Virginia Libertarian

Taco Bell to Ditch Trans Fats

Nov. 16, 2006 — Taco Bell today announced that it will start using a new canola oil for frying that contains no trans fats.Trans fats have been linked to an increased risk of heart diseaseheart disease.

Taco Bell restaurants will start frying with canola oil containing zero grams of trans fats — instead of partially hydrogenated soybean oil — in all of its U.S. restaurants by April 2007.

In a news release, Taco Bell says it began the transition more than two years ago “with extensive consumer taste tests to preserve Taco Bell’s signature flavors.”

This is how the restaurant industry should be making the switch from trans-fat products.  Not like this:

The New York City Board of Health voted unanimously yesterday to move forward with plans to prohibit the city’s 20,000 restaurants from serving food that contains more than a minute amount of artificial trans fats, the chemically modified ingredients considered by doctors and nutritionists to increase the risk of heart disease.

The board, which is authorized to adopt the plan without the consent of any other agency, did not take that step yesterday, but it set in motion a period for written public comments, leading up a public hearing on Oct. 30 and a final vote in December.

Do we see the difference here?  And you can also bet that Taco Bell doing it voluntarily will cost everyone a lot less money, and it will be done faster.  If people don’t want to eat trans-fat produced foods, then the industry will shift away from that on its own, because it will have to.  If people don’t care, then the industry really doesn’t need to shift, and we don’t need the nanny state telling us what we can eat, any more than we need it to tell us where we can smoke.  Now, I’m not a smoker, but I can freely choose to go somewhere that doesn’t allow it, and freely choose not to go somewhere that does.  With these kinds of laws, those freedoms have been taken away.  With each passage of these kinds of laws, we move a little more toward a totalitarian government that, instead of telling us what we can’t do, instead now tells us what we are allowed to do.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 8:44 am and is filed under National. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.