Jenn Martinelli Blogging in Boston

Dan wrote at 2006-12-28 09:50:

I have to point out a couple of things. First, they're not regulating what people can eat, they're regulating what people can feed to other people without their knowledge. That's an important distinction. New Yorkers can still buy their Crisco vegetable shortening if they want to and no one is going to arrest them.

Second, we're not talking about butter or cheese or some perfectly normal food that just happens to be bad for you. We're talking about an artificial food additive that has been shown to significantly increase the risk of death by heart disease (not to mention liver problems, etc.). What if it was a pesticide or a preservative that caused people to get cancer? Should they let them put that in food?

Ideologically, I would probably prefer that they just require people to give nutrition information rather than banning things outright, but in practice I think requiring small restaraunts to calculate nutrition information for all their meals is probably more intrusive than just making them change oils.

Jenn wrote at 2006-12-28 11:18:

I guess I would feel differently about carcinogens than fat, and maybe that's a misperception, but in my mind you should know if you're eating lots of fat that you may be signing yourself up for heart disease. This includes fried things. If you're buying something in a store that provides you with nutrition information, then it's your own fault. I guess you're right, that if you're eating out you may not know what contains trans fat and what doesn't per se, but you should know what is or isn't fried or what foods are likely to contain fat in general. While I guess it's possible that you could eat something that has trans fat in it without being aware that it does, it doesn't seem that likely to me that you would be unaware that it contained any fat at all, and so it's a decision you're making about whether to eat something fatty and "bad for you". It could be worse than you think if you don't think about trans fat, but it's certainly not good for you and you should be aware of it.

I guess I'm just sick of everyone trying to protect people so much in ways that seem to involve personal choices. If it affects other people that's one thing, but if my actions only affect me, I'd like the government to just let me decide what is or is not appropriate.

Dan wrote at 2007-01-06 10:38:

I don't disagree about the basic principle of not telling people what they should eat, but I think there's a lot of confusion surrounding these chemicals because they are, technically, fats and people are used to hearing that fat is bad for you, so they think this is the same thing. But butterfat, for example, isn't bad for you in the way that trans fats are bad for you, even though it's a "bad fat". It doesn't have as serious a negative effect on cholesterol levels and I don't know whether it ever becomes toxic to the liver in the same way. At any rate animal fats are natural and a normal part of the human diet.

Hydrogenation creates these weird chemical structures that don't exist in nature. Human beings have not evolved or adapted in any way to having these things in our diets. Therefore we should think of them as artificial chemicals rather than associating them with other fats.