Big Brother or Doctor?
New York City bans trans fat in restaurants, who have until July of 2008 to comply. "Big Brother or Doctor?" asks the poll at MSNBC. I say neither one sounds good.
Update: The Washington Post editors assume people need doctors and Big Brother to tell them what to do (Hat Tip: Soccer Dad).
Update: The Washington Post editors assume people need doctors and Big Brother to tell them what to do (Hat Tip: Soccer Dad).
posted by Helen at 3:50 PM
34 Comments:
haha i posted basically the same thing on my blog
Bring back the b&w pic.
anonymous 5:41:
What the heck is this with people asking me to put back the black and white pic?
Bloomberg is a miserable little shit, a true nannystatist.
Strange thing is the health nuts and average person will pay more for bland food while the foodies and well-heeled will continue to eat real butter. Downside is pastries will have to be smuggled in from Jersey.
that's a shame, Little Italy will now truly be gone from NYC for good...
don't - we like your hot red pj pic...
I'm really torn about this one. While I understand the resistance to heavy-handed government intrusion "for our own good", the truth is this stuff is poison. I've been trying to avoid trans fats ever since I learned what they are in my cell biology class in 1986. It's much easier now, thanks to increased awareness. We now know that butter and lard are less harmful for you than trans fat. And you can make really good fried food with butter or lard, but of course you can't manufacture it in ginormous quantities for cheap, so lard-cooked french fries would be more expensive. Transfats have driven the cost of prepared food way down, and now we are used to cheap cookies/twinkes/french fries, so we condsider it undue intrusion to ban them.
But we as a society more or less accept bans on other dangerous substances.
Another point (OK, OK, so I am sounding all pro-ban, which maybe I am in this case, even though I tend to be a little more skeptical of the nanny state in most cases) is that trans fats are so prevalent that it is hard to avoid them if you choose to do so. I avoid them by reading lables religiously, shopping at Whole Paycheck (which is trans fat free), mostly cooking my own food, avoiding fast food joints, and avoiding any menu items, like fries, that are higly likely to contain trans fats. But I'm never really sure that my spinach omlette wasn't cooked with trans fat-containing oil. And what about the children-again, one can avoid giving kids trans fats if we prepare all their food for them, but if my kid buys a muffin on the way home from school, she is probably eating greasy poison. At the very least, the stuff should be labeled.
The bottom line is that trans fats are unnecessary, and they are unhealthy. Yes, butter and lard are also unhealthy, but not nearly so. And if you have ever had fries or battered fish cooked in lard, you'd never, ever go back to eating stuff cooked in trans fats again.
In fact, try this. Go to the store, buy a big potato, slice it up, and cook it in olive oil, or canola oil, or any pure non-manufactured fat source you happen to have, add a little sea salt, some pepper, and eat it. Tastes good, doesn't it? Now, tell me you'd rather go to Burger King.
Actually there is very little scientific evidence that trans fat is bad for you.
To my knowledge, there have been no controlled scientific studies examining only the effects of trans fat on heart disease. (And the very few studies that found a correlation have not been reproduced and are quite dubious scientifically.)
There have, however, recently been several massive studies of low-fat diets and they all concluded that they didn't reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, colorectal cancer or invasive breast cancer.
Reducing all fat would reduce trans fat. Again, not a direct study, but it does strong suggest that studies finding trans-fat harmful are poorly done or simply junk.
Actually, there are several studies that show a link between trans fats specifically, and CHD.
The problem with the low-fat diet studies, and the whole low-fat movement of the 90's, is that these rarely take into account the kind of fat being consumed, and many processed "low fat" foods actually have trans fats in them. In fact, many manufactured low fat foods actually increase the proportion of trans fats to naturally occurring fats, because they tend to eliminate natural fats in favor of processed foods. Low fat diets call for margerine instead of better. Margerine has trans fats, butter does not. Can't eat steak, but go ahead and have some Snack Wells. Guess which of these two have trans fats. And there is a study that shows that the CHD risk increase per gram of trans fat is significantly greater than per gram of saturated fat (the naturally occurring kind in butter and meat).
We need fat. And it tastes good. People on low fat diets aren't getting enough good fat, and they tend to consume more crap-calories from low fat foods than do people that eat balanced diets of lean meats, fruit and veggies, with the occassional indulgence of slab bacon or pastries made with butter. Mmm. If you look back at the low fat diets that people were on 10 years ago, you will see that they stayed away from salmon, but could eat all the pretzels and low fat cookies they wanted. Turns out that the omega-3's and unsaturated fats in salmon actually LOWER the risk of CHD.
