The government is going to ban trans fats.

The government is going to ban trans fats. | PJ Tatler
The nanny state’s death star agency, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, is getting ready to ban trans fats.

If you enjoy donuts, movie popcorn, pie crust or french fries (to name a few) you’d better movie quickly before the jack boot of government food regulation sucks as much joy as possible from the American food palette.

Writes Politico, “The Obama administration is expected to all but ban trans fat in a final ruling that could drop as soon as next week, killing most uses of an ingredient that has been put in everything from frozen pizza to Reese’s Pieces but since deemed harmful to human health...”

Peter Suderman at Reason sums it up nicely.

The FDA and its supporters argue that trans fat restrictions are necessary as a health measure following a 2013 proposal that trans fats not be “generally recognized as safe.” This is more than a little bit ironic given that for decades, trans fats were pushed by the public health community as a healthier alternative to saturated fats. Indeed, the food industry shifted to trans fats through the 1980s and 1990s in part because of a requirement that food products with saturated fat be labeled—a requirement which, of course, was put in place by the FDA.

At least indirectly, then, FDA food regulations helped make the use of trans fats more common—yet now the agency is trying to ban the same fats its earlier work likely have encouraged. Meanwhile, itincreasingly seems clear that the old public health wisdom about the evils of saturated fats was off-base, and that the once-evil saturated fats aren’t nearly as bad as previously thought...