From the WSJ Opinion Archives
SCENE & HEARD
Body Heat
Health nuts try to dictate women's diets--just in case of pregnancy.
This week, a study from the Institute of Medicine advised that the federal government should get into the business of educating women and girls about their diets. Specifically, as incubators of the country's offspring, women should be told to cut back on fats from "meat, poultry, fatty fish and whole milk." And not just when they get pregnant, either, but as soon as possible, just in case they ever do.
The problem, it seems, is that those foods are in fact full of evil dioxins--nasty things that until now have existed primarily as a marketing windfall for health-food stores. According to the panel's report, the dangers from dioxins range from behavioral disorders to cancer. More to the point, the risk can be passed to children through breastfeeding.
Dr. Robert Lawrence, the panel's chairman, said his group refrained from demanding the exclusion of even trace amounts of dioxin from the food supply only "because it would be cost prohibitive with current methods." So the alternative apparently is to cut women off from food.
Now, it's hardly news that infinitesimal amounts of dioxin, a chemical thrown off by many industrial process, can be found in many women's mammary glands. Or that large amounts of dioxin cause all kinds of problems for lab animals. But scientists are far from any intelligent verdict on whether tiny amounts of dioxin are actually harmful to humans.
This might seem a good question to answer before commanding half the population to change its eating habits. But we wouldn't expect details to slow down the food puritans, for whom pregnant women are always the first and easiest domino. With every consumer pleasure that has passed out of social favor, pregnant women are target No. 1. And out of a sense of guilt or fear of social ostracism, they quickly fall in line.
The list of pleasures prohibited to pregnant women has become a sort of social litmus test. To light up in public is to invite being berated by the nearest stranger. Trying to order an alcoholic drink is likely to bring a scolding from a waitress or bartender, who otherwise would be happy to serve up poison with a smile to cirrhosis sufferer.
But don't expect the women's groups to express any indignation. They too busy making sure the ladies get mandatory family leave to spend a full year breastfeeding.
Pregnant women have become as defenseless as smokers, another group that has allowed itself to be pushed around by society without pushing back. This might seem a good thing, since the health of "our children" is at stake. But pushing back might serve a useful purpose: It would help bring out how flimsily based is the claim that many newly unpopular social habits are harmful to the unborn.
I use the word with deliberate irony: Apparently a woman has the right to do anything she wants with her body, except drink wine, smoke cigarettes or now have milk with her cereal. She can abort her unwanted child if she wants, but in the meantime the Institute of Medicine plans to strike whole food groups from the national menu in case she doesn't.
There's a case to be made that pregnant women are simply easy targets for those whose real goal is to eliminate pleasures or attack industries of which they disapprove for their own neurotic reasons. We still live in a country where people retain some right to abuse their own bodies with junk food, booze and tobacco. But the public-health groups figure it is hard to object to a defense of the defenseless.
In any case, society has shown even less appetite for realistic risk assessment where pregnant women are concerned than is otherwise normal in these weird public health crusades. Who even knows studies of fetal alcohol syndrome were based on serious, toxic alcoholics, not on moderate drinkers? Nearly everyone these days believes he's entitled to approach a pregnant woman sipping Chardonnay at a dinner party and denounce her in tones of righteous disgust.
In fact, extending the same epidemiology to moderate drinkers is purely a speculative exercise, one that survives only because of a purely gratuitous choice by scientists to subscribe to a "linear dose model."
This is an act of faith that says anything that's a poison in large doses is also a poison in small doses. It defies common sense and much science as well, but you can't expect scientists to spend time waiting to see what effect impossibly tiny doses of dioxin have in impossibly large populations of lab mice. So instead they pump a few mice full of dioxin and then extrapolate the effects of much smaller doses.
Public-heath guidelines are changing all the time. It's now believed that glass or two of wine is good your heart. Steak and eggs in moderation are better than pasta. Surveys show that people who eat cookies are generally happier, and happier people live longer.
Given this track record, 20 years from now scientists may well be recommending the consumption of tiny amount of dioxin for health reasons. Certainly before women let themselves be scared off of half the foods on the typical American dinner table they should ask if scientists really know what they're talking about.
Ms. Levey is an assistant features editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.
