You forgot to add cigarettes

This diet was invented in 1964 - The Drinking Man's Diet by Gardner Jameson and Elliott Williams. I've been meaning to get a copy of the book, but I'm more paleo myself.

Has anyone else considered at length the notion that perhaps the government doesn't want us to be healthy?

There is money to be made in fattening up the population!

Healthy people live longer in retirement, which costs the government money in pensions, medical and generate little tax revenue. If we would all just pay tax until 65, then keel over and die would be optimum as far as government fiscal productivity goes.

There is money to be made in pharmaceuticals and health insurance, and we all know government has their paws in both pots. Fat people suffer all kinds of health ailments, and it costs a lot of money to get fat, then a lot of money to stay healthy once you are fat.

Imagine the windfall for big pharm and government if every American, Canadian, Briton and beyond were a type II diabetic requiring expensive testing equipment, drugs, routine visits with the family doc, blood pressure meds, etc etc.

The low-fat, reduced calorie, high carbohydrate diet doesn't work for almost anyone - and they know it. If there were a better way to shorten life expectancy in retirement, they would endorse THAT as the best way to life.

I'm sure I sound cynical, but at the risk of sounding like a flaming nut, I don't believe ANYTHING the government tells us to just trust and believe (despite obvious concerns with said item.)

If this were in any danger of costing the government more money than it makes, they would be actively campaigning on your door step to help people get healthy.

It reminds me of the Canadian policy towards tobacco, alcohol and gambling, which are federally and/or provincially taxed and regulated. All 3 of these items generate a HUGE windfall for government, yet the government will not subsidize nicotine patches or gum, there is no publicly sponsored outreach program for alcoholics or their families and gambling counsel is reduced to a toll-free number (not a 24/7 one either).

When the government repeatedly turns a blind-eye and its "experts" produce studies that refuse to ask questions that may alter the pre-conceived outcome, it's time to be suspicious.

OOOOOOOOOoooH!

I love a good conspiracy theory...so soylent green

Well one of the things I noticed most was the absence of meat anywhere in the "so-called" healthy diet..Not even lean skinless chicken breast!..The nutritionists best friend!! My opinion it is a puff piece written by someone with a vegan agenda..JMHO...

I'm ONBOARD!!

I'm starting to think that myself.

Not that sinister men in a smoke-filled room planned all this out, but... things do have a way of working out to benefit this hypothetical agenda, don't they?

Population control? :P

But, honestly, the fertility-on-average has decreased since we've gone down this path. There are also fewer boys - and fewer fertile boys - so unless we become a polygamous society...


Exactly. I doubt anyone planned it to end up this way, but I'm sure there are lots of people who are happy it did...

Interestingly, in most parts of the world there are fewer boys being born. In Canada, which is every bit as fat a nation as the USA, there is a highly inordinate amount of boys being born.

Check this wikifile out:

Son Preference and Sex Ratios

For some reason Canada appears with countries like India and China where female infanticide has been (and is) rampant.

Ireland and Portugal appear to be in the same boat, for whatever reason. It does suggest that obesity and infertility may not be linked to more girls.

In the largest populations in the world (China, India) there have even been long-term predictions that a sort of polyandrous (multiple male spouses) may be the only solution for young men to marry at all (that or immigrate somewhere with a better ration of females to males).

Just my 3 cents

unfotunately for the conspiracy theory, an increasingly obese, hypertensive, diabetic, depressed population does not give you the "live-healthy to 65 and then drop dead" cheap-for-governments outcome, it gives you a hugely expensive outcome: an increasing part of your population with debilitating chronic conditions that often take them out of the work-place (temporarily or permanently) and require costly interventions for decades. This latter outcome, ongoing need for a medication/intervention that alleviates a chronic and increasing disease burden but does not cure or limit transmissability is often joked about in pharma circles as the holy grail.

Re that last part:

As for the rest, I didn't go into detail, but what I really think is that there is a lot of money in keeping us fat and unhealthy, in diet products that don't work and in medical care. It circulates a lot of dough, and governments benefit from that - they can't tax money that's just sitting there being saved, they need it spent. Plus of course there's the campaign contributions etc. they get from the companies that both make us sick and then treat the symptoms. I'm in favor of capitalism, broadly speaking, but like any system run by fallible humans, it can be abused.

And having everyone be sick makes us dependent. We need medical care and we often can't pay for it ourselves, so we have to get help from the government or from financial institutions. Governments like people to be dependent. There's no percentage in the independent.

Again, I don't think this was cold-bloodedly planned. The same corporation owns both the Atkins company and Cinnabon, but I think that probably both acquisitions were purely business decisions made on the basis of cash flow, it wasn't a cynical scheme to make people fat on cinnamon rolls and then get paid to slim them down again.

But things do tend to pan out as if it were deliberately planned.

Not trying to convince anyone of this, just elucidating my POV. YMMV and all that.

Check out the documentary called Fat Head, its on Netflix or read the book called Good Calories bad calories. More than enough scientific data and research to blow all the neigh sayers away.

Barry Groves mentions this in his book Eat Fat Get Thin

"The overweight are a ready source of income
But there is another problem – the slimming industry really doesn’t want you to know these facts. They rely on you for a very comfortable living. So you are kept in the dark unless 1) you know where to look for the right information and 2) you know what is truth and what is not. So let’s look at how you are exploited.

Jules Hirsch, of Rockefeller University, New York, observed in the 1994 Herman Award Lecture to the American Society for Clinical Nutrition:5
‘The public must understand that all current methods, from thigh
creams to stomach staples, are like gropes in the dark, and as
such, are either totally ineffectual or are no more than counter-
forces to an incompletely understood regulatory disorder. There
are no cures at this time.’

Although the first sentence of this statement is correct, Hirsch was wrong in the second, as this book will show. However, Dr Hirsch put his finger on a major stumbling block when he said:

‘The ambiguities inherent in [the] problem . . . has led to the growth of a flourishing industry for weight control. The basic tenets of this industry are that there are commercially available programs that can safely lower body weight more easily than those of competitors and unlike their competitors, once the weight is lost, it will remain that way for ever. On this basis an endless set of new products, new diets and drug interventions play legal tag with governmental regulatory agencies while reaping profit from a public desperate for answers.’ "

Capitalism is the problem, but it's no grand conspiracy. It's simple math. When you buy the ingredients for a box of cereal for pennies, and then charge $4 for it, and it can also sit on the shelf for months and needs no refrigeration...

You're going to push the box of cereal.

I've always said that if they could get away with only selling us people chow, that's what they would do.

I just feel sick in my heart every time I see the commercial for Frosted Mini-Wheats,with the cute little character bragging about how a big bowl of this will help prepare your child for the day...