Hey, who knows -- if every citizen can learn to think critically, they may even start to vote for representatives who spend their time doing something more meaningful that trying to treat us all like infantile idiots. Ya think?
One Cook Too Many
By John Tierney
The New York Times
In the annals of medicine, New York’s health commissioner deserves to be remembered as The Doctor Who Mistook His Diploma for a Hat. After a career in public health — his résumé lists previous jobs like epidemiologist, clinician and “community organizer” — Thomas Frieden decided he was entitled to wear a chef’s toque.
He tried persuading the city’s restaurants that their food would taste the same if they got rid of cooking oil and other substances with trans fatty acids, but most of the cooks stubbornly preferred to trust their customers’ taste buds. If you’ve compared a trans-fat McDonald’s French fry with Wendy’s trans-skinny version, you will understand the customers’ reaction.
Now that persuasion has failed, Frieden wants to force the restaurant cooks in New York to follow his recipe — and soon, he hopes, the rest of America will have to go along too. He justifies his fiat by comparing it to New York City’s pioneering ban of lead paint a few decades ago. But the analogy just shows that his understanding of epidemiology and public-health policy isn’t much better than his taste in French fries.
Most scientists — at least the ones not serving under Mayor Michael Bloomberg — do not regard McDonald’s French fries the way they regard lead paint. Lead has long been recognized as a potent poison, and taking it out of paint was undeniably good for people’s health. But the campaign to take trans fat out of French fries might not do any good, and it might even do harm.
For all the rhetoric against trans fats, they’re not worse for you than the old-fashioned saturated fats in lard and butter and various cooking oils. As Gina Kolata reported in The Times last year, the scientific consensus from the National Academy of Sciences, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute, and the Food and Drug Administration is that trans fats are on a par with saturated fats.
A few researchers do believe trans fats are worse, but the evidence is too weak and contradictory to justify new public policies (particularly considering how often researchers have changed their minds in the past about what’s healthy). David Kritchevsky of the Wistar Institute, an independent nonprofit research center, calls trans fat the “panic du jour.”
“The New York policy is an overreaction,” he told me. “I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat trans fat, but it’s nothing I’d go out of my way to avoid. It’s essentially another saturated fat.”
Food companies and restaurants voluntarily switched to trans fats to appease consumers and food activists worried about saturated fats. Now that those same activists have made trans fat the new bogeyman, restaurant chains and food companies are again looking to appeal to their customers with healthier alternatives — and when they find them, they’ll switch again voluntarily, without any legal compulsion from New York.
But if New York arbitrarily imposed a deadline, the simplest way to comply would be to go back to using saturated fats. The food wouldn’t be any healthier, but it would sound more virtuous after the grandstanding by Bloomberg and his health commissioner about their heroic reduction of trans fats. So New Yorkers could well decide that it was safe to eat extra fries and doughnuts and cheesecake, which would just increase their risk of heart disease.
And then what would the First Chef do? Ban New York pizza and cheesecake? That sounds ridiculous now, but if you’re determined to improve people’s diets, saturated fats are a more logical problem to address than trans fats because we consume a lot more of them.
You can make a case for a law requiring restaurants to tell people what’s in their food. But Frieden’s edict goes well beyond that — and well beyond past public-health measures like the bans on lead paint and smoking in restaurants. This is the biggest step yet in turning the Big Apple into the Big Nanny.
Those previous bans were justified as public-health measures to protect innocent victims from hazards created by others: the smoke coming from other people’s cigarettes, the lead chips falling from walls that had been painted years or decades earlier by someone else.
But if New Yorkers consume trans fat at McDonald’s or Chinese restaurants, it’s because they ordered it themselves. Telling them what kind of fat they’re buying might be useful. But they’re perfectly capable of figuring out what to eat. Chef Frieden can leave the ordering to them.
Photo credit: John Tierney. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
Technorati tags: John Tierney, New York Times, education, restaurants, food, oils, fats, medicine, health, politics, politicians, New York, news, commentary, op ed
No comments:
Post a Comment