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For instance, it seems fruit juice is now secretly sweet. Well, not secretly exactly. You can find this out by drinking a glass. Virtually all our food has gotten bigger, sweeter, fattier and weirder. Even carrots are now big orange candy sticks. But you don’t need the government to tell you so or prompt you to react.

Government is force. And using force to make us better people is patronizing, meddlesome and ineffective or worse.

The Post called the Canada Food Guide “the government’s food bible”. But we’ve been snoozing through the sermons. Waterloo professor David Hammond recently found that fewer than half of Canadians surveyed could name all four food groups and not one percent knew how many servings the government wrongly wanted them to eat.

Federal officials say don’t blame the Guide for one in four Canadians being obese because it’s designed to prevent obesity not cure it. But while I don’t mean to seem either obtuse or ungrateful here, if it prevented obesity we wouldn’t be swaddled in lard from sea to sea to sea, would we?

The Food Guide was always about social engineering. The 1942 original aimed to make us healthier soldiers, munitions workers and mothers of future soldiers. I’m surprised we won the war since it said eat only 70 per cent of the “Dietary Standard” to conserve food. But it did urge four to six slices of “Canada Approved Bread” daily.