If you aim to eat a healthy diet based on the belief, you are what you eat, you are in a minority. If you understand food chemistry and eat grass-fed and Omega-3 meats with a goal of optimizing your health, you are in a tiny minority. If you understand the science behind the Omega-6 to Omega-3 fatty acid (EFA) ratio, and focus on maintaining a low ratio, you are in a minuscule minority.

This past Monday (Jan 11, 2021) a lady on NPR was discussing the best way to stop civil unrest. Her solution was that we need to banish all commentary that isn’t truthful. That way there can’t be any disagreements. This week another lady sent me an email explaining how the ignorant mob only talks about their ridiculous “religious distractions, gun diversions and ‘fear and loathing’ while laughing all the way to bank, abandoning the country’s infrastructure, healthcare, education, environment, democracy and future to a funeral pyre of cheap tax cuts.” Yep, that was her “truth.”

When only “the truth” is discussed, I do not believe that will stop conflict. Oh, for sure, when everyone is forced at gunpoint to march to the beat of the same drummer, such as in North Korea, no one will say a discouraging word—out loud. They’ll just focus on staying alive and, when alone, pray for change.

Our country’s Founding Fathers not only understood history but they were subjects of rulers from afar. Therefore, when they wrote the Constitution and Bill of Rights they did their best to make sure the citizens of the new nation would rule, but at the same time minorities would be protected from majorities. That’s why the Federal government was created as a republic rather than a democracy.1

The reason the Founding Fathers wanted a republic is that they knew a democracy was basically “two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.” James Madison called it “the tyranny of the majority.” In more recent times the self-described “conservative arch-liberal,” Austrian political philosopher Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, was adamant in his opposition to democracies, communism, and Nazism. He famously stated that “the crucifixion of Jesus was a democratic event.”2 3

In order to prevent majority rule the Electoral College was created to be a guardrail for the national voting process. For the same reason each state could only have two senators regardless of their populations. It’s also why we have three pillars of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. The structure of government was designed “to ensure the government is effective and citizens’ rights are protected.”4

These days our society is going off the rails. Rep. Steve Cohen, D-TN, introduced a resolution to the House Judiciary Committee a couple days ago to abolish the Electoral College. His accompanying statement said, “It is past time to directly elect our President and Vice President. The Electoral College is a vestige of the 18th Century when voters didn’t know the candidates who now appear daily on their phones and television screens.”

Obviously this lawmaker needs a basic civics lesson especially if he’s swearing an oath to the Constitution. And every American from both sides of the isle must resist these siren songs. That’s because the vast majority of us are minorities in our occupations, activities, religions, social orders, ethnic backgrounds, mother tongues, and more. I don’t care what you think or do, there is always more than one aspect of your life that is so unique it’s not what a majority finds acceptable, palatable, or fun.5

There are already too many laws on the books regarding what can and can’t be said about diets. It’s illegal to say a diet can cure any disease! That belief is so ingrained in our nation’s bureaucracy it’s probably why medical doctors and nurses are not taught nutrition. Therefore they do not understand what biology and nutritional scientists have discovered in terms of how a diet can cause or cure a chronic disease. For that reason what most medical professionals know about diets is nothing more than what everyone else knows. They are the majority!

Some medical doctors have studied nutritional biology and are basing their practices around what they have learned. They report that they are “suppressing” diseases such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease, asthma, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and more by improving their patients’ diets. In so doing they have forsaken drugs and operations because they know that drugs mostly focus on single pathways, and targeting one pathway can show change, but in human studies, these limited approaches do not work. On the other hand food is a metabolical approach that addresses multiple modalities. They have proven that their dietary prescriptions literally stop some chronic diseases in their tracks. They are a minority and their professional peers ignore them.

For decades scientists in nutrition and biology have been publishing studies that illustrate how certain diets improve health in significant ways. Mostly the foods in those diets are limited to grass-fed meats, wild-caught seafood, Omega-3 meats, green leafy vegetables, some squashes and beans, and very little else. They recommend that fruit, grains, seeds, nuts, and high glycemic foods should be avoided. They emphasize a diet that balances the Omega-6 to Omega-3 essential fatty acid (EFA) ratio in addition to low glycemic whole foods that are nutrient dense and diverse.

So, what happens if all Americans are required to believe “the truth”? Who decides what’s true? Is it Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jack Dorsey and their favorite lawmakers? If a certain belief, circumstance, or function is considered a truth, how can there be any innovation going forward? Any suggestion of a change is sacrosanct. If the USDA’s My Plate diet is the truth, then every suggestion to the contrary is a lie. The scientists in nutrition and biology would then be ostracized and cancelled unless they ignored all of their modern findings and supported what is an utter failure. My Plate is essentially the same today as the USDA’s dietary recommendations in the 1960s. In the past sixty years the overall health of the nation has continued to get worse, not better. To me, that’s doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.6

If we are to lock in the failed nutritional science of the current USDA My Plate as “the truth,” then the next step is to cancel anyone with a different opinion. Can that happen? You bet it can. We live in a digital world where we are all tracked and recorded. Everything we put into print in the digital world can be found and then, if it’s not “the truth,” it will be squashed. At the same time foods determined as phoney by the arbiters of truth, such as meat and animal fats, can be banned for the health of humanity and the health of the planet.

That is what can happen to minorities when the majority rules without checks and balances. It’s what Benjamin Franklin meant when answering a group of citizens who were asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Why, because he, as well as most of the delegates, feared majority rule. In addition, Franklin and all the other delegates were in agreement with Alexander Fraser Tytler who was attributed to have said, “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.”7 8

We are truly “living in interesting times.”