I know what’s been weighing on your mind – you’re probably wishing that there was a team of bureaucrats ready to tell you how drastically altering your diet will not only save you but the entire planet as well. Well this is your lucky day! A committee has released recommendations that will be passed along to the USDA and HHS. Elizabeth Harrington for The Free Beacon reports:
The federal committee responsible for nutrition guidelines is calling for the adoption of “plant-based” diets, taxes on dessert, trained obesity “interventionists” at worksites, and electronic monitoring of how long Americans sit in front of the television.
The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) released its far-reaching 571-page report of recommendations to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Thursday, which detailed its plans to “transform the food system.”
This is not a new story, and the public comment window closed a few days ago. If you want to see a great collection of comments that read like a left wing atheist’s prayer to their god of Big Government:
O wise and just Dietary Guidelines Dietary Commission, please bestow the power of your wisdom unto those agencies that might humble non-believers. Smite those who use antibiotics, hormones, chemical fertilizers and toxic pesticides! Strike down those who deny that the climate end is nigh! We humbly beg of you to force the right choices unto those too unenlightened to do so themselves.
I could easily copy and paste the entire article, but here is one of the juicier sections of this proposal to invade our lives courtesy of left wing extremists:
As expected, the committee recommended that Americans move toward “plant-based” diets, after months of discussions in meetings regarding environmentalism and food policy.
DGAC said its recommendations to eat less meat are intended to “maximize environmental sustainability” out of concerns for climate change.
“The major findings regarding sustainable diets were that a diet higher in plant-based foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, and lower in calories and animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current U.S. diet,” DGAC said.DGAC recommended Mediterranean-style and vegetarian diets as the best options. Vegan, lacto-ovo vegetarian, pesco-vegetarian, and Mediterranean diets are the most environmentally friendly, with the least greenhouse gas emissions, it said.
“All of these dietary patterns are aligned with lower environmental impacts and provide options that can be adopted by the U.S. population,” the report said. “Current evidence shows that the average U.S. diet has a larger environmental impact in terms of increased greenhouse gas emissions, land use, water use, and energy use, compared to the above dietary patterns. This is because the current U.S. population intake of animal-based foods is higher and plant-based foods are lower, than proposed in these three dietary patterns.”
Read the whole thing. It is comforting to see at least some honesty in the recommendations, in that they are partially motivated by radical left wing social engineering in the name of their religion of Climate Change. I pointed out something similar to this a few months ago in a proposed plan by The Department of Transportation. But by now we should all be ready to follow left wing extremists in their faith in unelected bureaucrats making decisions over our lives. Just because:
They were wrong about cholesterol
They were wrong about low-fat products
They were wrong about red meat
is no reason to start questioning the faith. Based on how wrong the government has been in the past with their recommendations, I am going to make a bold prediction for 20 years from now when the government admits that it was wrong in pushing people toward a vegan diet. Their admission will probably read something like this: “We have found that the meatless, vegan life style to have produced unpredictable consequences in those who have followed these guidelines. If you took our advice you are far more likely to be miserable, self-righteous, judgmental, along with having an unfounded faith in Big Government. And you probably smell funny.”
Cross posted from Brother Bob’s Blog
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