Save Lives: Bring Back Trans Fats!

Today The New York Times reports that obesity increases a person's chances of surviving various diseases:

Linking, for the first time, causes of death to specific weights, they report that overweight people have a lower death rate because they are much less likely to die from a grab bag of diseases that includes Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, infections and lung disease. And that lower risk is not counteracted by increased risks of dying from any other disease, including cancer, diabetes or heart disease.

As a consequence, the group from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute reports, there were more than 100,000 fewer deaths among the overweight in 2004, the most recent year for which data were available, than would have expected if those people had been of normal weight.

Their paper is published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers also confirmed that obese people and people whose weights are below normal have higher death rates than people of normal weight. But, when they asked why, they found that the reasons were different for the different weight categories.

Wouldn't it be ironic if New York City's chief of the food police, Dr. Thomas Frieden, was actually responsible for increased mortality rates owing to his ban on trans-fats?

The Nanny Inquisition

The crusade continues, The New York Times reports:

Moonshine is the kind of cozy, lived-in Brooklyn bar that allowed customers to bring dogs inside and meat for the grill outside, both of which, it would come to learn, are against New York City health department regulations. But no one foresaw one violation uncovered during a recent surprise inspection of the Red Hook tavern.

It was tucked within the array of more common infractions on the inspectors’ forms for which Moonshine was cited: the grills, the “live dog” in the bar, fruit flies and “7 mice excreta” in the basement. If widely enforced, it is not an exaggeration to say that the rule would radically change the way thousands of bartenders do one small but vital part of their job every single day.

“A male worker observed having bare-hand contact with one slice of ready-to-eat lime while placing on top of beer bottle for patron in bar,” the citation, dated Oct. 9, states. Bare-hand contact? How else is a bartender supposed to get a ready-to-eat lime slice into a bottle of Corona for a patron? According to the health department, there are two solutions.

Plastic gloves or tongs.

In other words, every time a bartender in New York City puts a lime slice in that Corona with bare hands, he or she is breaking the law. ...

An informal survey of several bartenders on whether they use gloves or tongs when garnishing beer bottles was met with incredulity, ridicule and disdain. But when asked to perform this alien ritual, they did their best with the tongs, gripping the little wedges and guiding them into the bottles. Some fumbled, while others took to it like surgeons performing a transplant. None of them seemed happy with the thought of doing it every day.

The first stop was Smith & Wollensky, the revered brass-rail bar and steakhouse in Midtown where the staff wears sharp white coats. Patrick Ford, a bartender for 35 of his 53 years, was standing behind the polished bar amid gleaming bottles on a busy Tuesday night as he considered how to legally garnish a beer.

“I won’t wear gloves,” he said, his tall frame so thin it seemed his white coat was still on a hanger. “It’s not a doctor’s office. It’s a saloon.”

He fished out a Corona and looked around. “We don’t have tongs,” he said. “I’ll use a fork.”

He speared a little wedge of lime and walked past several amused regular customers, toward a waiting Corona. In his coat, holding the fruit before him, he looked like a mad scientist with a laboratory specimen. The lime addressed the lip of the beer bottle with uncertainty, but when Mr. Ford removed the fork, it stuck there. Men cheered.

“Hey, Patty,” one man bellowed. “Give me a Corona over here! Be sure to use a fork!”

While putting lime in beer borders on criminal, I believe the surgeon general recommends that anyone who would ban the practice be kept at least 100 yards away from any position of authority. It's just safer for everyone.

Selective Health Paternalism

From today's Best of the Web:

The Associated Press reports, "[San Francisco] health officials took steps Thursday toward opening the nation's first legal safe-injection room, where addicts could shoot up heroin, cocaine and other drugs under the supervision of nurses."

Meanwhile in Portland, Maine, the AP reports that "school officials on Thursday defended a decision to allow children as young as 11 to obtain birth-control pills at a middle-school health center."

In both San Francisco and Portland, however, smoking in bars is strictly prohibited. It's bad for your health, after all.

Meanwhile, in other health news:

-- Hillary Clinton makes fun of Americans for being fat.

-- New York City's Health Department will be visiting homes in Harlem to ensure nobody is smoking around children.

