A Matter of Trust
One of the things I continually come back to in my view of the world is the question of who do I trust to make decisions? That alone might be the biggest differentiator in politics. Yet, it is something that not everyone clearly understands. When you strip away all the trappings of government programs that seek to couch them in compassionate terms or the s usual “save the children” platitudes, they generally come down to a question of trust. Do you trust individuals or government to make key decisions about peoples’ lives.
Earlier this year I reached an age at which I realized that I had to make changes to the way I lived, or to surrender to the inevitable decline of middle age. As is my habit, I did a great deal of research in trying to decide what to do. My health, although not dire, was not good. I was exhausted all the time, didn’t sleep well, under constant stress from a variety of sources, and overall not as strong, vibrant, smart or content as I’d been in the not so distant past. All of that is to say nothing about the decline in sheer athleticism. I certainly was nowhere near as healthy as I’d been in high school, or in college for that matter.
Having a history of high cholesterol and diabetes in my family, I was particularly interested in understanding what was happening around diet as it pertained to those two things. After a great deal of time reading the conventional wisdom about those things, I started to become skeptical. Was it true that the best way to control diabetes was a low fat diet emphasizing foods with tons of carbs? Was it true that saturated fat was a evil villain dead set on killing everyone who at anything with fat in it?
To be fair, I started off somewhat skeptical. I spent nearly a year working in Europe as a consultant, and spent a good bit of that time enjoying both German and French cooking. That experience sparked a deeper interest in cooking, and I quickly found that dishes made with “real” butter tasted better than ones made with whatever substitute people wanted to try. My wife and I joked that Bacon, Butter and Booze made all recipes taste better. Bit by bit, we started to cook more in that manner, but I didn’t start to piece it all together until later after I started to research the origins of the conventional wisdom.
One of the things that I read was an analysis of Ancel Keys’s 7 country study. At the U of Chicago we learned to always look at the source texts to make your own judgments. In this case, the source text wasn’t as revealing as the information that had been left out:
http://high-fat-nutrition.blogspot.com/2009/02/cholesterol-presentation-between.html
While he may have been able to make the case that cardiovascular disease has been driven by saturated fat with only 7 countries, the expanded data set that he discarded for the purposes of saving his hypothesis call into question his theory.. in fact, the data refuses to support the theory.
Why is this so important? From a health perspective, the Saturated fat hypothesis is what really leads to the cholesterol theory of cardiovascular disease — another hypothesis that has struggled under scrutiny.
What does it mean in terms of government and trust? In a sense, government programs and expanded government are asking you to trust a cadre of people who are likely less capable and less scrupulous than Mr. Keys to make decisions about your life. I, for one, chose to not trust those people. I prefer to make my own decisions about my health and my life. In the case of my diet, I have chosen to eat a Primal or Paleo diet that includes dairy products. However, I have no intention of forcing others to eat that diet by decree. It is my individual choice and if I discuss it on this blog, readers are free to disagree and to eat what they want free from any worries of me trying to advocate for taxes or other means to force them into any diet choice I may advocate.
I would have a lot more respect for the left if they chose to live their lives without use of compulsion to get others to live the way they do. However, especially the last 3 years, we have seen that they simply cannot avoid the more authoritarian impulses in their nature.
