Free Republic

When it comes to fighting for the creation of a U. S. government-insurance plan to remedy the health-care crisis in the United States, President Barack Obama has almost three-quarters of the American public in his corner. Republican opponents, on the other hand, have Dr. David Gratzer, a Manitoba-born physician who came to Capitol Hill last week armed with a stack of statistics about patient wait lists in Canada, and a fusillade of dire warnings about the life-threatening consequences of government-managed care. An unfair fight? Not so fast. With the clock ticking on Mr. Obama's August deadline for passage of health-care...

We are what we eat. Right? As readers of this exhaustive (and exhausting) historical survey must conclude, the science behind that simple proposition remains speculative and incomplete. Over the past two centuries, so many fine researchers were showered with honors and titles and awards for getting the science totally wrong. One hundred years from now, people will look back on our nutritional pieties and marvel: They thought red meat was bad for you? They forced themselves to drink soymilk? Gratzer, an emeritus professor at Kings College, London, loves human folly. His other books, The Undergrowth of Science: Delusion, Self-Deception, and...