FDA to ban trans fat

In all the hubbub around the Supreme Court’s big end-of-session rulings on same-sex marriage and Obamacare, some high-level banana-republicanism was overlooked. The FDA has given American food manufacturers three years to get the “trans fat” out of their food. Trans fat, as you may know, is a type of fat that’s partially hydrogenated—reacted with hydrogen—to discourage its melting at room temperature. Trans fats became popular in the United States a couple of decades ago after the food police frightened everyone into using them instead of wonderful saturated fats like butter and lard, wrongly deemed an imminent threat to the nation’s arteries. (As an aside, The Scrapbook rarely feels sorry for millennials, but those of us old enough to remember the pre-1990 McDonald’s fries, cooked in beef tallow, can attest that the world really was a better place then.) Eating trans fats increases the quantity of low-density lipoprotein in your bloodstream—that is, LDL cholesterol, or so-called bad cholesterol. LDL transports fat around your body; without it you’d die. It’s only bad if you have too much of it. Of course, almost any harmless thing can kill you in excess. If the FDA gets its way, trans fat in processed foods will go the way of lead in paint and asbestos in insulation. But there’s a major difference: Lead is inherently toxic and asbestos is inherently carcinogenic. Trans fat is inherently harmless—what’s dangerous is using it to excess...more

Its Prohibition again.  Back then, though, it took a Constitutional amendment to ban a product. Now, apparently, it just takes a reg.  Will the food police create a black market for trans fats the way the feds did for alcohol?  Will we see a Kid Cholesterol and his gang of Trans Fat Toughies surreptitiously providing consumers with an illegal product?  Will we See Elliot Mess and his FDA agents breaking up barrels of trans fat?  Is a wanted poster for Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar in our near future?

Probably not.  You see industry has already removed this from 86% of their products and there has been a 78% decline in the consumption of trans fats.  That's a free market responding to consumer demand, long before FDA bungled their way into the issue.