Last month our national nannies hard-working officials who have our best interest at heart, officially banned trans fat. Manufactures looking to use trans fat in their products will have to seek special permission to use trans fats.
As I wrote last December, the trans fat ban is not just an unconstitutional infringement on our liberates, it is also unnecessary:
This is because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) -- the same folks that prevent us from drinking raw milk and prevent terminally ill patients from having access to the only treatments that may save their lives -- are currently putting the finishing touches on a regulation eliminating any traces of partially hydrogenated oils ("trans fat") from our foods. By forbidding the use of any trans-fat, the FDA will effectively make the use of sprinkles, those tasty little flavored candies put on top of ice cream and doughnuts, illegal.
While it is probably not a good idea to make trans-fat a center of our diets, the federal government has no constitutional or moral authority to tell Americans what we can and cannot eat. In any case, Americans have been reducing the amount of trans fat in our diets, and a little bit of trans fat is not harmful. But this does not matter to our national nannies at the FDA; they know better than we do, and they have decided any trans fat is bad for us -- so goodbye trans fat.
David Harsayni at Reason magazine agrees the trans fat ban in the FDA's desire to expand their power:
Most people, of course, don't really care whether partially hydrogenated oils fall out of the food supply. What they do care about are the unremitting efforts of politicians to micromanage their lives. Once consumers heard about the risks associated with trans fats, they began avoiding them, and businesses consequently stopped using them as much. Between 1980 and 2009, Americans' consumption of trans fats dropped by about a third (as did our intake of saturated fats). The FDA claims that "trans fat intake among American consumers has declined from 4.6 grams per day in 2003 to about 1 gram per day in 2012."
As Baylen Linnekin, the founder of the Keep Food Legal Foundation, points out, the American Heart Association has suggested that Americans consume "less than 2 grams of trans fats a day." So, he argues, "if the FDA and AHA are correct, then current consumption levels—prior to and without any ban —are well within safe levels."
Even with the decline, the FDA banned trans fats. Left-wing intrusions—small and large—follow a similar trajectory. First come reasonable calls for increased transparency (labeling regulations). If the public remains pigheaded, it's time to scare you (chilling studies and over-the-top predictions). If that doesn't work, leftists will discourage you (higher taxes and more regulations). And finally, they'll force you (banning or mandating) to comply.
With all this, we should not forget the favorite weapon of do-gooders: lawsuits. Government unleashes the lawyers to do their work, punishing companies that fail to comply, even ahead of the deadline. The usual collection of class action attorneys and professional bullies sue food companies that continue to use trans fats for various financial reasons—for example, taste and increased shelf life.
In today's world, the idea that government could dictate, say, what sort of sexual relationships a person can indulge in—whether they are bad for one's health or even a public risk—would seem preposterous. Even banning pot is beginning to be regarded as useless intrusion by millions. Yet allowing government to decide what we eat (or what our kids eat) is now considered a moral imperative.
After years of pressure from trial attorneys and junk-science public interest groups, the Obama administration has followed through with its pledge to ban what is—in the amounts most Americans ingest—a benign ingredient. But even if it's not, we have labels for a reason. It's unlikely the ban will do anything but create precedents that allow further intrusions into how and what we eat. Which is precisely the point.
Read the whole column here.
And for more on the ban see Breitbart.
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PDFTags: FDA, nanny state