I understand the general skepticism about nutrition advice in light of the above example. A decade ago we were supposed to eat low fat, now we are supposed to eat low carb, who knows what we will be supposed to do in 2015. But the bigger picture about all of this makes a fair amount of sense.
Sugar and fat have been a part of the human diet as long as there have been humans. Our bodies can deal with this-we've been selected for our ability to metabolize naturally occurring sugars and fats (and alcohol, for that matter), but at the cellular level, we don't know what to do with trans fats. It seems we don't turn them over. They stick around. God knows how long.
btw, while I do think that some of the trans fat studies are in fact scientifically sound, one could still argue against them just based on how much better home made french fries taste.
On a pragmatic note, though, I would prefer some financial incentive for a phased reduction of trans fats, rather than an outright ban that will surely cause economic upheaval. If the government is going to decide that on one day we can't do something that was perfectly legal the day before, they better be ready to clean up the resulting mess.
New York City bans trans fat in restaurants in an attempt for the Mayor to flex a "watch my second-hand smoke" voter base?
Is free space so tight in NYC that more cash generating skinny folks can be "managed" in the same space, kind of like airline seating stratagies on a limited ratio of space/weight/paying customer airplanes?
I see a financial boon for the folks in the olive oil importing industry. As always, follow the money. I seem to remember the ridicule suffered by the Mayor at the time when "runny egg yolks" were banned. Obviously he's no longer Mayor with edicts like those!
Boon to the olive oil importing industry? Almost certainly. But is that not one of the many benefits of capitalism? When a door closes, a window opens? Damn, now I want to get a piece of the olive oil importing action!
Hmmm...,
OK, perhaps I was a bit too coy with an antiquated euphemism...
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/2035/
Once, the debate about health was to do with how we could provide more and better resources for society, improve technology and provision for all sections in the community - and the best way to organise such a task. With the low horizons of modern political life, however, we seem to be headed toward a situation where we can play out a morality tale of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people – based on how they eat, drink, smoke, shop, and have sex in an age where we don’t seem to agree upon very much else.
oligo
Of course I realize that the food nazis told us to stop eating butter and lard. We now know they were wrong. We just shouldn't eat so much of them. I don't advocate blindly doing what the food nazis say. But once in a while they are right, and they are right about trans fats-independent evidence supports this.
As for sprouts, well, yes, most edible sprouts contain canavanine. Fortunately, they taste really yucky, so few people are likely to eat the hundred or so pounds of sprouts it would take to get the toxic 15g of canavanine. Other types of sprouts that contain lathyrogen, which is more toxic at lower levels, are not eaten, probably because they taste really really icky, so you'd be hard pressed to find any place that sells or serves them. If you did, I'd bet you could easily get them banned.
The difference between sprouts and trans fat food, other than the fact that trans fat food taste way better than sprouts, is that sprouts contain tiny amounts of toxins and huge amouts of beneficial nutrients. Fries cooked in trans fats contain large amounts of trans fat and no beneficial nutrients.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to cook up some sweet potato fries (vitimin A, C, B6 and manganese) with some olive oil (unsaturated fat) to eat with my poached egg. Yeah, I know the food nazis told us to stop eating eggs, but I didn't listen and it turns out they were wrong about that, too.
As much as I hate nanny-statism, I just can't get into the "Save the Transfat" movement. The stuff is garbage and it doesn't taste very good. Any evidence that shows that eating butter is better than eating margarine is fine with me.
I believe I was in high school when all the fast food restaurants shifted to their "low cholesterol" French Fries (i.e., transfat fries), and we immediately noticed how much more bland they tasted. So much so, that my friends and I would annoy the workers at various Fast Food restaurants by asking for the "high cholesterol" fries, which they no longer served. They probably spit in our food.
And I've been quite skeptical of the low-fat dietary movement since I recognized that people are getting fatter despite supposedly eating less fat. Really, we're eating less saturated fat, and more transfat, and we're getter fatter as a result. So, bring on the fries cooked in lard, I say.
So label the stuff and be done with it. The ban is just a way for the state to worm it's way into our homes through our kitchens. Labeling would give me the info to make an informed choice. And I would avoid transfat. But the state needs to leave me be.
Trey
Wow, I'm so glad there are others around to tell me what I should and shouldn't eat. Some of you can't seem to grasp that allowing others to take your rights away is a bad thing. No one is forced to eat anything they don't want. Let the market decide by letting customer's vote with their pocketbooks. Keep giving up pieces of your freedom and see where that leads you. Sheeple!
Oh, come on. Transfat wouldn't even be as prevalent if it weren't for the food nannies previously waging a war on saturated fat. You're fighting for your "right" to continue to eat a substance that the food nannies had already (wrongly) told you that you should be eating. So, who are the sheeple, here?
