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(This article is prima facie evidence in favor of the often demeaned idea of the "slippery slope." There is a slippery slope, and it operates exactly like you'd expect it to.
So, as I've asked before, what is to stop government from making all sorts of other decisions about your life, your diet, your habits, or even your IDEOLOGY? What mechanism is there that will prevent government from intervening in your life and personal choices at will?
Elections, you say? We've had many elections, and the problem gets worse. The Constitution? What, that quaint old document from a bygone era? Who believes that thing except for rightwing extremist nutjobs? The courts, perhaps? It is the courts that regularly overturn the will of the people when expressed via elections.
No, the first time government was allowed to assume power not granted to it by the Constitution was the beginning of the end of this great republic. That toothpaste is out of the tube.
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Los Angeles Times
Now that the Food and Drug Administration has moved to banish most trans fats from the nation’s diet, some public health advocates are hopeful that two other beloved ingredients — sugar and salt — will be subject to similar scrutiny.
“Sodium is next,” said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a Harvard University epidemiologist and cardiologist at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. (This man is highly credentialed and rather brilliant. However, he shouldn't be put in charge of anything, especially in government. He may have all sorts of genius ideas about what is wrong with what we eat, but no one should give this man power to implement them. The fact that his POLITICAL opinions are given weight is a huge problem. He needs to be kept in his professional discipline and out of politics.)
In acting to remove artificial trans fats from the food supply, Mozaffarian said, the FDA has acknowledged a scientific consensus that they are hazardous to the public’s health. The same case could be said about excess dietary sodium, and that should be an equally powerful prod to FDA action, he said. (And the same could be said for hang gliding, scuba diving, driving faster than 5 mph, walking and chewing gum at the same time. That does NOT give government the right to intervene into peoples' private lives and private choices.)
Tom Neltner, an analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C., said that sugar, too, may become a target in the wake of Thursday’s FDA action.
In regulating food additives, the FDA has historically focused on removing chemicals that cause death and acute injury, Neltner said. Now the agency has demonstrated that it’s ready to step in when a food additive contributes to chronic diseases that kill many people slowly. (Now the agency has demonstrated that there is no boundary to the power it has to tell people what they can and cannot eat, what they have to do, how much they are to exercise, and whether or not doughnuts should be legal. Try to stop them, see how well that goes.)
“I hope this presages a new willingness to regulate with an eye to these chronic illnesses,” Neltner said. (A willingness to regulate? This man scares me.)
Even compared with saturated fat — a frequent fellow traveler — trans fatty acid is a bad actor, knocking the blood’s lipid levels into dangerous territory on two fronts. Not only does it raise levels of LDL cholesterol, the bad kind; trans fat consumption depresses levels of HDL cholesterol, which is considered protective against heart disease.
Harvard University public health professor Walter Willett and colleagues estimated in 1994 that consumption of trans fatty acids caused 30,000 Americans to die prematurely of coronary heart disease each year. Other estimates have soared as high as 100,000 premature deaths per year. (Yeah, yeah, it's bad stuff. But that does not give government power to regulate it.)
In a more recent update of trans fat’s toll, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reckoned that eliminating the remaining trans fat from American diets would prevent the premature cardiovascular deaths of 7,000 Americans and head off three times as many nonfatal heart attacks. (And how many lives would be saved if we banned cars? How about water skiing? Camp fires? All you can eat buffets? Say, why don't we just ban everything that might possibly increase the risk of living, because living riskless lives is certainly better than taking a risk and maybe getting injured or dying. That is a choice government should take away from us, don't you think?)
In an interview Thursday, Willett cautioned that regulating sodium and sugar as additives would hardly be as easy as making a decision to ban trans fats.
While trans fats have no nutritional value, salt is an essential nutrient. And sugar, when consumed at reasonable levels, is not harmful, he said. If it is to act on mounting scientific concern about dietary sodium and sugar, the FDA will have to rethink the assumption that an additive it considers to be as safe “is safe in any amount,” Willett said.
The FDA’s regulation of food additives has come under growing criticism in recent years, and again on Thursday with the release of a three-year assessment of the FDA’s program by the Pew Charitable Trusts.
As the number and variety of substances added to food in the United States has exploded, the agency’s resources — as well as its regulatory powers under the 1958 Food Additives Amendment — have been overwhelmed, the Pew report concluded.
The FDA has the legal authority to scrutinize any new chemicals before they are added to food and are introduced to the market, and to approve or deny their use. But in 1997, the agency acknowledged it was sitting on an overwhelming backlog of requests, and announced that it would accept voluntary notifications of planned additive use from food manufacturers.
That policy would allow a food company pondering use of a new chemical in its product to make the case that the proposed additive was “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. Unless the FDA challenged the company’s argument, the company would then be free to use the additive as it saw fit.
The review by Pew’s experts found that many manufacturers of foods and food additives have bypassed the voluntary notification process altogether. The result, the report estimates that about 1,000 new chemicals have been introduced into the U.S. food supply without any FDA oversight at all. (Oh, but the FDA certainly has time to ban trans fats, sugar, and salt? Whaaa?)
And it’s not often that the FDA kicks a food additive off the list of edibles that are “generally recognized as safe,” as it did Thursday with artificial trans fats. The agency last did so three years ago, when it warned three makers of alcoholic beverages that it considered caffeine an “unsafe food additive” when mixed with alcohol and ordered their products off the market.
The last wholesale removal of an additive was in 1969, when the agency took cyclamate — a potent artificial sweetener — off the GRAS list. That decision was prompted by a 1966 study that found cyclamate increased the risk of bladder cancer, liver damage and birth defects in rats. Subsequent research found that cyclamate’s health dangers do not extend to humans, and in 1982 there was a request to reinstate the sweetener to the GRAS list. The FDA said Thursday that the request is “not actively being considered.”
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