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You Can’t Replace Insulin With Cooking Classes
Why cooking classes are a terrible way to stop people from being fat
Yesterday, the current head of the United States Federal Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, said this:
“We’ve got to stop and ask ourselves, should we be focusing more on school lunch programs, not just putting every kid on Ozempic…and maybe we need to treat more diabetes with cooking classes, not just throwing insulin at people.”
If you want to see the full rant which appeared on Fox news, you can click the first link there. In context, the statements are no more convincing than they are isolated. This is an astonishingly ignorant thing for any senior scientist to say, never mind the person nominally in charge of all food and drug safety for the U.S.
I’m not going to go into the various ways that the statements are offensive. People have already pointed out that this sort of rhetoric is hugely problematic for people with Type 1 diabetes, and it’s obviously absurd to say that any pediatrician anywhere in the world is considering putting all of their patients on Ozempic*.
But there is one fairly obvious scientific error here. It’s a common mistake made by people who believe that health is largely under individual control, and therefore merely a…
