New York City has banned trans-fats in restaurants; restaurants have until July 2007 to get rid of the trans fats. ((Except for donut shops, which have until July 2008.))
1) I’m enough of a libertarian to think they should have just required restaurants to clearly label foods containing trans fats, and then let consumer preferences do the rest. ((The bill does require restaurants to provide calorie information, which is good.))
2) On the other hand, if this law really saves 500 lives a year (as ban proponents claim), I’m enough of a liberal to think that’s worth a tiny loss in freedom. But I’m skeptical about the 500 lives a year claim; I haven’t been able to find out how that figure was derived.
3) NYC Mayor Bloomburg says “We’re not trying to take away anybody’s ability to go out and have the kind of food they want in the quantities they want.” It must be nice to be that free of distressing reality. Next, Mayor Bloomburg will explain how speeding laws aren’t trying to take away anyone’s ability to drive as fast as they want.
4) Trans fat ban proponents often claim that there’s no taste difference between food prepared with trans fats and food prepared with other oils. But that isn’t true; many folks (but not all folks) can taste the difference. See the taste test at the bottom of this Willamette Week article, for instance. And no one knows how to make trans-fat-free donuts that taste as good.
5) Ironically, margarine — once billed as the healthier (and lousier-tasting) alternative to butter — is much higher in trans fats than butter, and is now considered less healthy than butter. Zig! cry the health mavens. Zag! they cry, ten years later. Yet their credibility never seems to go down.
6) Banning trans fats in restaurants, but not in grocery stores, doesn’t make sense. I guess the supermarket lobby is more powerful than the fast-food and donut lobby.
[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.].
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Not to provide too much support to NYC on this, it strikes me as incredibly pie in the sky, for one thing, but what is sold in supermarkets is generally already required to meet labelling standards, including the specific disclosures on the type of fat used in the product. Honestly, having worked in many restaurants, banning trans fats is probably less of a burden than labelling requirements. If no one can use it, then the playing field is level. National restaurant chains would have a clear advantage over smaller, non-chain restaurantswhen it comes to labelling (unless the labelling is so generic as to be basically non-informative): “This restaurant uses transfats” or something along those lines. So I don’t agree with your assessment on that point, at least.
Actually, lard works BETTER than shortening for deep frying, well, anything. But lard got a bad rep, much like butter, when shortening and margerine came back on the market.
Maybe I’m overly libertarian, but it seems to me that if knowing the exact amount of anything (nutrients, fat, etc.) in everything that you eat is of that great a concern, cook at home. If you’re concerned about your transfat intake, make the majority of the foods you eat naturally transfat free, like vegetables and whole grains and non-fried products. This is kind of a no-brainer to me, and not an area where government intervention belongs.
I’m all for changes will make the majority of America healthier, but I also think there is another important component here. Transfat is being cut from menus because it is linked to obesity, and like the rest of the anti-fat movement, I think they forget that not all of America is fat. I’m naturally underweight, due to a high metabolism and heart rate, and trying to gain weight in a culture obsessed with weight loss, a culture that even forces it upon me when I go out to eat now, makes it even harder. My cafeteria at school now only has wheat pizza crusts and wheat pastas, we’ve switched oils in which foods are cooked… I agree with the above comment. If you are so concerned with what is in your food and how it’s cooked, please stay home and cook for yourself!
I agree with you. I don’t understand why they would ban trans fat in restaurants only. If NYC is going to ban it, they should actually BAN it.
But I in no way support the ban. I know it’s terribly bad for you, but people do destructive things to themselves all the time. Banning trans fat won’t make that much of a difference.
Question:
Do transfats kill any more people than smoking or drinking? Does that mean we are going to ban the sale of cigarrettes? If so, I’m all for that (not really, but it sounds nice to me in some ways).
Seriously, I wish people would get off their high horse about the obesity in america problem. Is it an issue? maybe. Not really at the top of my social problems list though…
I think the issue with transfats is that, unlike cigarettes and alcohol, you consume many of them without being conscious of that fact. I don’t know why NYC is banning them — but they do more than contribute to obesity, they are very bad for atherosclerosis (after being hyped as being better on that score than butter or lard) but have no fewer calories, typically, than the alternatives.
The reason why transfats can reasonably be banned while cigarettes and alcohol remain legal is that transfats are far more replaceable. The difference with the ban will not be that different foods will be available, but that foods may taste slightly different to a small portion of the population. No such close alternative, to my knowledge, exists for alcohol or cigarettes.
Thus, while banning cigarettes will deprive people of the choice to smoke- something it is very sensible to defend despite the lives it would save- banning transfats will just slightly change the eating experince. Thats not something I am willing to see people die for.
If banning abortions after the 34th week saved 500 healthy babies a year, would you be in favor of the ban?
There are plenty of things that could be banned that would save lives but I believe that people have to make their own choices concerning what they eat: the food should be clearly labeled if it contains trans-fat but banning it is going too far, IMO.
Tanter –
So you’re “willing to see people die” from drug use, but not from eating?
Casey- Its not that I am happy about people dying in either case.
However, I was trying to point out that this is not really a ban comparable to a ban on drugs. Donuts aren’t being banned, but how they are made is being regulated- which is already done with alcohol. Thus, this represents a type of infringement on freedom which society has already deemed acceptable.
