An interview with anti-health nanny Tom Naughton, part 1

If you watched Super Size Me and decided afterwards that McDonald's is to blame for obesity in America and taxing, restricting, and labeling fast food will make everyone healthier, Tom Naughton says you’ve been fed a load of bologna. Naughton is a health writer, filmmaker, and comedian who earlier this year released a documentary called Fat head, which takes aim at the “Spurlockian Bologna” presented in Super Size Me, as well as the nonsense perpetuated by many other misinformed health nannies who believe it’s their job to protect consumers.

Tom was kind enough to answer some questions about his movie, health and science policy, and chicken McNuggets in this two-part interview.

What was your primary motivation to make this film?

I started out intending to create a pilot for a TV show I wanted to pitch: a standup comic with some common sense examines issues of the day, that sort of thing. The pilot episode would’ve been about how we treat fat people in our society. I watched Super Size Me as part of my research and was so annoyed with it, I decided to shoot my own reply.

How would you describe your political views? Did those have anything to do with your decision to make Fat Head?

I’m a libertarian conservative, and yes, my beliefs very definitely influenced both my decision to produce Fat Head and the direction of the film. I believe very strongly in individual liberty, and that includes the freedom to make bad decisions. If people get fat eating French fries and drinking milkshakes, that’s their choice, and the blame belongs to them, not Ronald McDonald.

What is your biggest problem with consumer advocacy groups like The Center for Science in the Public Interest?

Where do I begin? First off, they’re not a consumer advocacy group. They’re a radical vegetarian group. Consumer advocates wouldn’t be calling for high taxes on the foods consumers prefer, which CSPI does. They wildly exaggerate the risks of any foods they don’t like, and they’ve been dead wrong in the past without taking any responsibility for their actions. They’ve pressured schools into giving kids skim milk, which deprives kids of the fat their brains need to grow properly, and they tell parents to feed their kids cereals and whole-grain crackers. Those foods metabolize into sugar soon after you eat them, and they contribute to both obesity and diabetes.

Most people agree that trans fats are unhealthy. Can you briefly tell us how trans fats made their way into fast food restaurants?

Once again, you can thank the Center for Science in the Public Interest for that fiasco. They’re the reason trans fats ended up in all the restaurants. They decided lard and tallow are health hazards – which isn’t true, by the way – and pressured the restaurants into switching to hydrogenated vegetable oils. When those oils were later shown to contribute to heart disease, CSPI sued the restaurants for using them. That takes a lot of gall.

In the film you sat outside several fast food restaurants to see if any of them would force you to eat their food. What did you find out from that experiment?

Well, I was just being silly to make a point. Morgan Spurlock and groups like CSPI blame fast-food restaurants for making people fat, but conveniently ignore the fact that nobody is forcing anyone to eat fast food. It’s ridiculous to blame a restaurant chain for the choices consumers make of their own free will.
 

Why are you opposed to laws requiring that nutrition labels be posted on restaurant menus? Wouldn't having more information about our food be a good thing?

Well for one thing, there’s a freedom issue at stake. If a restaurant doesn’t want to list its nutrition information, consumers are free to go somewhere else. It’s not the government’s responsibility to get between the buyer and the seller of a product that no one is being forced to buy. For another, that information is already easy to find. It’s available in books, on the internet, and in most of the restaurants on a printed nutrition guide.

That doesn’t satisfy the food police because they want consumers to be confronted with calorie counts, whether we want to see them or not. And frankly, sometimes I don’t want to know. If I decided to indulge one of my rare urges for a pizza and some beer, I don’t want some nutrition nanny forcing me to consider how many calories I’m consuming. That takes the fun out of it, and I eat those foods for fun. What they’re hoping, of course, is that they can scare us all into eating less. It’s just an attempt at controlling our behavior, which again, is none of their business.

Finally, what exactly makes these goofs think the menu laws are going to work? There is zero evidence that people change their eating habits when they’re confronted with calorie counts. When the FDA ordered food manufacturers to use those standardized nutrition labels nearly 20 years ago, there were all these media stories about how much smarter people were going to eat, thanks to all that government-mandated information. Does anyone think we’ve gotten leaner and healthier since then?

Read part 2 here.

For more info: visit Tom Naughton's website, You Tube channel and Fat Head Blog