When you see ordinary people questioning health authorities, you have to ask why.
They believe engineers when they say this bridge won't collapse. They are not searching YouTube to find out how to make a safer airplane. But start talking about any public health issues and you see a much different situation.
The vigilante mob is outside the public health officials' door, but why? The same public health officials wringing their hands on cable news about vaccine skepticism built their credibility crisis one bad nutrition recommendation at a time.
Let's be clear: to the public, health officials are health officials — AMA, CDC, Surgeon General, USDA. They're not splitting hairs over jurisdiction, and in general, independent of who authors the original advice, they all fall in line.
You followed the rules. You ditched the eggs — all that "dangerous" cholesterol, they said. You swapped butter for margarine. You poured skim milk over your fat-free cereal and felt virtuous for it. The government said fat was killing you. The doctors said fat was killing you. The cereal box said "heart healthy," and you believed it.
Now it's decades later. Your kids are overweight. Your spouse is pre-diabetic. Your doctor is talking about starting the whole family on insulin. And you're wondering what went wrong — how you did everything they told you to do and still wound up here.
The truth is, their advice was bad advice from poor science and it did not make you more healthy - in fact it made you unhealthy.
Now they try to say that people don't exercise enough and spend too much time on the computer. What a lame excuse. It's a deflection to avoid taking responsibility for their bad science.
It's good to be active and get exercise, but exercise burns very few calories unless you're running marathons. Walk for an hour and you'll burn around 200-300 calories — less than a regular Snickers bar (280 calories).
You can't out-exercise a bad diet, especially when the diet they recommended made you constantly hungry.
The Birth of a Lie
The low-fat craze started with bad science and good intentions. As we know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
In the 1950s, physiologist Ancel Keys launched the Diet-Heart Hypothesis — the idea that dietary fat raised cholesterol and clogged arteries. His Seven Countries Study looked convincing: nations eating more fat had more heart disease.
Except there was a problem. Keys cherry-picked his data, ignoring countries like France where people ate cheese and butter, cooked with duck fat, and drank wine but had low heart disease rates. He selected only the countries that fit his hypothesis. Correlation became causation by fiat, and in the political panic over rising heart disease, no one wanted to hear otherwise.
By 1977, the McGovern Report popularized low-fat advice, and in 1980 the medical establishment institutionalized it in the first Dietary Guidelines for Americans. When the entire health authority complex tells America what to eat, dissent becomes heresy.
How Sugar and Big Food Took Over
Once fat was declared the enemy, the sugar industry saw their opening.
The Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard School of Public Health scientists to publish papers minimizing sugar's role in heart disease and shifting blame entirely to fat. Meanwhile, the FDA dragged its feet for decades on requiring added sugar labels, despite mounting evidence. Food companies reformulated everything to be "fat-free," while quietly loading products with sugar and refined starches. The grocery aisles filled with products stamped with the AHA's reassuring "Heart-Check" logo.
We repeat: the sugar industry paid Harvard public health officials. Do you think this little bit of history is not common knowledge among public health skeptics?
When this scandal broke in 2016, what did Harvard do? No institutional apology. No acknowledgment of the damage done to public health. Just a few professors offering weak deflections about how "funding disclosures were not the norm back then." In other words, Let's not talk about that. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Ignoring Basic Biology
Here's the thing: you cannot eat a truly low-fat diet.
Fat isn't optional. You need it for many metabolic functions.
Cut fat too low, and your body fights back. Your body demands fat, it needs it to function. Now you are going to eat several cups of low-fat cereal to get the 10 grams of fat you need, while ingesting hundreds of grams of sugar and starch.
This is basic nutrition and physiology math. The scientists could not make this calculation?
In addition, fat triggers satiety hormones that tell your brain "I'm full, stop eating." Remove it, and you're left hungry, searching for more food to try to achieve satisfaction that never comes.
The Arrogance of Authority
Where is the humility here? If you don't know something with any certainty, why tell the public to try your pseudo-science experiment? And when you were wrong, where is your apology and accountability? Where is your woke moment? You tell people how much you care about public health but… don't make me laugh with this behavior.
Researchers who questioned the narrative were labeled cranks. John Yudkin, who warned about sugar in the 1970s, was publicly ridiculed into irrelevance. When evidence began mounting in the 1990s that sugar was the metabolic bomb detonating in American households, the same institutions dug in deeper.
The Human Cost
Look around. Childhood obesity rates have tripled since the 1970s. Type 2 diabetes, once called "adult-onset diabetes," now shows up in children. A staggering percentage of adults are on insulin or metabolic medications by middle age.
Big Pharma isn't going to complain when half the country needs insulin and cholesterol medication.
Healthy Fats, Unhealthy Hype
When the low-fat narrative finally collapsed in the early 2000s, public health officials pivoted.
Now the buzzword was "healthy fats". Avocados, olive oil, salmon, nuts — good. Butter, red meat, eggs — still suspect.
The truth? This "good fat vs. bad fat" binary is just another deflection.
Moderate saturated fat from whole foods isn't killing you.
Processed seed oils consumed in excess can be inflammatory.
Omega-3s are beneficial, yes — but that doesn't mean your body doesn't know what to do with steak or pastured butter.
The science is nuanced. The messaging is not. And every time the experts dumb it down for public consumption, they do more harm than good.
The Trust Collapse
When you betray public trust this profoundly, you don't just create a nutrition crisis. You create a credibility crisis.
People stop believing anything you say. They take the law into their own hands.
This collapse doesn't stay contained. It spills over into everything: vaccine skepticism, pandemic denial, climate change conspiracies. The vaccine skeptics sound ridiculous until you realize they learned their skepticism in the cereal aisle. You are representing the scientific community. They watched their families get sick following official dietary advice, saw the same officials refuse to admit error, and concluded that institutional expertise is incompetence at best and maybe just to help enrich themselves and big Pharma.
Closing Shot
It's time to take some ownership on why the mobs are at the door of public health departments with their vigilante justice. It's not helpful for them to be involved, but public health departments caused this. People used to defer to science there, and they were let down. The road back will not be easy.
Telling people that they are ignorant and that they should shut up and believe you is not going to help. The additional burden is that politicians have weaponized this for their benefit and will continue to use it in that way. "Look at what these elites did."
Alcoholics and drug addicts first stage in recovery is admitting they have a problem. Time for public health to do the same. The path forward isn't complicated: acknowledge the errors, stop the deflections, and maybe try some humility when the science is uncertain.