Is The Goverment’s Cheese Push Making Us Fat?

First, a couple of facts: Last year the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which is orchestrating an anti-obesity drive that discourages over-consumption of fattening foods, spent $12 million for a marketing campaign that helped Domino's sell a new line of pizza with 40 more cheese. What's up with that? In this expose, New York Times reporter Michael Moss suggests that the feds have some splaining to do, as Ricky Ricardo used to say. Moss tells us that Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese a year, nearly triple the 1970 rate, and that cheese is now the largest source of saturated fat in our diet. He reports that Dairy Management, a marketing group set up by the USDA, spent millions of dollars on research to support a national advertising campaign promoting the notion that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy products, and that the campaign went on for four years, ending in 2007, even though other researchers found no such weight-loss benefits. Why are the feds saying one thing and feeding us another? Read more in the New York Times and say anything but  "cheese."