I don't know Rick Berman, a PR guy who shills for the restaurant and food-processing industry, and have not before read anything he's written, but given that his piece was recommended to me by the discredited "Center for Consumer Freedom," I expected to encounter half truths and blinding lack of insight. And, I did.

He takes aim, as the CCF often also does, at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an organization I have no feeing for or opinion on — apart, perhaps, from the pillorying it takes from CCF and cronies, which puts a point in its favor. So I'll just sidestep the CSPI stuff in his screed.

Berman presents four rules for "Americans who want to splurge without ordering a side of hype-inducing concern," and not a one stands up to moral truth. No. 2, for example, says "One or two studies does not a scientific consensus make."

This is a true statement, but it implies that only one or two studies have been conducted; a paragraph later, in fact, he refers to a review of 9 studies, and even those are not the only studies conducted on salt and hypertension. 

"The bottom line is that there’s a lot that we don’t know about nutrition and how our bodies respond," he says. Again, that's a true statement, but there is also a lot that we DO know about nutrition, and just because we don't know it all doesn't mean we should disregard what we know.

Please note that that statement is lifted from the global-climate-change-denier handbook: There's a lot we don't know. It hasn't been studied enough. So let's do nothing."

Another "rule" he offers: "It’s OK to indulge a little." Again, that's a true statement, but does anyone think that what the food industry really thinks? The slogan is not, after all, "You deserve a break every once in a while"? It's, "you deserve a break today." Indulging "a little" wouldn't bring the great profits that indulging at every meal would, would it? But it's less defensible to say what they mean, so they dissemble. Repeatedly.

One more statement Berman makes should be called to attention: "Maintaining weight, after all, is simply a matter of balancing calories in and calories out according to your metabolism." At best, that is incomplete; he would have to know, if he's been promoting processed food for decades, that food processors manipulate their products with fat, salt, and sugar because they know that those products drive overeating. This is proven information from brain-imaging studies, and to imagine that the food processors haven't taking note of it is ignorant folly or willful denial.

But, again, they can't be say that if they want to succeed in the market. So they manipulate their products to make people want to eat more, and then tells us we just have to take responsibility for how much we eat. As I've asked before, when will they take responsibility for their efforts to undermine ours?