The act of smoking tobacco and the consumption of trans fatty acids are in many ways analogous activities. Both are unequivocally bad for you. In small amounts, neither will do too much harm, yet if you wish to maintain absolute, optimal health, neither a cigarette nor a food item containing trans fat should ever touch your lips.
The dangers of smoking have been known for some time; the perils of trans fat are a more recent revelation. Both have come under the glare of increased governmental regulation in recent years. The city of Madison, to much publicity, enacted a smoking ban in all workplaces, including restaurants and bars, in 2005. Many cities and states around the country have done the same.
In December 2006, the New York Board of Health voted to ban artificial trans fat in all city restaurants. A handful of other municipalities and counties have enacted similar bans, while a few state-level bans are under consideration. The Madison City Council opted to pass a nonbinding resolution in July of this year encouraging local restaurants to discontinue the use of trans fat in their foods.
The flurry of regulations raises the question as to how much meddling the government should engage in on issues concerning individuals' health choices. The merits (or lack thereof) of the smoking ban have been covered at length in this newspaper, so let us now turn our attention specifically to the validity of banning trans fat.
There is certainly a strong argument to be made for the power of the free market in this matter. As consumers have become increasingly concerned about the prevalence of the artery-clogging substance, food chains have reacted by cutting back and, in some cases, eliminating trans fats from their menus. KFC, McDonald's, Taco Bell and Burger King (while still certainly not destinations of choice for the health-conscious) have done away with or at least pledged in the near future to get rid of trans fats from their food. The Walt Disney Company has announced its intention to eliminate trans fats from its theme parks by the end of the year.
The need for a trans fat ban is seemingly lessened further by the lack of collateral damage from their consumption. While a smoker subjects those around him to dirty air and a foul stench, nobody has ever suffered from second-hand partially hydrogenated soybean oil.
Yet regulations should not be quite so easily dismissed when dealing with trans fats. Markets operate best with sunshine. Trans fats, on the other hand, do their damage insidiously. They lurk in food without betraying their presence. Silent but deadly, you could say.
Take a cookie, for example. Common sense says it isn't particularly healthy for you — chances are it's packed with sugar, largely devoid of vitamins and high in fat. But can you tell, just by eating it, whether or not it contains trans fat? Some cookies have a lot, some a little and some none at all. To discern how much the particular cookie you're eating contains, you need to look at the label.
Contrast the cookie with a smoke-filled bar. When walking into a bar or restaurant, it is abundantly and immediately evident as to whether or not the establishment allows smoking. It is for this reason that smoking bans are, without question, poor public policy. They only prevent people from freely making a decision they are well equipped to make — whether to sit in a smoke-filled room or not.
Restaurant patrons can similarly make basic deductions about the healthiness of a menu item. They cannot, however, determine if a particular food contains trans fat. Otherwise healthy foods — or at least nutritionally neutral foods — can be marred by the presence of trans fat. For proof of that, scrutinize the labels of various packaged foods at the supermarket. It can be a surprising and highly enlightening experience.
As with smoking, an outright trans fat ban would be the wrong approach. People should be able to fill their lungs with smoke if they want to. People should be able to swim in a bathtub full of mayonnaise-covered grapes if that's what makes them happy. And people should certainly be able to consume trans fat if they so choose.
What's needed is disclosure. The Food and Drug Administration did this for packaged food products by requiring manufacturers to list trans fat content on their nutrition labels starting in 2006 (though a product can claim to be "trans fat free" if it contains .5 grams or less per serving, an unfortunate loophole).
Now it should be restaurants' turn. Madison's approach to trans fat is surprisingly and refreshingly level-headed, given its heavy-handedness on the smoking issue. Instead of banning restaurants from serving trans fat, the city council created the Madison Trans Fat Reduction Project as part of its July resolution. The project, which includes the University of Wisconsin student group Informed Consumers Equal Improved Health, aims to inform consumers about the dangers of trans fat and publicly recognizes restaurants that keep their menus trans fat-free. The group has already singled out 13 gold star winners.
If restaurants do not reduce their dependence on trans fat, regulations — though never a ban — would not be out of order. The concept of requiring restaurants to disclose caloric content on menus is starting to gain traction around the country. Mandating the disclosure of trans fat in restaurant food would be another option. Though such regulations must be crafted so as not to be overly cumbersome (requiring the information on the menu itself seems excessive, for instance), equipping diners with basic information about food options simply leads to more informed choices.
Because really, you are what you eat, and it's good to know yourself.
Ryan Masse ([email protected]) is a first-year law student.
