Conspiracy Theory

Quite a few recent studies have shown that – hey – that low carb, high fat diets really do work better than the fat-free high carb ones. And I’ve been puzzled about why the food industry and medical establishment keeps refusing to admit that they’ve been wrong all these years. I’ve come up with a government conspiracy, which might confirm that I'm crazy:

I contend that it is in the government’s best interest – in several ways – to keep the general population eating a high carb diet. Here's why.

First

Several studies have found that a low-fat, low-protein, high carb diet lowers testosterone levels, especially in men. Testosterone causes aggressive tendencies and muscle development, and the government wants to keep the population compliant, non-threatening, weak, tired and easy to control.

Corollary

It is also in the government’s interest to keep us fat. Fat people can’t mount a real revolution – they’d get too tired five minutes into it.

Two

Carbohydrates – grains and sugars – are cheap. If people decided to spend more on meat and vegetables, they’d have less to spend on products that have higher profit margins, like consumer electronics and silly-looking clothes they don’t need. Also, they’d have less to spend on processed foods. (Incidentally, modern processed foods are generally about starches and sugars – so if we started eating fewer carbs, the processed food industry would be hit pretty hard.)

Three

This one’s tricky, but this is the really good one, so follow along closely: Our agricultural capacity – particularly thanks to not-so-good technologies such as chemical pesticides and artificial fertilizers – is far greater than we Americans actually need. (U.S. farms grow more grains and sugar than we could ever possibly consume. That’s why they’re so cheap in the marketplace.) (By the way, some studies have also shown that pesticide-treated food tends to be harder to metabolize – it makes you fatter. Another good thing, in the government’s eyes!)

Now, you might think that this means that farms would become unprofitable and farmers would give up the farming business in favor of something lucrative. Unfortunately, farms are profitable, because the U.S. government delivers billions in farm subsidies every year. The farm lobby is powerful enough to squash any attempts to rectify this. Why is the farm lobby so powerful? Because it’s not a bunch of small-time farmers lobbying Congress: most farms are owned by one of a few major billion-dollar conglomerates – the American family farm is so rare these days it’s almost a myth.

Anyway, farm subsidies keep agribusiness corporations profitable and also result in our farms constantly producing too much food. If we started eating less grains and sugars, we’d literally run out of space to store all the surplus, these corporations would see their profits fall, and the government would have to pay even more subsidies to keep them in business. There’s already all this grain. Somebody has to eat it!

Why don’t we just let agricultural profits fall? Because we can’t picture farms run by corporation. We still think that if a farm goes under, some poor farmer and his family will go homeless and starve. All the agricultural lobby has to do is trot out some old advertising copy about how farmers toil away, at the mercy of the elements, to keep us from starving – and we get weepy eyed.

Four

All right, you say. If we have so much surplus grain, let’s ship it to hungry countries and feed the starving in, say, Africa. We could sell it for a few pennies or even give it away! Why don’t we do this? Because we like them to starve. A poor, starving nation is a nation that can’t ever become strong enough to become a threat to us. Or mount any kind of effective protest when we march in and strip them of their natural resources.

We also keep our surpluses in store as a foreign policy weapon. In the event that some starving country looks like it might develop the means to feed itself, we can swoop in, sell our surpluses at such cheap prices it forces native farmers out of business. Once their farms have been shut down, we cut off the grain supply. Then everyone starves, the country becomes/stays easy to control and … well, the cycle repeats.

Conclusion

So anyway, that’s what would happen if the government encouraged us to eat fewer carbs and more meats and vegetables. Multibillion-dollar corporations would go out of business, and many Congressmen would thus lose their jobs. Other starving countries might have a chance of pulling themselves out of poverty and getting out from under our control. And our own population would grow the backbone necessary to confront and question our government about all the other stupid and/or immoral things it does.