RFK Jr. and Our Big, Fat Controversies

R emember “olestra”? Or the brand name it came to be known by, Olean? Olestra was a fat substitute that the FDA eventually approved to put into food in the mid 1990s.

Researchers at Procter & Gamble had been looking for a use for olestra since they discovered it in a search for metabolizable fat alternatives for premature babies in the 1970s. Olestra was made by combining vegetable oils with sucrose and potassium soaps in a chemical reactor and then heating them to 300 degrees Fahrenheit until methanol was distilled from the reaction. The rest of the product would be washed with alcohol, then bleached and deodorized.

Yum!

In the 1990s, olestra was going to help Americans lose weight. After a complex approval process, it went into savory snacks, the type of food that already had a low fat content. It also came with a warning that it caused diarrhea and flatulence.

Yum!

Eventually it was found that rats consuming olestra tended to overeat and grow even more fat, likely because this chemical concoction disconnected calories consumed, satiety, and nutrition in a way that mis-programs nature itself. Its use in the United States as a food additive ended in 2015. But P&G still markets it under the name Sefose; it is widely used as a lubricant for small power tools, and as a base for deck stains.

Yum!

Why was olestra made? And why wasn’t it approved for use like Crisco or canola oil, as a tub of fat that you could put into any recipe where lard, tallow, or butter might have been before? Well, because our government food pyramid demonized nutritional fats that make you feel full, and encouraged the food industry to produce endless iterations of shelf-stable carbohydrates instead. These carbs are often loaded with extra sugars to make them palatable.

This way of eating leads to frequent insulin spikes, elevated blood sugar — and eventually diabetes. And because of the food pyramid and the junk science that went into it, for many years dietitians and hospitals and schools recommended that people struggling with their weight eat even less fat and even more carbohydrates. In the 1990s, fat women following the government-backed “Science” as popularly understood would sweat to the oldies for hours a week, then try to lose weight by eating Quaker Rice Cakes.

As I’ve seen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reemerge as a political figure in the past few years, I’ve thought a lot about things like olestra.

I’m pretty sure that the mainstream view of vaccines and autism is correct, and that Kennedy’s is not. And if that’s true, he’s spent a lot of time putting families through an unforgivable amount of guilt and pain over getting vaccines that save children from mumps and measles. I’ve watched videos in which he seriously entertains absolutely outlandish conspiracy theories about Covid.

At the same time, I don’t think it’s unreasonable or nanny-statism to ask why a diarrhea-causing base for deck stains was approved as a food additive, and allowed to be marketed as a weight-loss strategy. Or to ask questions about all sorts of ingredients marketed as “food additives.” Or to ask why our government had such a misbegotten food pyramid to begin with.

I’ve thought a lot about things like the opioid epidemic, which demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt RFK’s contention that Big Pharma money could corrupt the FDA, and thousands of doctors along with it, and lead to an enormous public-health disaster.

I’ve thought a lot about the Covid pandemic. I’ve thought about New York governor Kathy Hochul threatening to send in the National Guard to replace the hundreds of nurses she wanted to fire over a Covid vaccine mandate. These nurses, most of whom had been infected with Covid early in the pandemic, reasonably believed they would not benefit much from the emergency-use vaccines. Millions of people felt that way, and resented obvious lies about the vaccine from the government — lies such as that it would prevent transmission, and that Covid would go away forever once everyone took it. Those people felt that RFK Jr. was speaking for them. Which is why he had a substantial political following, in a year when the polls had the two major-party candidates neck and neck.

Something about America’s institutions — its medical boards, its centrally funded university-level research, its liability claims, and insurance companies — creates adamantine taboos around medical and nutritional knowledge, even as these institutions promote obvious idiocies, like olestra and “sex-affirmation” surgeries that leave children without a functioning reproductive system. I’m with Peter Thiel, and think that these institutions spend a crazy amount of energy reassuring us of their authority, even as they have become stagnant and prone to mistakes that become social enormities.

I’m pretty sure that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a crank. But, on the topics of nutrition and medicine, nearly every single person I know agrees with him on something that’s wrong with our food or medicine. Maybe something small, like bringing back beef tallow to fast food or more closely following peer nations on chemical food additives.

Most Americans are not as paranoid about their food and medicine as RFK Jr. is. But they’ve lost trust in these industries and their regulatory agencies for good reason. Our problem is that the only person who is volunteering to get in there and do something about it is Kennedy.