Food Police in NYC

There are plenty of things in Kentucky Fried Chicken that are bad for your health — cholesterol, saturated fat and salt, to name a few. But only one has the potential to get the colonel's recipe banned in New York City.

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That ingredient is artificial trans fatty acids, which are so common that the average American eats 4.7 pounds a year, according to the Food and Drug Administration. City health officials say these so-called trans fats are so unhealthy they belong in the same category as food spoiled by rodent droppings.

On Monday, the Board of Health will hold its first public hearing on a proposal to make New York the first U.S. city to ban restaurants from serving food containing artificial trans fats.

Eateries are scrambling for ways to get trans fats out of their food.

KFC Corp. said it was planning a "major announcement" in New York on Monday about a change coming to all 5,500 of its U.S. restaurants. Franchise owners told several newspapers and magazines that KFC would stop using partially hydrogenated vegetable oil — the primary source of artificial trans fats.

What the food police would like the public to forget is that they're the ones responsible for this mess in the first place. They pressured restaurants to switch from butter or lard to partially hydrogenated vegatable oils believing that they were healthier for the heart.

They were wrong.

It's time to tell the food police enough is enough. Eat in moderation and don't listen to the food police when they say that X is bad or Y is good because chances are that within a few years, they'll reverse their position and your health will suffer as a result.

And that's precisely what the restaurant community in New York City and elsewhere in the country should do. They should tell the food police to stuff it.