Gotham's Butter Cops Run Wild

The first fines in New York City have been issued for illegal possession of margarine. The so-called grace period, where restaurants received warnings as opposed to fines for use of trans fats, expired September 30th. From Oct. 1 through Oct. 5, 20 restaurants received trans-fats citations -- most for possession.

The Post reports:

The fines ranged from $200 to $2,000, and all the restaurant owners are entitled to challenge the summonses at hearings.

Nearly all of the ticketed eateries were cited for using trans-fat-laden margarine.

Only one, Ballato on East Houston Street, which has hosted the likes of Sophia Loren, Roberto Benigni and Daniel Day-Lewis, was cited for using oils that lacked proper labels about the trans-fat content.

In other words, it's now illegal to possess unlabeled containers of oil. So much for those exotic, high-end olive oils retailed in ornate bottles -- too much work for the food cops to determine whether the law is being broken.

Owner Emilio Vitolo said he'll fight the summons because the oil in question was peanut oil -- one that doesn't contain the offending fats. He insisted that he never uses trans fats in preparing his meals.

Workers at nearly every restaurant contacted by The Post said the infractions were for stray containers of spreads or oils that hadn't been tossed out -- and they insisted their cooking is trans-fat-free.

"I didn't know [the new rules] applied to bakeries as of yet," said Rajandra Mahase, owner of Little Guyana Bake Shop in Queens.

That's also news to the Health Department -- from a recent press release: "This first phase of the regulation applies to oils, shortening and margarines used for frying and as spreads. It does not apply to baked goods or prepared foods, or to oils used to deep-fry dough or cake batter. Those products are covered by the second phase of the initiative, which takes effect on July 1, 2008."

And all this while the science behind the ban is dubious at best.

Dr. Frieden, Call Your Office

New York City may have already sicced its food cops on anyone using trans-fats, but according to a new report, that may have been premature. John Tierney reports in yesterday's New York Times:

In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. Alluding to his office’s famous 1964 report on the perils of smoking, Dr. Koop announced that the American diet was a problem of “comparable” magnitude, chiefly because of the high-fat foods that were causing coronary heart disease and other deadly ailments.

He introduced his report with these words: “The depth of the science base underlying its findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964.”

That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book meticulously debunking diet myths, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” (Knopf, 2007). The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros.

Read the whole thing. It's a fascinating take on how one myth can cascade into conventional wisdom. This seems to be exactly what's happened with fears of secondhand smoke.

Picture of the Day

Fact of the Day: It's possible to smoke, drink AND eat trans fats, while still living a long, healthy, happy life. One-hundred-year-old Winnie Langley is case in point.

(Hat tip to Karol)

'The French fries look like they've been standing on a steam table for an hour'

So says William Gounaris, owner of the Queens restaurant Brooks 1890, in regards to how New York City's newly-effective ban on trans fats has affected his eatery's fries, as reported in today's Wall Street Journal:

Fried chicken doesn't get as crispy in the new oil, Mr. Gounaris complains, and the fries are pale and limp.

Patrons used to slather their baked potatoes and corn on the cob with margarine from a four-ounce tub at Dougie's Bar-B-Que & Grill in Brooklyn, one of a six-unit kosher restaurant chain in New York and New Jersey. By law, the restaurant, where huge portions are the norm, can now only provide petite, foil-wrapped portions of margarine. Customers "think we're making fun of them," says co-owner Barbara Landau, who says she's paying 20 percent more for kosher-certified, nondairy, trans-fat free oils and fats. [...]

The city's roughly 350 kosher restaurants have had a particularly hard time due to the prohibition on meat and dairy products being made or consumed together. "Margarine is a major staple in the kosher industry," says Yoel Schonfeld, a rabbinic coordinator for the Orthodox Union, a large, kosher-supervising agency based in New York.

The trans-fat ban boils down to this: fried food remains unhealthy, it now just tastes worse and costs more.

'Bad Habits Fuel Longevity'

Perhaps Mayor Bloomberg and his health czar, Thomas Frieden, can hire Zhang Shuqing to head up a new outreach program. China Daily explains:

Zhang Shuqing, a centenarian in Pixian, Sichuan, has his own secret for long life - smoking every day and drinking liquor after every meal.

