Is It a Crime to Tell People What to Eat?
Four years ago, [Steve] Cooksey was a walking — actually, barely walking — collection of health risks. He was obese, lethargic, asthmatic, chronically ill and pre-diabetic…
When a busybody notified North Carolina’s Board of Dietetics/Nutrition that Cooksey was opining about which foods were and were not beneficial, the board launched a three-month investigation…
“If,” the board sternly said, “people are writing you with diabetic-specific questions and you are responding, you are no longer just providing information — you are counseling — you need a license to provide this service.”
More from George F. Will on free dieting advice.
Selling advice or any other good or service is quite different from pontificating or opining on a topic. This is another example of rent seeking.
Advice can be considered conunseling, it just depends on how you word it.
Was Steve Cooksey merely blogging about his health problems and his quest to improve his diet? If so this hardly falls into the category of counseling. Mr. Cooksey wasn’t claiming to have any professional skills in the matter. He wasn’t offering his opinion to individuals for a price. I agree with Joe, this is rent-seeking on the part of North Carolina’s Board of Dietetics/Nutrition.
Joe is absolutely right. Cooksey has a constitutional right to share his hypocrisy with the world. By attempting to stop him on the grounds that he doesn’t have a license is rent seeking through and through.
Medical professions, like the North Carolina’s Board of Dietetics/Nutrition, are rather good at rent-seeking and erecting barriers to professional entry.
Years ago I knew a hospital dietary technician, who was a recent graduate with a BS degree in nutrition. She said she really didn’t expect to ever become a registered dietitian because the process for being accepted for the required internship programs was very political. You basically had to know someone prominent, willing to recommend you. An internship was necessary to become a registered dietician. Without the RD certification, you were mostly relegated to a dietary technician position that didn’t require a college degree and that paid far less than a registered dietitian. Oddly enough, I was also friends with someone who was an example of what the dietary tech told me.
Why is it that govt ALWAYS wants to interject itself into matters that do not concern them? You’d think they had enough to worry about with the whole 8% unemployment and all.
I really, really hope he wins his legal battle. Otherwise that would be basically setting a precedent that opinions are not free speech when those opinions fall into certain fields.
“North Carolina’s purported authority to scrub the Internet of one-on-one nutritional advice, whether for free or for compensation, is rooted in a nonbinding 1985 opinion by three U.S. Supreme Court justices in Lowe v. SEC.[1] The opinion in Lowe suggested that the First Amendment simply does not apply to advice from one person to another in contexts where professional expertise is the norm and one person is asking the other to exercise judgment for him or her. Classic examples would be the regulation of what doctors may say to patients and what lawyers may say to clients.”
http://www.ij.org/north-carolina-speech-backgrounder
if he isn’t charging people i don’t see what the problem is.
What happened to freedom of speech? What Cooksey was doing is called blogging! Something that everyone is doing nowadays, and if it’s not harming anybody I don’t see what the big fuss is.
According to this article, he was only responding to questions and concerns people were going to him with. He was giving advise on eating habits that worked for him, and, in any case, they were pretty good healthy suggestions.
“When a busybody notified North Carolina’s Board of Dietetics/Nutrition that Cooksey was opining…” Exactly, he was opining. He wasn’t forcing nobody to do anything. I would like to think we are all still entitled to an opinion. Right?