Um, no. transfat would not be so prevelant if it were no so CHEAP.
Cheapness certainly has something to do with it, but I didn't say it wouldn't be used, I simply said it wouldn't be as prevalent. The fast food restaurants didn't start using it until the "low cholesterol" phase, even though it was available long, long before that.
sorry, oligo, but there again you're wrong. Natural trans fats are recognized and metabolized to conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), which is actually quite good for you. Among the other health benefits of CLA, it seems to actually reduce the amount of fat that we store in our adipose tissue, especially belly fat. In other words, it minimizes uptake of other fats.
Synthetic trans fats, not so much.
If you want to argue this one based on the principle of government intrusion, go ahead. It is a valid argument. Though I would have to agree with Rizzo that is is really hard to jump on the pro-trans fat bandwagon.
But quite a bit of good science exists behind the anti-trans fat movement, so if you're going to go that route, learn the science and don't just assume all statistics are lies. And just because a bunch of self righteous tree huggers say trans fats are bad does not mean that trans fats are not bad.
ada47m
I hate to break the news to you but, very little good science exists behind the anti-trans fat movement.
I was once a believer, then I tried to find all that good science I was sure existed to support my view. And failed. Badly. It just isn't there.
joe and oligo,
what is the standard that must be reached for you to call something good science? What is missing from the current studies that keeps you from believing them? I would not say that the evidence is complete or a slam dunk, but the weight of the existing evidence pretty much supports the claim that trans fats are bad bad bad.
I'd like to refure you on this, but I can't begin to do so unless you can tell me what should be done to prove that trans fats are bad.
Here in quebec, when the government made it illegal to not wear your seat belt, we knew it was because they were going to introduce the state managed no-fault insurance system...
They were the ones who would pay if you had an accident so they forced us to wear our seatbelts, so there'd be less damage/injury to pay for...
Could the ban of trans fat indicate that pretty soon New York will introduce a kind of universal "free" healthcare system like we have in here Canada?
I hope yours work, ours is a mess...
Tiny Belgium has more MRI machines than Canada...that is what "free" universal health care gets you...
ada47,
Let's say the so called "science" is correct for now. Experience has shown that it won't always be so. Of course, by then NYC will be devoid of their famous bakeries and bagel shops. Too bad as we're probably heading into a recession and NYC will need the tourist trade they are running off. Let's all check back in 2010 and see the dearth of low and mid priced restaurants and bakeries in NYC. No sandwich shops, no hot dog vendors on the street. Ever wonder what type of fat is in those soft buns that don't go stale overnight?
A reasonable option would have been to have the businesses give notice of the presence of trans fats and allow people a choice. Of course, they can't do that as they know the poor stupid peasants will choose badly.
ada47,
I agree with pretty much all you said on this topic and for what it is worth,
isn't there also evidence that countries where people consume a lot of natural fats ( like olive oil, greeks consume a LOT of olive oil, I think they have the world record ) have less health problems than people in countries like the USA and Canada where there are processed/trans fats in almost everything we eat?
Natural fats such as olive oil are better for us and do taste great when you know how to use them, I like my sweet potatoes fried in olive oil just like you!
I really don't like the state telling me how to live my life but
banning a bad fat is not exactly telling people what they can and can not do;
people can still live on french fries, cheeseburgers and Oreo cookies if they want to.
In fact they will be able to live on french fries, cheeseburgers and Oreo cookies a little longer now that trans fat will not be in them anymore!
ada47,
THERE IS NO SCIENCE.
The anti-trans-fat hysteria results from an observed and VERY low correlation from a handful of studies that weren't specifically and narrowly looking at trans-fat. The sampling size of these studies was too small and the methodology terrible.
Contrary to this, there have been several very large, well constructed studies specifically examining the effect of low fat diets on heart disease and breast cancer. These diets included trans-fat (though didn't focus on it, unfortunately.) Still, the results found that low-fat diets did not reduce heart disease or incidence of breast cancer.
joe,
Wait, wait, wait. You’re telling me all the science is crap, and you cite that one study to back up your contention that there are no adverse health effects of trans fats? That particular study is bad science. Several posts back, I talked about why. This is not just my opinion, this is the consensus from scientists from a wide range of specialties. Scroll back for the details, but the bottom line is that the low fat studies did not look at the type of fat consumed, and based on this alone the study is junk. Low fat dies tend to be higher in trans fats (margerine instead of butter, cooking spray instead of olive oil, etc.) and several controlled and reproduced studies, as well as a host of anecdotal evidence from observations of dietary habits, indicate that several natural fats neutralize the effects of saturated fats. Passing on the “high-fat” salmon and avocado in favor of the “low-fat” cookies made with trans fats is counterproductive to health.
