New York City Nannycrats Want to Ban Transfats
New York City is taking the concept of the nanny state to new levels.
NEW YORK (AP) — Three years after the city banned smoking in restaurants, health officials are talking about prohibiting something they say is almost as bad: artificial trans fatty acids.
The city health department unveiled a proposal Tuesday that would bar cooks at any of the city’s 24,600 food service establishments from using ingredients that contain the artery-clogging substance, commonly listed on food labels as partially hydrogenated oil.
Artificial trans fats are found in some shortenings, margarine and frying oils and turn up in foods from pie crusts to french fries to doughnuts.
Doctors agree that trans fats are unhealthy in nearly any amount, but a spokesman for the restaurant industry said he was stunned the city would seek to ban a legal ingredient found in millions of American kitchens.
“Labeling is one thing, but when they totally ban a product, it goes well beyond what we think is prudent and acceptable,” said Chuck Hunt, executive vice president of the city’s chapter of the New York State Restaurant Association.
There was a time when we were being told that margarine was healthier than butter. Now they say that transfats in margarine are bad for you, butter is better. What if they’d passed a law banning butter and forcing people to use margarine when they considered margarine the better choice? They would have forced a lot of people to eat what they are now calling poison.
On the Today Show this morning, Meridith Vieira, Matt Lauer and Ann Curry were discussing the proposed transfat ban. Meridith and Ann supported it because they they buy the current idea that they’re bad for our health. One of them noted that heart disease kills thousands of people each year. Matt said just have the restaurant post a sign like “transfats used here” and let individuals decide whether they want to eat there or not.
I was struck that the two women wanted to tell others what they can do with their own bodies. I have no doubt that they support a woman’s right to choose an abortion (which is lethal to millions of fetuses each year) but they don’t think adults should be allowed to make informed choices about what they eat.
If you want to understand why women are slowly losing their right to choose what to do with their bodies, look no further than their eagerness to take the same right away from others.
For the record I totally support a woman’s right to choose what they do with their own bodies. The difference is, I support the same liberty for all individuals. I do not see control over one’s own body as a right that is exclusive to women, but many women do.
There are other reasons why the government should stay out of the business of dictating what people may and may not eat:
- What if they’re wrong? Who pays for the damage they do? The taxpayers who are the people they claimed to be protecting?
- People are genetically unique. Universal solutions are never appropriate or rational for a population of individuals who are all genetically unique.
- There is no scientific evidence that certain individuals possess a “right” dictate what others do to their own bodies. Doctors who believe in such a right are not supported by scientific evidence.
- Depriving individuals of the option of learning to make their own rational choices turns that ability into a useless, unneeded appendage with no survival value. Without survival value, genes that support the ability to think rationally and responsibly about one’s own health will be wiped out of the human gene pool. That will be far more damaging to human beings than transfats or any other substance that rational people would choose to avoid. Just as certain substances can be poison to the body, certain ideas are poison to the mind, making it impossible to think rationally.
- When you provide people with factual information and they still make bad choices, they often kill themselves off, wiping their genes out of the gene pool and making the human species both healthier and more rational. That is basic evolution.
The fact that people have become so lazy about taking care of their own bodies and so ignorant of science is evidence that living under irrational forms of government has a detrimental impact on the population. When there is survival value to blindly accepting the rule of others, we create a population of ignorant slaves, which is exactly what those who love control want.
So-called scientists are pushing these ridiculous laws even when there is no scientific evidence that they have a right to do so. That puts their actions squarely in the realm of pseudoscience. When “scientists” believe in things that don’t exist and force those beliefs upon others, it is just as harmful as when religious people force their unsupported beliefs upon others.
| Go to Home - Most Recent Posts