New York City Bans Trans Fats
This is great news.
At the risk of having this blog veer dangerously off course, I wanted to give a shout out the white geek equivalent of a shout out (a w00t?) to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYC’s “activist health commissioner”, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden.
NYC is going to ban most trans fats from restaurants, including little restaurants like, oh I don’t know, McDonald’s.
This issue is dear to my heart because the way we’ve been operating up ’til now is completely fucking insane.
We know that trans fats cause heart attacks. That is non-disputed scientific fact. So why are foods containing trans fat still available in supermarkets? Is it alright to kill people if you do it real slow? Can you imagine what would happen if food companies were knowingly using an ingredient that was proven to cause cancer?
Trans fats cause thousands of unnecessary deaths every year. The stuff should be marked with a skull and crossbones symbol.
And what chaps my ass so sharply about this whole issue is that that food companies know all about the poisonous effects of trans fats. They’ve known for a long time.
For years the food companies have been coasting along, content with the knowledge that most people didn’t know that the stuff they were eating was killing them (people find it hard to be food science experts when they’re trying to raise kids and pay the mortgage and distracting stuff like that).
It’s only when governmental heath agencies here and in the U.S. passed legislation forcing disease food factories to start labeling the presence and amount of trans fats in their products that any of them started doing anything about it. And that’s not surprising really, when you consider that these big companies have a history of knowingly, willfully putting profit ahead of human health. (Kraft is owned by a tobacco company for fuck’s sake.)
Anyhow, bravo NYC. You are going to provide a powerful example for the rest of the world.
From the NYT piece, here’s the deal with trans fats:
Trans fats are the chemically modified food ingredients that raise levels of a particularly unhealthy form of cholesterol and have been squarely linked to heart disease. Long used as a substitute for saturated fats in baked goods, fried foods, salad dressings, margarine and other foods, trans fats also have a longer shelf life than other alternatives.
