Now This Is What We Were Waiting For From A Third Term!
Another campaign against another food additive . . . and the Campbell Soup Company weeps big, salty tears as they shake in their boots, hoping against hope that Supernanny Bloomberg finds another blighted neighborhood or some great new gadget to focus his attention on instead:
On Monday, the Bloomberg administration plans to unveil a broad new health initiative aimed at encouraging food manufacturers and restaurant chains across the country to curtail the amount of salt in their products.
The plan, for which the city claims support from health agencies in other cities and states, sets a goal of reducing the amount of salt in packaged and restaurant food by 25 percent over the next five years.
The BATC Editorial Board weighs in:
- First thought, Wow, it’s pretty ballsy for a city government agency to attempt to change the food industry. Second thought, This might work, but… Third thought, Hey, wait, why is a city government agency doing this? Don’t they have something better to do with their money and time?
- The Health Dept. is really cheesing me off now. Just glory hogs using the agency as a stepping stone. I buy that transfats are bad, but salt is not universally bad for you, and it’s a lame slippery slope to other goofy shit, like smoked/charred foods (possible cancer link), or whatever else. Fewer glossy ad campaigns, more stuff like vaccines.
- But maybe they don’t have something better to do…? Salt is a big issue in the American diet, that’s not in doubt, the question is just what to do about it and who should lead the change. Even if pressuring the food industry to change its ways — a la the transfat issue — is the way to make us healthier, I think it’s still something I’d feel better about seeing come down from the Surgeon General (beats talking about masturbation, anyway) than Bloomy.
- I’m guessing they do have a lot of better stuff to do, including vaccines, probably HIV/STD campaigns & education, probably putting money into their low-income clinics. I just really, really mistrust glossy media-whoring campaigns like this.
- There’s good point about whether this is more appropriate for a federal agency — right now, most of the places that have taken on trans fats (and who knows who will jump on the salt bandwagon) are cities and counties on the coasts . . . not places with a vested interest in making those salty, trans-fatty foods.
- Yeah, I’m not always against half steps, but I don’t think tweaking the ingredients in processed foods is going to do all that much good for public health. Processed foods represent a host of problems for people who overconsume them. Cutting transfat isn’t cutting the actual fat in the diets of people chugging Oreos, and cutting salt in canned soup isn’t going to do much for hypertension either.
- The food industry muzzles the truth, which is that there just aren’t many processed products that come with a shelf life that are actually healthy for you. It might be worse for the average American to get the idea (we call it a “health halo” around here) that now that x, y, and z REALLY BAD ingredients are out, now that box of fatty o’s is totally fine to eat at will. Posted: January 11th, 2010 | Filed under: Feed, Follow The Money, Things That Make You Go "Oy"
