Michelle Obama: First Lady of Junk Science

[Guest]

By Michelle Malkin

While her husband may have paid lip service to ending the abuse of science for "politics or ideology," first lady Michelle Obama gave herself a super-sized waiver. Two of her showcase social engineering campaigns -- tax preferences for breast-pumping working mothers and expanded nutrition labels -- are based on distorting or dismissing the prevailing public health literature.

Just as the White House costumed Obamacare activists in white lab coats, the fashionable Mrs. O has cloaked her meddling anti-obesity crusade in medical fakery.

Over the past year, the first lady has marshaled a taxpayer-subsidized army of government lawyers, bureaucrats and consultants against the "national security threat" of childhood obesity. She has transformed the East Wing of the White House into Big Nanny's new Central Command headquarters. The biggest threats to Mrs. Obama's 70-point plan for national fitness: parental authority and sound science.

As part of her "Let's Move!" anniversary celebration this week, Mrs. Obama rolled out a new breastfeeding initiative because "kids who are breastfed longer have a lower tendency to be obese." She made her assertion to an invitation-only group of handpicked reporters who were barred from asking questions about her scientific conclusions. It's not healthy to challenge Super Nanny, you see.

After the Internal Revenue Service carefully studied and rejected an advocacy push to treat nursing equipment as a tax-deductible medical expense last fall, the tax agency suddenly reversed itself in time for the first lady's new public relations tour. The surgeon general has also issued a "Call to Action" to pressure private businesses to adopt more nursing-friendly environments to combat childhood obesity, all while denying that government is intruding on personal decisions. "No mother should be made to feel guilty if she cannot or chooses not to breastfeed," Surgeon General Regina Benjamin asserted, while laying an unmistakable guilt trip on moms and moms-to-be.

So, what do studies on breastfeeding and babies' weight actually say? Rebecca Goldin, Ph.D., research director of George Mason University's Statistical Assessment Service, points out that the literature is inconclusive or demonstrates that the health advantages of bosom over bottle are short-lived:

"Indeed, there is little evidence that using formula causes obesity. There is a correlation between formula use and obesity among babies and children ... though this correlation is not consistent in all studies. Some of these studies show a relationship in only some demographics and not others. Others show that the disadvantage of bottle-feeding and/or formula mostly goes away by the time a child is about 4 years old.

"The result is that we cannot discover whether breastfeeding is correlated with obesity because infant formula or bottle feeding leads to subsequent overeating or disposition to being overweight, or whether those parents who breastfeed are also more likely to offer their children green beans instead of French fries. Despite weak evidence, there is a lingering conviction that formula causes obesity among pediatricians and the press; if anything, the study about infants should make us reflect more carefully on this conclusion."

Alas, such nuance from Mrs. Obama and her unquestioning media water-carriers is scarcer than tofu at Taco Bell.

Don't get me wrong. As a proud mom who breastfed both of her babies, I've been and will always be a vocal defender of women who have devoted the time, dedication and selflessness it takes. But there are myriad individual reasons beyond Mrs. O's expansive goal of battling the collective scourge of childhood obesity -- intimate bonding and health benefits for the mom, not just the baby, for example -- that lead women to nurse.

And we don't need Big Brother or Big Mother to lead the Charge of the Big Bosom to persuade us of the personal benefits. Many private hospitals and companies have already adopted nursing-friendly environments. If it's as good for their bottom lines as it is for babies' bottoms, they don't need a government mandate to do the right thing.

But as I've noted many times over the past year, Mrs. O's real interest isn't in nurturing nursing moms or slimming down kids' waistlines. It's in boosting government and public union payrolls, along with beefing up FCC and FTC regulators' duties.

Take another East Wing pet project: leaning on private businesses to print expanded front-package nutrition labels warning consumers about salt, fat and sugar. The first lady's anti-fat brigade assumes as an article of faith that her top-down designer food labels will encourage healthier eating habits. It's a "no-brainer," Mrs. Obama insists.

However, the latest study on this very subject -- funded by no less than the left-wing Robert Wood Johnson Foundation -- confirms other recent research contradicting the East Wing push. A team led by Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School's Eric Finkelstein, published in the peer-reviewed American Journal for Preventive Medicine, found that mandatory menu-labeling in Seattle restaurants did not affect consumers' calorie consumption. "Given the results of prior studies, we had expected the results to be small," the researchers reported, "but we were surprised that we could not detect even the slightest hint of changes in purchasing behavior as a result of the legislation."

Will the first lady and her food cops be chastened by the science that undermines their spin? Fat chance.

http://townhall.com/columnists/michellem...ence/page/full/

[Dr. Shane]

I love this first lady. She is one that really cares and she takes on these non-political issues so that she won't become decisive. It is too bad the right-wing commentators can't just give her a pat on the back and say 'good job'.

