Obesity and the attack on soft drinks: "the academic equivalent of junk food, emotionally and politically satisfying yet intellectually empty?"

http://www.theawl.com/2012/10/the-sugar-wars

The Sugar Wars: Science's Fierce, Geeky Debate Over Soda

Trevor Butterworth | October 8th, 2012

"Was it the soda, the sugar, the deluge of so-called empty calories that had made us so fat? Or was this no more than the academic equivalent of junk food, emotionally and politically satisfying yet intellectually empty?
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As Mike Gibney, Professor of Food and Health at University College Dublin, recently noted, if we think of heart disease as having a complexity of one, and cancer a complexity of ten, then obesity has a complexity of 100. Which means, he continued, that anyone who argues that one food alone is behind the obesity epidemic is just not being intellectually serious.
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The risk, of course, is that "good enough" is not really much good at all, and policy interventions based on conjecture and weak data won't work—or may turn out to have unanticipated and unfortunate consequences, thereby eroding the public's willingness to accept future, urgent, "science-based" interventions. When New York City's public schools trumpeted their removal of whole milk from lunch menus as a method of tackling childhood obesity, they neglected to mention that kids switched to drinking fat-free chocolate milk, which had just as many calories."