Bloomberg News: “Your Education Level Determines Your Diet!”

It depends on where you got your education. Let’s hope it wasn’t from Bloomberg.

According to a recent “analysis” of USDA data by Bloomberg Businessweek, the two most significant factors in an individual’s diet are his or her income and level of education. Specifically, the analysis says, the more education people have and the more money they earn, the “smarter” the choices they make at the supermarket.

Gross generalizations like this run rampant in the Bloomberg article, including the notion that healthier diets are vastly more expensive. This is not true: eating a Mediterranean-style diet rich in fruits and vegetables costs just $1.50 more a day. Also, a far more important factor than how much money they spend is whether or not individuals live in a “food desert”—a neighborhood devoid of stores and markets that provide access to fresh, whole foods.

Bloomberg’s “expert analysis” truly unravels with a closer look at what foods they deem to be “healthy” and “unhealthy”: skim milk and wheat products are good, while animal fats, high-protein beans, and whole milk are bad! Wrong, wrong, wrong. In fact, a recent study has shown that children who drink whole milk are slimmer than kids who drink skim! One theory for this is that “full fat foods” promote satiety. Additionally, full-fat diary can reduce your risk of diabetes, cancer, and heart disease.

Perhaps most egregiously, Bloomberg fails to address the benefits of organic milk over conventional milk. We’ve discussed the benefits of organic foods in previous articles, but new findings from Dr. Charles Benbrook (you may remember him as the lead researcher on our study of glyphosate-resistant superweeds) found that organic milk contains more heart-healthy fatty acids than conventional milk. This is crucial to maintaining a proper balance of omega 3 and omega 6 fats.

Of course, the healthiest milk is both organic and raw, but—thanks to the FDA and USDA bias against small, local, and organic famers—it’s increasingly hard to find.

Contrary to Bloomberg’s “wisdom,” it’s impossible to overstate the importance of consuming whole, unprocessed foods to promote health. In particular, this means animal fats and full fat dairy. These foods contain cholesterol and saturated fat, which are in fact critical nutrients despite being demonized by mainstream “experts”: cholesterol helps build new muscle and protects against heart attack and cancer, while saturated fats enhance the immune system and plays many other important functions.

Unfortunately, it’s not just the mainstream media that touts the “low-fat” myth: America’s school lunch program not only mandates low and nonfat milk, but limits fat levels. It’s not hard to connect the dots between what we’re feeding our kids and American students lagging in international math, science, and testing scores.