Zhang, whose daughter died eight years ago, turned 100 on May 7. He lives with his nephew Zhang Chenggui.

Zhang senior said he started smoking and drinking strong liquor when he was in his early 20s. Since then, he has smoked every day and taken a drink with every meal.

According to his grandson Xu, Zhang has consumed 15 tons of liquor and more than a ton of tobacco in his lifetime.

Zhang, who is in good health, has a huge appetite, with a standard meal comprising two chicken legs, a bowl of steamed pork fat and glutinous rice, vegetables and fruit. And he eats the lot in less than 20 minutes.

(Via Fark)

Frieden's Tax Hikes

"THE city's Ministry of Culinary Righteousness struck again yesterday, shutting popular Park Avenue South eatery Les Halles for health-code violations including 'conditions conducive to rodents' -- although there were no actual rodents," The Post's Steve Cuozzo reports.

The question that TV-loving Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden should answer is: Does his face turn red in the privacy of his own mirror?

The city's transparent campaign to cleanse itself of the recent KFC-Taco Bell rat stench is bad business in a town where eateries are already besieged by food police who dictate the oils in which french fries can be cooked.

Two months ago, rats were photographed cavorting through a KFC-Taco Bell the day after an inspector found nothing wrong.

Frieden was stung up the wazoo by public and press outrage. Ever since that embarrassment, his food cops have been closing places at three times the previous rate.

And not for entirely just reasons:

Many violations criteria are useless for safeguarding customers' health - like a missing "no spitting" sign or a jar of olives left on the floor, as happened at Coffee Shop.

The city denies targeting the well-known places, saying each posed "an immediate threat to public" health like others closed.

But as Frieden should know, if it looks like a rat and it smells like a rat - it's a rat.

The Neighborhood Retail Alliance's Richard Lipsky adds an important point:

The regulatory jihad is costing local eateries close to $30 million a year, and the decision to force calorie posting will cost an additional $46 million. Very little of the department's activities has any good impact on protecting the health of New Yorkers. It does, however, directly imperil the health of the city's restaurants, a sector that employs hundreds of thousands of our folks. Just another reason why the expansion of government often means trouble for the industrious among us -- and the average citizens who depend on their enterprise.

Herein lies the greatest problem with the city's Health Dept. Policies' actual effects on businesses are never considered. The "menu mandate," which requires many city restaurants to post calorie contents next to menu items in the same type-size, is essentially a tax increase that has a side-effect of altering city menus.

Like the circumcision campaign, there's no scientific data suggesting it will achieve the desired result. Therefore, its one, certifiable impact -- increasing the cost of business -- should be what attracts the greatest attention.

Frieden Wants Your Foreskin!

The New York Times reports:

In the United States, “New York City remains the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic,” Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner, said in an interview. Referring to H.I.V., he said, “In some subpopulations, you have 10 to 20 percent prevalence rates, just as they do in parts of Africa.”

His department has started asking some community groups and gay rights organizations to discuss circumcision with their members, and has asked the Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs city hospitals and clinics, to perform the procedure at no charge for men without health insurance. ...

No spontaneous outcry for circumcision has arisen in New York, Dr. Frieden conceded.

“This is not something that has a lot of buzz,” he said.

But he added that even 1,000 circumcisions in the right subgroups might slow the spread of AIDS.

You know what else might discourage the spread of AIDS? Not promoting sex with strangers.

Interestingly, though, Frieden's latest campaign has no actual scientific grounding, as he himself concedes:

In three recent clinical trials in Africa, circumcision was shown to lower a man’s risk of contracting the virus from heterosexual sex by about 60 percent. On March 28, the World Health Organization officially recommended that countries adopt the procedure as part of their AIDS prevention plans. ...

The studies, done in Uganda, Kenya and South Africa, enrolled men who said they had sex with women, while New York’s highest-risk groups are men who have sex with men, men who inject drugs and people who have sex with those men.

Nonetheless, Dr. Frieden said, it is logical to assume that circumcision would offer protection in some types of gay sex.