Indeed. The Food and Drug Act was first enacted in the early 20th century because of the unhealthy, unsanitary and out and out deceptive practices that took place in the food industry. It’s why the FDA later banned cyclamates and certain food dyes. Because there were alternatives or the benefits of the product (blue m&m’s) weren’t worth the perceived risks of having known carcinogens in food. It’s been a long time (if ever) that we took the position that those worried about cancer should do their utmost to avoid carcinogens but let the rest of us make our own decisions.
Maybe I’m overly libertarian, but it seems to me that if knowing the exact amount of anything (nutrients, fat, etc.) in everything that you eat is of that great a concern, cook at home.
I thought libertarians were all about fully-informed persons making choices freely–and you can’t make intelligent choices in the absence of information. Maybe I’m overly libertarian myself, but it seems to me that if you are going to throw a tantrum because you are required to tell your customers what you’re selling them, you shouldn’t be running a business.
I hate to say it, but as I’ve noted over at my place, I cannot help my reaction to all this hoo-hah about banning trans fats:
“Look, guys, they’re just love handles, okay? Just give me some time to work out.”
Seriously, though, while I’m all for public health, would this effort be better spent educating people and increasing transparency so they can make better, informed choices about their nutrition? There’s always some panic food to recoil from or fad thing to gorge on, and if we could just, say, stress moderation and balanced meals and make whole or fresh ingredients more available to more people, we wouldn’t have to bother with all this nonsense–or the diet industry, or the talking heads, or the articles on the “obesity epidemic,” or the making people crazy with this or that new–oh. Oh I see. Hm.
No, it’s just that the NYC Board of Health doesn’t have jurisdiction over food sold in supermarkets.
The feds regulate packaged food, and they’ve required manufacturers to disclose trans fat content for some time now. Interestingly, some manufacturers that had maintained that they couldn’t possibly do without trans fats in their packaged foods (Oreos being one example) suddenly decided that they could after all once they were required to disclose trans fats on the labels.
Trans fats are an industrial byproduct that restaurants and food manufacturers did without for a very long time. The reason for switching to trans fats had a lot to do with concerns over saturated fats, but the reason they remain popular is that they have a longer shelf life and are cheaper than the oils that had been used previously.
All together now: the issue with transfats is not FAT. You will be just as fat if you eat french fries fried in suet or, God forbid, butter, or even canola oil. But transfats have been associated with some bad health consequences quite apart from making you fat. Some things that make you fat are also quite bad for you. Just because “extra” poundage is not conclusively tied to a higher death rate doesn’t mean that all things that take you there along the way are okie dokie.
Very true Bean. Point well made and def. well received. I agree with you now, having read your comment and done a little research, that transfats are unhealthy for all people. I think the argument being presented isn’t about health though, it’s about obesity, unfortunately. I also think there are many other things in the anti-fat movement that have been detrimental to people trying to GAIN weight… really small portions, ect.
thank you barbara!
the point of the ban, from what i understand, is that transfats are more dangerous than regular fats, not because of the amount of calories they contain, but because they have a greater effect on one’s cholesterol.
that is also why indoor smoking was banned in new york–not to save smokers from themselves, but to protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke, with its concomitant carcinogens, that they did not choose to consume.
i think it boils down to something similar to a nuisance argument–if the music is so loud you can’t sleep, if the smoke is so thick it affects your health, then the law has a right to intervene.
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~ The taste test was one restaurant’s fries vs. another’s. That’s about as unscientific as you can get; I bet that if I had a board of tasters, I could find two restaurants which cooked with trans fats, and two which cooked without, and reproduce the same results without a difference in the cooking oil.
Also, the guy who tried to switch to canola probably didn’t make the smartest choice. It holds up well in certain kinds of cooking applications, not in others.
On the other hand, there IS a taste difference in foods cooked with large amounts of trans fats. I can taste them, and it puts me off my feed. I can eat things drenched in butter for hours and maybe feel over-full, but I never get the sense that something’s sort of bad about my food. I also don’t get the weird itchy feeling on my face — not like an allergic rash, but like my pores are secreting some nasty griminess — after eating non-hydrogenated fatty food.
(I’m avoiding overusing the term “trans fat”, because these molecular states occur naturally in small percentages in end-state cooked food, and that’s differentiated in my mind from using them in pure form intentionally.)
It’s been enough of an immediate problem that I’ve become rather careful in reading food labels for myself. Long-term health benefits are a concern of mine, but short-term are the ones that get the work done.
Declare, or ban, I don’t personally give a damn. Hydrogenated oils are a fad; they brought them in to replace butter and other oils, and they haven’t really been a part of the food source for that long.
I do think that they should be eliminated from the food source in the long run. For one, it might dis-associate eating from mortality somewhat. Because Barbara is right: they’re not bad because they make you fat, they’re bad because they make you sick.
For another, my partner recently visited her parents in a poor area and discovered that in poor-area supermarkets, EVERYTHING has hydrogenated oils — even the cans of beans. They’re used as filler. This sets off alarms for me; it is not okay to feed poor people cheap toxic food because you’ve got them in a corner.
P.S. – here’s a piece of FDA history: http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/history1.html
I have problems with the FDA’s biases, big problems, but I still think we’re better off without eating formaldehyde.