Fatty McFat?

I just read a story on the NYC transfat ban. I recall a similar measure was considered in Chicago. My reaction to these ordinances is best described as sort of perplexed and a little scornful. I guess as a smoker, I can't help seeing the bans on things like artery clogging fat as a little bit of a double standard. It says "hey, we understand it's hard to take accountability for your own shitty dietary choices." But cigarettes? Yes, smoking's been banned in some places, but there's always a big old dose of blame on the tobacco consumer. The transfat bans and discussions which go with them do not place a similar blame on the fat-munchers. Regardless of whether I think stipulating when, how, and where people can consume things that are legal and arugably their own (bad) choice to consume, the way the issue of personal accountability is partitioned between smokers and poor eaters really rubs me the wrong way.

Take this quote from NYC Mayor Bloomberg, for example:
"Nobody wants to take away your french fries and hamburgers — I love those things, too," he said recently. "But if you can make them with something that is less damaging to your health, we should do that."

When was the last time you heard that kind of apologetic language about smokers and smoking from antismoking advocates? The common reasoning which seems to support the double standard of blame/accountability is that the negative effects of the substances contained in cigarettes smoke, unlike those in an artery clogging McMeal, are not easily contained to just one person. If you smoke in public, you are exposing others to your nasty carcinogen laced fumes which are both unpleasant and constitute a physical irritant for many people. Further, if you smoke in public you are making it very hard for people who have chosen to quit to maintain a tobacco free state.

Another argument in the various tobacco free public health campaigns and policies is that we all pay for other people's smoking habits. Even if someone were to confine her nasty health destroying tobacco habit to the privacy of her home and car, she puts herself into a higher health risk category through tobacco use. Google "health insurance" "health care costs" and "smoking". There's been plenty of interest in calculating what tobacco addiction costs not just the individuals who smoke but society. It seems to be common wisdom at this point that all of us, smokers or not, pay for individuals' tobacco addiction and use in terms of increased health care costs. Those health care costs mean higher premiums and copays for those of us lucky enough to be insured and higher taxes for the working uninsured. These claims, true or not, seem to be a significant factor in the stigmatization of smokers.

However, let's not forget that cigarettes contain a highly addictive substance. As far as I know, there haven't been any widely released studies on the physically addictive properties of fat ("fat addiction" is a totally separate thing from eating disorders, and I'm disregarding the stuff about general fat or carb addictions which are, at best, hypotheses). So if you eat this shit habitually, you are choosing to put yourself at increased risk for a variety of physical ailments and you are creating a public health nuisance that could be quite legitimately considered nearly if not exactly as bad as that caused by smoking - if we applied the same reasoning to both smoking and eating high trans fat diets. For example, the "shared cost" argument which supports a culture of stigmatization of smokers can easily be applied to people who consistently make poor dietary choices. Obesity and malnutrition resulting from overconsumption of transfats are associated with lifelong substandard physical conditions which, much like smoking, put the afflicted/consumer at risk for a greater number of diseases.

So who the hell is Bloomberg to say "no one wants to take away your fries"? Someone wants to take away cigarettes, to the point where a smoker could lose his job for smoking during his non-work time, based on the theory that even if smokers can keep their fumes to themselves, they can't keep the cost created by their legal substance addiction to themselves.

I do recognize that restaurants make it hard to make health conscious choices regarding their menus. A restaurant chain that has a lot of locations locally, Friendly's, will not provide calorie information to customers, even type 1 diabetic customers who would simply like to know how much insulin to give for the presumably responsible oriental chicken salad. I know this because I was with someone who once asked, then looked it up when he was given an uninformative answer. "We change our menu so often that we can't keep up with the nutritional information on every item" was the reason given for their providing no nutritional information. Ok, so how about they give the info for at least those things that have been on their menu for YEARS? Nope. I do think that shit like that is something public health officials can and should regulate. This issue is addressed in the NYC diet regulations recently passed, but it is poorly addressed.
(from the AP report)
Some [restaurants] that chose to inform customers about calorie content will have to list the information right on the menu. The rule would generally apply to fast-food restaurants and other major chains.

Breaking that down: It's not mandatory to provide nutrional information, and those restaurants where the info is voluntarily provided will essentially be punished for making the information available to health conscious diners. I don't blame the restaurant chains for not wanting to spend the extra printing costs for menus which include page after page of nutritional info. A reasonable alternative would be a highly visible notice on the menu which says "nutritional information is available on request" or an insert/table topper/tray liner with the info on it. I wonder if such options were considered or if the members of the NYC public health board made their menu only decisions after having seen the shocking scene in Super Size Me where a chain routinely hid the nutritional info posted in the restaurant.

It would be a simple and no more authoritarian solution than banning transfat to mandate and enforce nutrional information availability while making it less costly or difficult for restaurants to comply. But this puts the responsibility on the restaurant goers, and that brings me back to my initial point. While possibly too much blame and stigma is put on smokers, I think too little is put on the people who eat themselves and us into a national health crisis. I am a little divided on all the antismoking policies, and I certainly think the stigma is excessive. But what bothers me the most is the selective and extreme application of the notion of responsibility which translates into a motto of: Smoke yourself to death, shame on you. Eat yourself to death, shame on someone else.