A man’s risk from performing penetrative anal sex is about the same as his risk from vaginal sex, Dr. Frieden said, so circumcision would presumably confer the same protection as it did in the African trials.

The risk from receptive anal sex is five times higher, he said, and circumcision would obviously not protect those men. Oral sex is much less risky.

From extrapolation, to projection, to social policy. So runs the mind of Dr. Frieden.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports this latest Frieden adventure may be too much even for the famously maternal Mayor Bloomberg.

Dr. Frieden Redefining Hip

The Connoisseur of Cool, city health czar Dr. Tom Frieden, says the (supposed) decline in smoking among city women reflects changing attitudes, The New York Post reports:

"Women are taking charge of their health," said Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden.

"It may reflect that smoking is less and less cool. Most people don't want to smoke," Frieden told The Post.

Which brings to mind just one question.

On matters of what's "cool," who are you going to trust?

Him?

Or these guys?


























































































UPDATE: Mom e-mails: "I don't think I'd use a picture of Sammy Davis in your smoking thing as he died a very painful death due to his smoking--throat cancer. Maybe you could use Bogart. Oops, no. He died of esophageal cancer because of smoking. How about Yul Brenner? Nope, lung cancer because of . . . oh nevermind. (It's a mother thing.)"

Frieden Fries

Meet Dr. Tom Frieden, the man with the power to control the personal lives of New Yorkers. In his short stint as the city's health overlord, Frieden has banned smoking in private dining areas, detained TB patients for refusing treatment, created a monitoring system to track diabetes patients like the endangered Cochabamba Mountain-finch (and, unlike the Mountain-finch, without their knowledge), released dire warnings on the effects of secondhand smoke on pets, enabled health officials to look into the medical records of AIDS patients, banned the use of trans fats, and -- oh yes -- he's just getting warmed up. As profiled in this week's New York Magazine, Frieden is a messianic health missionary who won't quit until mortality, too, is banned. But, unlike Frieden and his co-elitist-in-chief, Mayor Bloomberg, not everyone shares this obsession with living forever ...

This is hard for someone like Frieden to accept. His basic philosophy is that each time a New Yorker dies a premature death from a preventable disease, he has failed. “Whenever he sees anybody smoking in New York City,” his former communications director, Sandra Mullin, told me, “he considers it his fault.” (She also said that several members of the staff were smokers when Frieden took office—he never pressured them to quit, Mullin said, but they all did.)

What Frieden argues is this: With trans fats, it is the restaurants that are giving people no choice. “In a restaurant, it’s not labeled, and there’s no practical way to do it. Nobody goes into a restaurant and says, ‘I’ll have a plate of trans fats.’”

Strictly speaking, yes, nobody does. But they do supersize their orders of French fries. Certainly, from a public-health point of view, we do a pretty lousy job of making our own choices, even when we know which choices are better for us. “Heart disease is the leading cause of premature death in New York City,” says Frieden. “Exhorting people to eat less and exercise more is totally ineffectual.”

No, that's why the jackboot of government becomes necessary. Bravo to the piece's author, Dan Halpbern, for taking the rare step of actually considering the implications these precedents have set:

His track record clearly cuts against individual rights in favor of collective safety. As director of the Bureau of Tuberculosis Control in the early nineties, he successfully sought the detention of TB patients who repeatedly failed to adhere to treatment. And in his current position, he has pushed for a surveillance system to report diabetics’ test results as well as changes to New York law that would waive the requirement to obtain written consent before performing an HIV test. The American Civil Liberties Union has also criticized the health commissioner for his proposals to open HIV-positive patients’ medical files to health officials so that their progress may be monitored.

“It’s awfully Orwellian that the health department could get your labs, call you up, call your doctor up. I’m not sure that’s the kind of health system I want,” says Charles King, the president and CEO of Housing Works, the nonprofit organization that provides housing and services to homeless persons living with HIV/aids. King told me he found Frieden to be intractable: “He believes in what he’s doing to the point of arrogance, and as a consequence doesn’t really listen to outside voices.”

This is, of course, a very old fight, a battle over the extent to which government should be able to employ paternalistic policies: Is it acceptable to remove trans fats from restaurants? How about locking up TB patients? If these are the precedents, what would stop the city from, say, making it punishable by a prison term to have sex if you are HIV-positive? To put anyone who comes off a flight from Hong Kong in quarantine? To remove a child from a mother who drank too much wine during pregnancy?

