Salt Police
This is from an article in the New York Times:
The last two times New York City's health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, stepped into the nutrition wars, he gave muscle to nationwide moves to ban trans fats and require posted calorie counts on restaurant menus. This time around, you could soon be hearing more about salt than you have in a long time.
The city isn't going after the seasoning people add at the table or in the kitchen. That makes up only about 11 percent of the salt people eat, Frieden says. His targets are packaged foods and mass-produced restaurant meals, which contribute 80 percent of the sodium in the average American diet. The prime suspects include cheese, breakfast cereals, bread, macaroni and noodle products, cake mixes, condiments and soups.
Just what we need: more food police. Some people just aren’t happy unless they are changing everyone elses’ lives.
“Changing” is the wrong word, Larry. They want to regulate everyone else’s life.
Given that many health care policy types are mad for evidence-based medicine, it would be nice to see the evidence suggesting that salt is a public health hazard significant enough to warrant attempting regulatory control of its use by people in normal health.
For a round-up of the (lack) of evidence see Junk Food Science at http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2007/04/salt-shaking-news.html.
[…] previously reported on plans by the nanny mayor and the nanny health commissioner in the nanny city of the nanny state […]