Ho Hum: What Will Kill You THIS Week?

Pity the manic food police of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. They’ve really hit a dead end this time.
After warning that virtually every food on the planet is destined to kill you, they’ve run out of victuals to vilify and now they’re getting hysterical all over, about fare they’ve gotten hysterical over in the past.
This time: Chinese food.
Again.
A new AP report making the rounds by writer Libby Quaid tells of the latest CSPI harangue whose snarky title “Wok Carefully” strains the group's PC credentials.
(“Wok…” Get it? Nyuk nyuk)

“The typical Chinese restaurant menu is a sea of nutritional no-nos, a consumer group has found. A plate of General Tso's chicken, for example, is loaded with about 40 percent more sodium and more than half the calories an average adult needs for an entire day.The battered, fried chicken dish with vegetables has 1,300 calories, 3,200 milligrams of sodium and 11 grams of saturated fat.”

“…a consumer group has found?”
A consumer group?
It sure would be nice if the AP provided a little context instead of carrying the CSPI’s silly rant without any clarification, caveats, or consideration of the source.
Libby Quaid’s dispatch contains nary a mention of the group’s previous tirades against popcorn, ice cream, pizza, French fries, hot dogs, soft drinks, Thanksgiving turkey, cookies, crackers, cheese, bacon, candy bars, fast food, Chinese food, Mexican food, Italian food, Greek food, airline food, hospital food for crying out loud, and so on, ad infinitum.
The only “public” in whose “interest” the CSPI practices "science" must be some population of masochistic vegan monks.
This is the outfit with a decades-long history of bloviating that virtually everything you’d ever actually want to eat will kill you.
Might’ve been worth mentioning.
The study’s findings, appearing as an article by nutritionists Jayne Hurley and Bonnie Liebman in the group’s Nutrition Action Healthletter, certainly stick to the CSPI’s tradition of agita-inducing pontification. For example they say of the delicious Chinese dish lemon chicken “It’s like eating three McDonald’s McChicken sandwiches plus a 32-oz. Coke.”
Obviously the simple invocation of the “McDonald’s” name is enough to label something as eeeevillll in the CSPI’s world. The group’s accompanying press release describes such classic staples as noodles and fried rice as “a load of greasy refined carbs.”
One amusing quirk of the story is the degree to which the AP writeup gooses the hype from the CSPI'S press release, which in turn ratchets it up from the content of the report itself.
The intensity of the scare rhetoric increases, and the acknowledgement of any mitigation diminishes, the farther we get from the original source.
The AP piece does include an inverse back flip somersault clarification when it comes the CSPI’s traditional bogeymen, fat and cholesterol.
Chinese food is, in fact, very healthy on that front since, historically for the most part, it has been cooked in cholesterol free, trans-fat free, mono or poly unsaturated oils, often peanut oil.
So what do we get from the AP? A begrudging acknowledgement that says Italian and Mexican restaurants are worse.
In truth, the “Wok Carefully” report does mention that, up front. (parenthetical “hooray!” in the original)

“Chinese restaurants deserve credit for keeping a lid on saturated and trans fat, thanks to vegetable oil, no cheese, and a host of seafood, poultry, and (hooray!)vegetable dishes.”

And it tastes great too.
So then, inevitably, comes the preaching about sodium. …lest anyone get the idea that it’s possible, or permissible, to enjoy dinner without threat of death.
Of course, as most diners know, the eye popping calorie and sodium figures listed for a “single serving” of Chinese dishes are pretty meaningless anyway because few people ever really eat a whole entrée at one sitting. Chinese dinners are frequently consumed "family style" with each member of a gathering having small samples of each dish. Further, large proportions of such “servings” end up going home in those iconic Chinese takeout boxes, to be eaten another time.
Presto. Instant per-meal calorie reduction. Happens all the time.
At least, that’s the way it works in the real world, a place with which the nutrition nannies are sadly unfamiliar.
Theirs is a world where moderation is replaced by an all-or-nothing extremism. For the CSPI, either you’re choking down poached tofu and sprouts, or you’re gorging yourself with batter fried sticks of butter in cream sauce with mountains of powdered sugar and salt for every single meal and snack.
The notion that a “treat” is something to be enjoyed sporadically never enters the equation as the group serves up its draconian pronouncements.
Remember the CSPI’s news that fettuccini Alfredo is “a heart attack on a plate?” Having personally enjoyed the stuff several times without once having a heart attack, I can only deduce that this was yet another bit of silly exaggeration meant to grab headlines and squander yet another opportunity to educate the public.
Even public attempts to encourage moderation without privation are dismissed.
In 1992, when M&M/Mars introduced a reduced fat Milky Way candy bar, Bonnie Liebman exemplified the CSPI’s mentality beautifully when she scoffed “Even if they took out all the fat, this candy bar would not turn into a cantaloupe.”
Why no, it wouldn’t.
And anyone who wants to eat a cantaloupe is unlikely to mistake a candy bar for one.
The CSPI’s real complaint is that people, who know the difference, freely choose the candy bar.
…or the cheeseburger, or the burrito, or the fettuccini Alfredo.
The group’s conclusion seems to be that people cannot be trusted to make their own good choices and must instead be forced to choose a diet it deems sufficiently healthful. Such force is manifested in calls to ban, limit, or tax products of which the CSPI disapproves.
Failing that, these food police try to scare people, using pronouncement after pronouncement that just passing through the drive-through at Wendy’s will wipe out your whole family.
These diatribes only serve to drive a wedge between consumers and what might have been some sound nutritional advice they could have used.
Unfortunately, the CSPI and the media have developed a perverse co-dependent relationship in which they try to top each other with dire expostulations and have concluded there’s no other way to get their message to the public.
Ultimately, the only messages they’re actually delivering any more are...

• It is imperative that you must be miserable! Or...
• Tune us out.

Unsurprisingly, most people choose the latter.
Spare us!
Treat us like adults and we’ll listen.Until that happens, the CSPI will remain a punchline in jokes about popcorn, pizza and, especially, Chinese food.
Considering that obesity truly is a growing problem in the United States, and given that the CSPI has some real nutritionists doing real research, that’s not exactly a constructive outcome.
March 21, 2007