Why not? As I wrote recently, acquiescing to this style of lawmaking necessarily invites totalitarianism.

So what shape will the restaurant industry take once trans-fats are banned? Hopefully something like Chicago's, where restaurateurs are defiant in the face of the Windy City's recent ban on foie gras, as the Chicago Tribune reports:

Chicago's foie gras ban took effect on Aug. 22, and several restaurants rebelled that night by serving the forbidden fatty liver on pizza, soul food, sausages and in other dishes.

Some chefs and restaurateurs promised more of the same--culinary civil disobedience to protest the ordinance--while also collectively suing the city to overturn the ordinance ....

The words "foie gras" actually still appear on Bin 36's dinner menu in a $14 appetizer: "Summer fig, apricot and honey terrine, and a foie gras torchon, on us." The dish includes a sizable, squat cylinder of dense, spreadable foie gras alongside the gelled fruit combination. The restaurant seems to be testing a possible legal loophole that has been much debated: If you can't sell foie gras, can you give it away?

And civil disobedience is breeding creativity:

Foie gras appeared on pizza on Archer Avenue Tuesday, complemented cornbread and catfish at a South Side soul food place, and was stacked on sausages like pats of butter at a gourmet hot dog joint on the North Side.

Chicago's immediate reaction to a city ordinance banning foie gras--the French dish made from the livers of force-fed ducks and geese--was to embrace the gray goo like never before, in flights of culinary imagination.

Rhetoric and pate abounded on the first day of the City Council's ban, as restaurateurs and gourmands openly flouted the prohibition--cultured, giddy, goose-liver-fueled acts of defiance.

Like teenagers told not drink booze, the ban is having a perverse effect:

At the same time, many diners tried the dish for the first time, drawn to the outlaw pate out of curiosity or desire to chomp on the wild side.

Some profusely thanked the restaurateurs who served it. Others laughed as they nibbled away, rolling their eyes at Chicago's avant-garde concern for poultry.

The city Department of Public Health delayed enforcement, and even Mayor Richard Daley raised his hands in bewilderment.

"I think it's the silliest law that they've ever passed," he said Tuesday.

Call it the City Council's foie gras faux pas.

And what of the actual taste?

As a host of restaurants thumbed their noses at the ban by hastily introducing the dish, diners joined the revolt just by going out to lunch.

At BJ's Market & Bakery, a soul food restaurant on Stony Island Avenue, a sign placed next to the cash register declared foie gras the special of the day, and those who had it proclaimed it delicious.

"I've had regular liver and it doesn't taste like that. I hate to say it, but it tastes like chicken," said manager Steven Jones, 22. "I tried it and I thought it was pretty good."

At Connie's Pizza on Archer Avenue, employees wedged a foie gras pizza on a table display between a pork cutlet sandwich special and a bucket of Miller Lite bottles.

His table shaking with laughter, 54-year-old Jerry Stout of Naperville pronounced that "it tastes like expensive liverwurst. But I better not say that, they might try to ban that too."

In a "Farewell to Foie Gras" spectacular, Harry Caray's Restaurant on Kinzie Street offered a foie gras on sea scallop appetizer and a foie gras and tenderloin entree. Managing partner Grant DePorter said he considered having the farewell a day earlier--but decided Tuesday made "a bigger statement."

'The Joe Moore'

A less publicized but long-standing protest continued at Hot Doug's, where proprietor Doug Sohn offered three variations of a foie gras-laced sausage despite the prohibition. In April he named the foie gras and sauternes duck sausage (with green apple mustard and goat cheese) "The Joe Moore" in honor of the proposal's sponsor.

Sales have been brisk, Sohn said, and he doesn't plan to stop selling it until more clarity about the law arrives.

The line of customers stretching out the front door of his jammed red-and-yellow store widened his smile.

UPDATE: John Stossel asks, "Why do the health police get to take away my choices?"

UPDATE II: Forgot to include this earlier. Frieden is taking credit for New Yorkers' longer lifespans. The man is a GOD.