[phkrause]

I love this first lady. She is one that really cares and she takes on these non-political issues so that she won't become decisive. It is too bad the right-wing commentators can't just give her a pat on the back and say 'good job'.

[Guest]

I love this first lady. She is one that really cares and she takes on these non-political issues so that she won't become decisive. It is too bad the right-wing commentators can't just give her a pat on the back and say 'good job'.

That's where you're wrong. It is a VERY political issue. And it's not AT ALL about health. It's all about more government control over your life. You can't legislate good eating habits. What a communist dictator type of thing to try and pull off!

Trying to legislate what people can and cannot eat, is NOT how you say: "I care". When will you wake up and smell the coffee? You're living in a rose colored fantasy land, if you really believe that ANYTHING the obama's do is not political. Ever heard of Saul Alinsky? His book, "Rules For Radicals" was obama's training manual.

You really should join the people in Realville.

Did you even bother to read the article?

[Dr. Shane]

I don't think obesity is a political issue. I have never seen it on a party platform. I criticized the Bush-haters for never giving him credit where credit was due and I simply can't be guilty of the same thing with Obama. But, of course, we are not even talking about Barak here. We are talking about his sweet and tender wife who is only looking out for the health of our fellow Americans. I don't buy into all that Saul Alinsky conspiracy stuff. I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt and not try to second guess their motives.

[Guest]

So in other words, you don't buy into any of the facts. your reality is already made up in your mind.

[Dr. Shane]

I have never been much for conspiracy theories of any kind.

[bonnie]

I don't think obesity is a political issue. I have never seen it on a party platform. I criticized the Bush-haters for never giving him credit where credit was due and I simply can't be guilty of the same thing with Obama. But, of course, we are not even talking about Barak here. We are talking about his sweet and tender wife who is only looking out for the health of our fellow Americans. I don't buy into all that Saul Alinsky conspiracy stuff. I prefer to give people the benefit of the doubt and not try to second guess their motives.

Then tell them to quit making it a political issue.Stay out of what I feed my family.I never felt the need to lie to mine,perhaps that is where I went wrong.None of my sons,thier wives,or grandchildren are overweight.

Michelle Obama is about as sweet and tender as a pirhana.

Tell her to look after her own health and weight.She is carrying more than a few extra pounds.Let Obama trick her and make her run the stairs,she would lose what she is carrying behind

Feed her children as they should be,quit your lying,and stay out of the families of others.

If a mother is to stupid to see her child becoming overweight and do something about it,she probably is to dumb to have children.Most can figure out calories are not in the air you breathe but the amount you shovel in.Michelle Obama is not going to convince anyone,especially telling mothers to lie to their children. Good mothers do not lie and trick their children.They teach them good habits and obedience from infancy

[Guest]

I have never been much for conspiracy theories of any kind.

It's not a theory. Only a person who prefers to remain blind would call a well known fact, a theory. Without ever checking to see what the documented facts are, I might add.

The job offer to "Miss Hillary Rodham, Wellesley College" was dated Oct. 25, 1968, and signed by Saul D. Alinsky, the charismatic community organizer who believed that the urban poor could become their own best advocates in a world that largely ignored them.

Alinsky thought highly of 21-year-old Rodham, a student government president who grew up in the Chicago suburbs. She was in the midst of a year-long analysis of Alinsky's aggressive mobilizing tactics, and he was searching for "competent political literates" to move to Chicago to build grass-roots organizations.

Seventeen years later, another young honor student was offered a job as an organizer in Chicago. By then, Alinsky had died, but a group of his disciples hired Barack Obama, a 23-year-old Columbia University graduate, to organize black residents on the South Side, while learning and applying Alinsky's philosophy of street-level democracy. The recruiter called the $13,000-a-year job "very romantic, until you do it."

Obama embraced many of Alinsky's tactics and recently said his years as an organizer gave him the best education of his life. Clinton's interest was more intellectual -- she turned down the job offer -- and she has said little about Alinsky since their association became a favorite subject of conservative critics during her husband's presidency.

Alinsky was a bluff iconoclast who concluded that electoral politics offered few solutions to the have-nots marooned in working-class slums. His approach to social justice relied on generating conflict to mobilize the dispossessed. Power flowed up, he said, and neighborhood leaders who could generate outside pressure on the system were more likely to produce effective change than the lofty lever-pullers operating on the inside.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/24/AR2007032401152.html

[Dr. Shane]

I was always impressed that Obama took a job as a community organizer instead of a job at a high-dollar law firm. His ideology might be bent a little in the wrong direction but is motives are noble.