The now infamous low-fat diet study that you cite took years to do. Too bad they did it wrong. It will take another 10 years to do a similar study looking at dietary lipid content, rather than just counting grams of “fat”. And it this point, it is unlikely that such a study will be done because most nutritionists would consider it unethical to force someone to be on a high trans fat diet.
However I can show you at least 10 smaller studies that come to the unanimous and highly reproducible conclusion that diets high in trans fats raise LDL and lower HDL, thus moving the LDL/HDL ratio into the unhealthy zone. The results are exactly the opposite for diets high in unsaturated fat with minimal trans fats, and diets high in saturated fat have a less extreme effect on the LDL/HDL ratio. LDL/HDL is, for good reason, accepted as the primary indicator of CHD risk. This is backed up by tons of good science and years of medical records.
As for the economics, I am of course sympathetic, but I did a little looking into the NY situation. Recently, a self-policing measure was taken, whereby restaurants could voluntarily reduce the amount of trans fats in their food. One year later, there was no significant change in the number of restaurants with significant trans fats in their menu offerings (although a few individual restaurants went trans fat-free). The waitstaff at most restaurants were unable to identify trans fat-containing goods on their menus. Under the current “ban”, they have six months to get trans fats out of their deep fryers, and eighteen, that is eighteen, months to get trans fats out of their baked goods. Of course there is resistance to this, but several restaurant owners have weighted in, saying that simply following the market trends over the last years indicates that such a reduction is warranted, so they are less concerned with negative economics of the ban. This is of course not the universal response, but most reasonable people are not predicting economic collapse.
We should fear the nanny state. We should be ever vigilant against government intrusion into our lives. We should question whether any decision by the government is in our long-term interest. But there is a school of thought that suggests that government can and should have a positive and progressive role in correcting market failures. Widespread use of a product that is proven to be bad for us, because it is cheap, is a market failure (is their lead in your house paint? No? Why not? Who took it out?). In a perfect world, an informed populace would drive trans fats off the market by refusing to buy trans fat-laden foods. In some way, this is working, as proper labeling of foods has lead to less widespread commercial use of trans fats. I’d bet that the few restaurants that went trans fat-free and advertised that fact have lines around the corner. There is a demand, but the fact that people don’t know which restaurant foods contain trans fats, and the information about the deleterious health effects of trans fats, which is about as close to scientific consensus as exists on any issue, has not trickled down to the general public, is a market failure.
Hydrogenated oils, trans fat are man made or more precisely man-processed, and are only about half a century old.
There was a bakery industry BEFORE man began to process fat.
and there will be a bakery industry after trans fats are gone.
The price of other oils/fats will go down as more and more bakers use them.
When vitamin E is added food has a longer shelf life, almost as good as with trans fats.
The food industry will survive, we will all survive a world without trans fats.
Yes, trans fats are dangerous for everyone--not just New Yorkers.
So, if trans fats are dangerous for everyone, why isn't the FDA banning or regulating it?
If it isn't dangerous enough to warrant a ban/strict regulation, then NYC shouldn't be doing a thing. Or the FDA.
Either way NYC shouldn't have done a job that isn't really theirs to do.
rowena,
I disagree entirely.
The NY measure is in fact more responsive to democracy. The next mayoral election can see the end of the trans fat ban or the continuation of it, and the voters can be heard about that. Bloomberg's health commissione put the ban in place. People can vote out Bloomberg and make it clear they don't like the ban, so his successor will ease up on the regulation and not try something like this again. Or, they can re-elect Bloomberg, or (does NYC have mayoral term limits? I can't rememver) someone who vows to keep the ban in place and thus voice their approval of it.
The FDA, unfortunately, can be politicized in a manner that does not always serve the interests of the people. Farm subsidies ensure that your Big Mac costs less than a salad and a coke costs less than orange juice. Since the FDA is part of the arm of the Federal Gov't, it is less responsive to popular will. There would ahve to be congressional measures, people would have to, like, vote in midterm elections and know who their congressperson voted, and it would take a while.
But don't worry, the FDA eventually will ban trans fats. Or, better yet, they won't have to, as trans fats will cease to exist. National chain restaurants will have to adapt to the NY ban by removing trans fats from their products. It will cost too much to do this just for NY, so the will do it nation wide. Some innovative food scientist will come up with something new, it will be mass marketed and soon will be ubiquitous.
See, capitalism has its benefits, and federal government control over every aspect of our life has its faults. I would think that conservatives would know this.
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