“We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.”

“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.”

It’s that notion which created the mess – with the founding of things like the FDA and USDA – in the first place.

That said, it’s important to understand also that big corporations are really a function of government as well. In fact, I think it’s becoming increasingly difficult to draw distinctions. So, while I’m all for individual rights, property rights, the right to produce & trade, I also recognize that what we observe in the big corporate sector likely would not exist in a free market where there’s no shielding of personal liability by law.

I’ve come to believe that it’s the shielding of personal liability that’s at the very root of what’s wrong. You might also not that government officials are also generally shielded from personal civil liability.

It’s true that those in the mainstream medical field tow the party line. It’s also true that many of them do so because to not do so would be to lose financial benefits (I’ll leave the true believers, and those who have developed the habit of never thinking too independently about anything out of this). However, what everyone in the paleo (ie: enlightened, intellectually active and honest) community should do well to realize is this: the pharmaceutical companies are under the same pressure to tow the line as the doctors are!

They don’t set the standards for what’s considered healthy nutrition and exercise. They don’t decide which types of foods get subsidized and which don’t. Yes, of course pharmaceutical companies, being big businesses, have lobbyists for these things – and some private industry or particular company always wins at the expense of some other industry or company – but ultimately it’s the government which decides. Ultimately it’s the government which says that it’s it’s responsibility to make *some* decision. That they’re our parents. Do you honestly think that any company, or even any industry as a whole, can fight that premise? No, all they can do is hope to play into it.

In any situation like that it’s always the individual (popularly refered to as “the consumer”) which loses – and it’s always the producer (not the government) which takes the blame. As it stands now, people do what they do in nutrition because, well, that’s what the government says they should do (they think it’s “uncorrupted” by money, ironically). They take the government’s advice on faith.

It could be better – but government would have to get out of the way. Even those individuals who eat 200 grams of carbs every day are worse off for having the government tell them that that’s what they should be doing than if they came to that conclusion themselves. While, of course, their reasoning for doing so would be false if they had done it themselves, at least it would be their own reasoning. At least they would have some scientific basis from which to be persuaded.

Once upon a time in this country the government didn’t concern itself with the health of it’s citizens. It used to say, whenever some out of their mind, activist subgroup of people wanted it to, that that’s not our business. Yes, during this time people figured out how to produce alot of carbs. They didn’t do so because they said to themselves “we’re trying to find the optimal nutritional regimine possible given the nature of the human genome.” They concluded that carbs were preferable to periodic famines – and so they produced them. The reason why they (later on) came to the conclusion that those things were optimal nutritionally was because of one thing: government policy.

Government policy – more concerned with the “general welfare” of masses of people rather than the individual’s health – saw the fact that carbs were cheap, plentiful, and durable, and so they concocted the lie (and created the agencies to promote and enforce that lie) that they were healthier to0. They did this to further their own ends. The government is concerned with avoiding food riots, and with using grains as leverage in international diplomancy; not with the health of the individual. So is it any wonder that they would step in front of the people’s march towards technological and scientific harmony, once they had what they wanted to keep themselves in power?

So greed, financial gains, conflicts of interest – whatever you want to call them – aren’t the real problem. They are just symptoms of a far more profound cultural and political disease. Everything – all of the dogmatic intellectual stagnation – that has happened in the health care, food, exercise, pharmaceutical, and medical education industries (and many, many more industries actually, if you care to look into them) ever since the government got what needed to stay in power it is the result of government meddling into something only the individual should be responsible for: doing his best to learn what he needs to do to maintain his health.

•Lipid levels obtained in the first 24 hours of hospitalization may still be
altered by the acute phase response and thus may not be entirely
reflective of the baseline steady state lipid levels.