“The result is that we cannot discover whether breastfeeding is correlated with obesity because infant formula or bottle feeding leads to subsequent overeating or disposition to being overweight, or whether those parents who breastfeed are also more likely to offer their children green beans instead of French fries. Despite weak evidence, there is a lingering conviction that formula causes obesity among pediatricians and the press; if anything, the study about infants should make us reflect more carefully on this conclusion.”

Alas, such nuance from Mrs. Obama and her unquestioning media water-carriers is scarcer than tofu at Taco Bell.

Don’t get me wrong. As a proud mom who breastfed both of her babies, I’ve been and will always be a vocal defender of women who have devoted the time, dedication and selflessness it takes. But there are myriad individual reasons beyond Mrs. O’s expansive goal of battling the collective scourge of childhood obesity—intimate bonding and health benefits for the mom, not just the baby, for example—that lead women to nurse.

And we don’t need Big Brother or Big Mother to lead the Charge of the Big Bosom to persuade us of the personal benefits. Many private hospitals and companies have already adopted nursing-friendly environments. If it’s as good for their bottom lines as it is for babies’ bottoms, they don’t need a government mandate to do the right thing.

But as I’ve noted many times over the past year, Mrs. O’s real interest isn’t in nurturing nursing moms or slimming down kids’ waistlines. It’s in boosting government and public union payrolls, along with beefing up FCC and FTC regulators’ duties.

Take another East Wing pet project: leaning on private businesses to print expanded front-package nutrition labels warning consumers about salt, fat and sugar. The first lady’s anti-fat brigade assumes as an article of faith that her top-down designer food labels will encourage healthier eating habits. It’s a “no-brainer,” Mrs. Obama insists.

However, the latest study on this very subject—funded by no less than the left-wing Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—confirms other recent research contradicting the East Wing push. A team led by Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School’s Eric Finkelstein, published in the peer-reviewed American Journal for Preventive Medicine, found that mandatory menu-labeling in Seattle restaurants did not affect consumers’ calorie consumption. “Given the results of prior studies, we had expected the results to be small,” the researchers reported, “but we were surprised that we could not detect even the slightest hint of changes in purchasing behavior as a result of the legislation.”

Will the first lady and her food cops be chastened by the science that undermines their spin? Fat chance.