Here's his latest:
To New York officials, who simply won't mind their own business, salt and cooking oil might as well be cyanide. New York City "health czar" Thomas Frieden has committed himself to forcibly removing almost half the salt from New Yorkers' diets. And Gov. David Paterson has announced that his new War on Obesity will begin with a statewide expansion of New York City's trans-fats ban. If Paterson succeeds, margarine and shortening will become contraband almost everywhere food is sold in the Empire State.
Anyone familiar with our country's track record on internal "wars" (think drugs and poverty) should be skeptical of anti-fat crusades. Adding a little extra salt to your french fries, or cooking them in an oil that some people find tastier, isn't worthy of government intervention.
The problem isn't a little bit of salt that you sprinkle on your french fries. It's the MASSIVE amounts of sodium that is ubiquitous in our foods. And people die from these things. Martosko's title is "Leave food choices to eaters: Bans don't work. Government should relay safety concerns, and then butt out." What about other enjoyable things people like consuming, like heroin? That would be a VERY popular item if it were legal. It would create a fantastic new market too. It would add to GDP. Poppy farmers could make money. And people like it. Why don't we let the market determine how we handle heroin and have the government butt out?
The government does not handle its "war on drugs" well, but even a good policy on drugs recognizes that heroin is bad for you and doesn't just say "let the free market regulate it." Heroin kills people and detracts from the wellness of our society and so do certain foods in the quantities we eat them. Ban salt? No. But clearly when we let the free market regulate it, we end up with too much of it in far too many products. We end up in a place where companies are preying upon consumers, selling them diets that are not healthy. Diets that kill. No, you won't die from one hamburger. But I don't think any government official is trying to prevent you from eating one hamburger. They are trying to make sure that you aren't preyed upon by companies who would be content to feed you an entire diet of hamburgers - and fries and soda and Krispy Kreme donuts, etc.
Now, while I disagree strongly with Martosko, I also think the government is not handling this well. I think the government has totally 100% fallen into what Michael Pollan would call "nutritionism." They look at the health of food based on which nutrients it has in it. Does it have fat? What kind of fat? Calories? Sugar? Vitamins? And that determines whether the food is "good" or not to the U.S. government. But there's no measure in there of whether the food is real or not. Did the food come from a plant or an animal? And is it still in a recognizable enough form that we could name which plant or animal it came from? And did it require special chemical processing to create it? Does the nutrient value come entirely from fortification? Because processed white flour and sugar combined with palm oil (no trans fat!) and fortified with 100% of your recommended daily allowances of 11 essential vitamins and minerals is NOT real food. And until the government changes its tune to realize that, I believe that we won't have good policy, particularly with regard to the food allowed in school cafeterias.
Grist's Tom Laskawy agrees with me on this. He says:
Rather, the fundamental problem with Bloomberg's approach is to try to address health one nutrient at a time. Bloomberg and his health commissioner point to their "success" limiting trans fats as a model for the salt reduction policy. But trans fats, which are so potently bad for your health, are frankly more similar to a poison than a nutrient. While they do occur in trace amounts in nature, trans fats are just a manufactured food additive that play no role in human nutrition. Their presence in processed food is a by-product of food companies' search for inexpensive ingredients with a long shelf-life (i.e. partially hydrogenated vegetable oils). We had no business eating trans fats and never would have if not for the efforts of food processors and manufacturers.
Trans fat bans are thus the exception to the nutrition rule (and thus more like toxic substance regulations), not the model on which to base all future policies. Indeed, it's the nutrient-based guidelines that have gotten us in the pickle we're in now, and it's why you can eat Froot Loops and M&Ms for breakfast, a cheeseburger for lunch and 3 slices of pepperoni pizza for dinner and still stay safely within the USDA food pyramid.
Meanwhile this ongoing focus on nutrients just keeps the food companies happy as they get to roll out new products based on the latest food fad. To wit: according to the WaPo, we're now seeing processed food with fewer ingredients. Five ingredient ice cream (which Haagen Dasz has introduced) is great-who needed that carrageenan and guar gum anyway. And corn chips that just have three ingredients are, well, better than corn chips with 15 ingredients, most of which were unpronounceable. But I'm reminded of the Jay Leno-era Doritos tagline, i.e. "Crunch all you want. We'll make more." And that's exactly the issue right there.
He says New York missed the forest through the trees. I think they missed the forest through the salt shakers. |
