fat lunch with french fries, but such things should be an exceptional treat not something you do every day. Americans eat way too much processed foods, and the way to get healthy is to not smoke and not eat processed foods, but instead go for basic, simple foods as close to the farm and ground as possible.
