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Nanny State of the Week: FDA bans trans-fats

Monday, June 22, 2015 15:44

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(Before It's News)

TND Guest Contributor: Eric Boehm |

Enjoy your brownies, donuts and other shrink-wrapped snacks while they last.

That’s right, the federal government is coming for your stash of Hot Pockets, popcorn and Ding-Dongs.

The federal Food and Drug Administration approved new rules last week that will effectively ban trans fats within three years, forever changing the face of snacking and fast food. Specifically, the FDA is going after partially hydrogenated oils, the main ingredient in the trans fats that liter the diets of many Americans.

Food companies have until 2018 to remove the oils from their products.

But does the government have the power to force people to eat healthy?

The FDA is charged, in part, with protecting Americans from food that is unsafe to eat. They inspect meat, for example, to make sure we’re not going to get mad cow disease.

The agency is now expanding that role to include trans fats, which the FDA has determined to be “no longer safe for use in food.”

But there’s a difference between government regulations that enforce safety and those that enforce good health, says Daren Bakst, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

“The agency is trying to use its power to go after ‘unhealthy’ ingredients, not ‘unsafe’ ingredients,” he told U.S. News and World Report. “People can make voluntary and informed decisions regarding what food they choose to eat. Sometimes those decisions aren’t going to be consistent with the bureaucrats’ views on what people should eat.”

In other words, if it’s okay to eat one Twinkie, it should be okay — in the eyes of the government, if not your mother — to eat the entire pack. That’s because the ingredients are safe, even if they are woefully unhealthy.

It’s a blurry line, to be sure: at some point, eating a six-pack of mini donuts with every meal probably crosses over from being unhealthy to being actually hazardous. The FDA is essentially arguing the line doesn’t exist at all.

These styles of government regulations remove human agency from the equation. They assume people are unable to make the right choices.

But when it comes to food, too often it seems like we Americans can’t.

The FDA says trans fats are part of the reason why Americans have a deserved reputation for being obese and cause as many as 20,000 heart attacks each year.

In one sense, we only have ourselves to blame for this latest intrusion by the federal government into our grocery stores, fast food restaurants and pantries.

We couldn’t eat in moderation. We couldn’t be happy with fried chicken on a bun, no, we demanded a sandwich made of fried chicken, bacon and cheese.

While we were gorging ourselves, we happily passed the buck to someone else to pay for the consequences. We stopped worrying about what we were eating and stopped accepting the consequences of our diets.

We abdicated personal responsibility as our waistlines grew.

If health care costs are socialized (and they were already well on their way to being socialized before the Affordable Care Act), then it was only a matter of time before the state came after the cause of so many health problems. A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the taxpayer-funded health care system, as they say.

Getting rid of trans-fats will save between $117 billion and $220 billion over 20 years, according to projections from the American Public Health Association.

Will it save Americans from bad diets? Bakst says it might not, because every ban comes with the specter of unintended consequences.

“Consumers could choose different foods to eat as a result of reformulation making the products less palatable —trans fat improves taste, texture, and increases shelf life, among other benefits that the FDA ignores,” he wrote last year as the FDA was first considering the ban. “The replacement products consumed by individuals could lead to an overall diet that is worse than their current diet.”

The only real solution for Americans’ diet and health problems: better choices being made by individuals, not being forced by the government.

But the Nanny State rarely rises without cause, and rarely grows spontaneously. The rejection of personal responsibility leaves a vacuum that can be, and is, filled with bureaucrats pushing paper and red tape.

If you can’t sometimes choose to say “no” to the donuts, the government will just remove the choice.

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Eric Boehm is a reporter for Watchdog.org and former bureau chief for Pennsylvania Independent. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he enjoys great weather and low taxes while writing about state governments, pensions, labor issues and economic/civil liberty. Previously, he worked for more than three years in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, covering Pennsylvania state politics and occasionally sneaking across the border to Delaware to buy six-packs of beer. He has also lived (in order of desirability) in Brussels, Belgium, Pennsburg, Pa., Fairfield, Conn., and Rochester, N.Y. His work has appeared in Reason Magazine, National Review Online, The Freeman Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Examiner and elsewhere. He received a bachelor’s degree from Fairfield University in 2009, but he refuses to hang on his wall until his student loans are fully paid off sometime in the mid-2020s. When he steps away from the computer, he enjoys drinking craft beers in classy bars, cheering for an eclectic mix of favorite sports teams (mostly based in Philadelphia) and traveling to new places.

Watchdog.org is an online news organization that publishes articles by independent journalists covering state-specific and local government activity. The program began in September 2009, a project of Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to promoting new media journalism. This article is reprinted with permission.