No problem. 
It does help…probably depends a lot on the skill of the baker.
No doubt bakeries would have the toughest time. My understanding is that the taste of, say, french fries, is not affected much one way or the other…it’s more of a texture thing, which is more important with baking.
Wouldn’t the banning of trans-fats actually result in there being more choices available to restaurant-goers?
Regarding:
There’s:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/nyregion/06fat.html?em&ex=1165640400&en=8f3cc947aa59b695&ei=5087
So while the Mayor can stack the deck here, it’s a body that’s certainly more in tune with the science than a city council would be. Your city may vary.
I also wonder if this might have an ‘it only has half the fat so I end eating twice as much’ effect.
One of the great things about living in NYC is that you basically have room service, except it’s cheaper, better prepared, and has more variety than the swankiest of hotels. Add to ordering in actually eating in a restaurant and getting lunch at work, usually from a restaurant, and you have a huge amount of your diet being consumed from restaurants.
If a good part of that food can be made more healthy (or less unhealthy) by banning trans-fats then I don’t have a problem with the ban. If our favorite dishes are going to be horribly corrupted by the substitutes, then that’s going to be a problem, and I imagine the ban will modified or lifted.
Frankly, given how important restaurants are to the city, I doubt the Mayor would lobby for such a ban if it would mean catastrophe for the industry.
Here’s the Health Board’s notice, BTW in case nobody’s posted it yet.
One man’s poison is another man’s food additive. Lead is actually a good example in this case, in that there’s a long history of its use as a food additive (it’s quite sweet, which was valuable before refined sugar became widely available). Far from being immediately lethal, the effects of long-term consumption are incremental – unless of course you eat a superhuman dose of lead-glazed candies at a sitting.
Are you kidding? You don’t know that saturated fat increases one’s risk for heart disease? Did you prove that banning trans-fats will increase people’s health? Do that first, and then I’ll prove that banning butter would increase people’s health.
There’s no great substitute for shortening either.
Ask ANYONE who cooks what kind of oil goes in biscuits. Go ahead, ask them.
So by your logic it would be better to ban shellfish altogether. I’m sure glad you don’t make the laws. :rolleyes:
That’s a pretty slippery slope there - it must have Crisco on it. In YOUR argument, only one thing is regulated, but in your STRAWMAN characterization of MY argument, many things are regulated. Yeah, that’s fair. :rolleyes: I didn’t “make an issue” of those things; I simply questioned why, if one makes an issue of trans-fats, why one shouldn’t make an issue of other unhealthy things. Surely I don’t have to explain to you what a rhetorical argument is, do I?
Wow, you are so reaching now. Lead is a poison.
Look at this list:
Find “lead” on the list. Yes, it’s there. Now find “trans-fats” on the list. Huh - it’s not there, is it?
I certainly never said that. Who did?
Why is that not informative? The person who wishes to avoid consumption of trans-fats can refrain from eating at that restaurant. It’s not rocket science.
That was just a slight bit of hyperbole. I know one poster equated it to the state (it isn’t, it’s very local), and I thought, but can’t find on a scan, someone linking the ban directly to the FDA. I’m pretty sure no one…well, almost no one…thinks President Bush will attack France if they refuse to give up shortening.
But the point we were discussing was whether or not the information was even available in the first place. If it isn’t (ie, if the answer is “no”), then what is there to synthesize? And remember, we’re talking about local politicians here, not some independent government agency.
lowbrass, I seem to have lost sight of your point. Are you arguing that transfats aren’t dangerous, or that government should get out of the business of regulating food ingredients altogether?
Your categorical “lead is a poison” statement leads me to believe you have a Manichean view that things divide neatly into poisons/non-poisons. It ain’t so, and you can’t regulate on that basis.
Children die from lead poisoning. Maybe it is because they ingest more than what would normally be found in any kind of food, but it IS immediately lethal if ingested in high enough quantity. A child died recently from swallowing a charm that was made out of lead. I doubt that any child (or anyone else) has EVER died from ingesting too much Crisco at a single sitting.
People die from water poisoning. Maybe it is because they ingest more than what would normally be found in any kind of food, but it IS immediately lethal if ingested in high enough quantity. A person died recently from drinking too much water.
The Board of Health, which voted on the ban, is comprised of physicians and other health professionals appointed by the Mayor. While they are “local” I wouldn’t necessarily classify them as “local politicians”.
I also linked to their notice above, which has references, if that’s what you’re looking for.
OK, let’s do this…one of us can drink water and eat cookies made with Crisco, and the other one can eat cookies glazed with lead until one of us is dead. You pick…which test subject do you want to be?
For many years I have considered trans fats as poison, and other fats, even animal fats as healthy. I for one am very glad the government is banning poison being served as food, and eagerly await the return to McD’s fries made in beef tallow.
Okay, I’ll eat cookies each glazed with one nanogram of lead, while your cookies will each contain four tablespoons of Crisco. Go!
Cookies can’t be made with 4 tablespoons of Crisco each, and it would have to be enough lead to qualify as glazing.
I am talking about using ingredients as they would typically be used (or, in the case of lead, how they were apparently used at one time).
In other words, you recognize that one nanogram of lead is far below the dose that is going to be toxic. And yet you’re not proposing to allow food purveyors to add even the tiniest doses of lead to food, are you?
Add it? No, because there is no reason to. On the other hand, traces of undesireable substances are ALLOWED in food, because of the difficulty of removing them entirely, or preventing food from being contaminated with them. If there was a food substance that naturally contained lead, and removing all but a nanogram was possible, and it could be shown that consuming that nanogram was not harmful, then I would be OK with that.
Well, how about this, then? I read in the New England Journal of Medicine (cite) that “food is still cooked in lead vessels in parts of India to give it a distinctive flavor.” Are you okay with a New York restaurant offering that particular delicacy?
To quote my previous post:
The example you gave in no way falls into any of these criteria. 1) The lead is not naturally occurring in the food, 2) There is no way to know how much lead is in the food, and 3) There is no way to know if it is in large enough quantities to be harmful.
That being said, I am not entirely sure I would disallow a restaurant from serving it, provided that the consumer be provided with the information they need to decide if they want to take the risk. I highly doubt, in our culture, that any restaurant would choose to take the risk of serving it, anyway, at least not without a disclaimer for the patron to sign. It’s like that puffer fish they eat in Japan that is highly poisonous. If it’s not prepared correctly, it can kill you, and sometimes it does indeed kill people. I wouldn’t eat it, but hey, if a person is fully informed that it can be deadly, and they want to take the risk, then I say let them go for it. People jump out of airplanes for fun, too.
Yes, but they couldn’t ban it without approval of the city council (or whatever legislative body exists in NYC). Could they???
From…
to…
…in three easy steps.