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Why are those recalcitrant consumers ignoring FDA’s nutrition information and continuing to eat unhealthy diets?

After over thirty years of trying to get consumers to change their behavior based on Nutrition Facts Panels, FDA is revising a scheme that they fought fifteen years ago.

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Without realizing it, one reason for the decline in trust in government results from “allegiance bias.” Allegiance bias occurs when scientists “distort findings based on investigators’ preferences”—but some decisionmakers also are guilty of these biases. 

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A number of years ago, I wrote a question about whether government should have a monopoly on public health. That monopoly is defined by public health agencies replacing consumers, physicians, and other experts on what is safe and effective for drugs and devices. 

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We’re fat and getting fatter (have fatness?). Three out of every four adults are overweight or obese. Today, we are caught somewhere between fat acceptance and drug cures.

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The coronavirus has, in the manner of Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great, temporarily conquered the known world of humans. Bacteria, another type of microbe like viruses, prevented the conquest of humans in H.G. Wells’ fictional The War of the Worlds although Wells never specified whether it was bacteria, viruses or other types of microbes likes fungi and parasites.

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Fred Randall: “I'll enter the same calculations using what we like to call The Right Way.”

—RocketMan (1997) Harlan Williams as Fred Z. Randall

That’s from a very funny movie about an astronaut who was as far from the prototypical crewcut, athletic, military pilot as one can imagine but who happened to be the right person for the job. The Right Way was Fred explaining programing to an astronaut. Where his competitors who fit the mold were unable to keep themselves from going crazy in and isolation chamber, Fred was able to entertain himself with sock puppets.

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