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The Anti-Pleasure Principle
The "food police" and the pseudoscience of self-denial
Jacob Sullum

...CSPI’s resistance to diet soda -- an innovation you might think the organization would embrace, given its frequently expressed concern about the "epidemic of obesity" -- is a matter of prejudice, not science. It reflects the group’s preference for the natural over the synthetic, its dislike of big business and mass trends, and, perhaps most fundamentally, its suspicion of pleasure without pain, of enjoyment unencumbered by fear. That suspicion is the thread that runs through CSPI’s uneasiness about artificial sweeteners and caffeine, its dire warnings about fat and salt, its campaign against the fat substitute olestra, its hysteria about acrylamide in French fries, its discomfort with food irradiation, its condemnation of the imitation-meat product Quorn, and its opposition to alcohol consumption as a way of preventing heart disease. For those who share its asceticism, CSPI offers pseudoscientific rationales to justify their phobias.

Perpetual Lent

The charge that CSPI is puritanical has been heard before, of course, especially in connection with the group’s highly publicized hit-and-run reports on restaurant food, which earned it a reputation as "the food police." But if CSPI were nothing but a bunch of pleasure-hating sourpusses, it would be hard to understand the organization’s success in generating press coverage and attracting supporters.

CSPI is a hit with journalists largely because of its inflammatory rhetoric and dependable alarmism, which make for eye-catching stories...