Also, the guy who tried to switch to canola probably didn’t make the smartest choice. It holds up well in certain kinds of cooking applications, not in others.

On the other hand, there IS a taste difference in foods cooked with large amounts of trans fats. I can taste them, and it puts me off my feed. I can eat things drenched in butter for hours and maybe feel over-full, but I never get the sense that something’s sort of bad about my food. I also don’t get the weird itchy feeling on my face — not like an allergic rash, but like my pores are secreting some nasty griminess — after eating non-hydrogenated fatty food.

(I’m avoiding overusing the term “trans fat”, because these molecular states occur naturally in small percentages in end-state cooked food, and that’s differentiated in my mind from using them in pure form intentionally.)

It’s been enough of an immediate problem that I’ve become rather careful in reading food labels for myself. Long-term health benefits are a concern of mine, but short-term are the ones that get the work done.

Declare, or ban, I don’t personally give a damn. Hydrogenated oils are a fad; they brought them in to replace butter and other oils, and they haven’t really been a part of the food source for that long.

I do think that they should be eliminated from the food source in the long run. For one, it might dis-associate eating from mortality somewhat. Because Barbara is right: they’re not bad because they make you fat, they’re bad because they make you sick.

For another, my partner recently visited her parents in a poor area and discovered that in poor-area supermarkets, EVERYTHING has hydrogenated oils — even the cans of beans. They’re used as filler. This sets off alarms for me; it is not okay to feed poor people cheap toxic food because you’ve got them in a corner.

the point of the ban, from what i understand, is that transfats are more dangerous than regular fats, not because of the amount of calories they contain, but because they have a greater effect on one’s cholesterol.

that is also why indoor smoking was banned in new york–not to save smokers from themselves, but to protect nonsmokers from secondhand smoke, with its concomitant carcinogens, that they did not choose to consume.

i think it boils down to something similar to a nuisance argument–if the music is so loud you can’t sleep, if the smoke is so thick it affects your health, then the law has a right to intervene.

6) Banning trans fats in restaurants, but not in grocery stores, doesn’t make sense. I guess the supermarket lobby is more powerful than the fast-food and donut lobby.

No, it’s just that the NYC Board of Health doesn’t have jurisdiction over food sold in supermarkets.

The feds regulate packaged food, and they’ve required manufacturers to disclose trans fat content for some time now. Interestingly, some manufacturers that had maintained that they couldn’t possibly do without trans fats in their packaged foods (Oreos being one example) suddenly decided that they could after all once they were required to disclose trans fats on the labels.

Trans fats are an industrial byproduct that restaurants and food manufacturers did without for a very long time. The reason for switching to trans fats had a lot to do with concerns over saturated fats, but the reason they remain popular is that they have a longer shelf life and are cheaper than the oils that had been used previously.

Seriously, though, while I’m all for public health, would this effort be better spent educating people and increasing transparency so they can make better, informed choices about their nutrition? There’s always some panic food to recoil from or fad thing to gorge on, and if we could just, say, stress moderation and balanced meals and make whole or fresh ingredients more available to more people, we wouldn’t have to bother with all this nonsense–or the diet industry, or the talking heads, or the articles on the “obesity epidemic,” or the making people crazy with this or that new–oh. Oh I see. Hm.

I thought libertarians were all about fully-informed persons making choices freely–and you can’t make intelligent choices in the absence of information. Maybe I’m overly libertarian myself, but it seems to me that if you are going to throw a tantrum because you are required to tell your customers what you’re selling them, you shouldn’t be running a business.

2) On the other hand, if this law really saves 500 lives a year (as ban proponents claim), I’m enough of a liberal to think that’s worth a tiny loss in freedom. But I’m skeptical about the 500 lives a year claim; I haven’t been able to find out how that figure was derived.

If banning abortions after the 34th week saved 500 healthy babies a year, would you be in favor of the ban?

There are plenty of things that could be banned that would save lives but I believe that people have to make their own choices concerning what they eat: the food should be clearly labeled if it contains trans-fat but banning it is going too far, IMO.

Thus, while banning cigarettes will deprive people of the choice to smoke- something it is very sensible to defend despite the lives it would save- banning transfats will just slightly change the eating experince. Thats not something I am willing to see people die for.

Seriously, I wish people would get off their high horse about the obesity in america problem. Is it an issue? maybe. Not really at the top of my social problems list though…

But I in no way support the ban. I know it’s terribly bad for you, but people do destructive things to themselves all the time. Banning trans fat won’t make that much of a difference.