NYC: MORE OFFICIAL FOOD FASCISM

About four centuries ago, England's greatest Queen -- Elizabeth I -- asked that great bureaucrat and religious tyrant, King Philip II of Spain: "Why cannot Your Majesty let your subjects go to the Devil in their own way?" She would find much cause to ask the same question today. Freedom of choice is forever under attack from arrogant "do-gooders" who would make all our decisions for us if we let them. I might mention that when I go shopping I deliberately look for groceries that are NOT "Lite", "Low" or all the rest of that BS -- on the grounds that the normal stuff generally tastes better.

The New York City health department urged all city restaurants yesterday to stop serving food containing trans fats, chemically modified ingredients that health officials say significantly increase the risk of heart disease and should not be part of any healthy diet. The request, the first of its kind by any large American city, is the latest salvo in the battle against trans fats, components of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, which three decades ago were promoted as a healthy alternative to saturated fats like butter.

Today, most scientists and nutrition experts agree that trans fat is America's most dangerous fat and recommend the use of alternatives like olive and sunflower oils. "To help combat heart disease, the No. 1 killer in New York City, we are asking restaurants to voluntarily make an oil change and remove artificial trans fat from their kitchens," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city's health commissioner, who compared trans fats to asbestos and lead as public health threats. "We are also urging food suppliers to provide products that are trans-fat free."

It is far from clear how many restaurants will heed the call of Dr. Frieden, one of the city's most activist public health commissioners in a generation. A survey by the department's food inspectors found that from 30 to 60 percent of the city's 20,000 restaurants use partially hydrogenated oil in food preparation, meaning that thousands of cooks and chefs might need to change their cooking and purchasing habits to meet the request. Trans fats are particularly prominent in baked goods, frying oils, and breading, and can be hard to replace without raising costs or changing the taste of familiar foods like cookies and French fries.

While the health department will not seek to ban the ingredient outright, it has begun an educational campaign among restaurateurs, their suppliers and the public denouncing trans fats. In a letter sent to all food suppliers in the city last week, Dr. Frieden wrote: "Consumers want healthier choices when eating out. Our campaign will increase consumer demand for meals without trans fat."....

Denmark imposed a ban in 2003 on all processed foods containing more than 2 percent of trans fat for every 100 grams of fat. Canada is considering a similar ban. Government agencies in the United States have been less interventionist, largely relying on the industry to police itself. Outside of New York, the only effort of note was a campaign in Tiburon, a small town in Marin County, Calif., that led to 18 local restaurants ending the use of trans fats....

Among the alternatives available to replace partially hydrogenated oil, Dr. Angell said, are many common monounsaturated and polyunsaturated oils like olive, peanut, sunflower and cottonseed oils. McDonald's and a few other fast food companies have pledged to use healthier alternatives to partially hydrogenated oils but have faltered in finding a solution that is both cost effective and that does not significantly alter the taste of their foods.

The city was careful to solicit the endorsement of the Restaurant Association before announcing its campaign, as well as the American Heart Association. However, many restaurant owners, workers and patrons interviewed yesterday greeted the city's campaign with some skepticism. The reaction of Karen Quam, a waitress at the Bridgeview Diner in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, was typical. "Labeling is as far as you want to go," she said. "You don't want to be telling people what to eat."

More here

And if anybody thinks that current medical pronouncements are a sure guide to what people should be forced to do, just read this little excerpt from some recent medical history:

"Of course, medicine has also had many experiences that resemble the eugenics fiasco. For example, we recently went through the premature ventricular contraction (PVC) debacle. As a resident and a cardiology fellow, I was taught by master clinicians and clinical investigators that patients who had PVCs following a myocardial infarction were at increased risk for sudden death. Moreover, I was instructed that such patients should be treated with antiarrhythmic drugs such as quinidine in order to eradicate the PVCs. Although some retrospective analyses questioned whether quinidine therapy really saved lives, most practicing cardiologists accepted the "PVC hypothesis" and treated patients liberally with antiarrhythmic agents. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the National Institutes of Health sponsored a large, multicentered, randomized and double-blind trial, the Cardiac Arrhythmia Suppression Trial (CAST) in order to test whether PVC suppression really benefited patients with ventricular ectopy following a myocardial infarction. To everyone's surprise, PVC suppression with antiarrhythmic drugs actually was associated with a higher rate of sudden death or cardiac arrest than occurred in the placebo group. The publication of this trial led to a dramatic decrease in the use of antiarrhythmic drugs. The PVC hypothesis had been disproved!

The experience with the CAST trial is not unique. Many other examples of medical "common knowledge," so-called pearls, taught for decades and even generations, have been shown to be false. For example, each of the following pearls taught to me as a student or house officer has now been shown to be untrue: Don't give nitrates to patients with acute myocardial infarction; don't use beta blockers in patients with heart failure; tight control of glucose in diabetic patients is not beneficial; peptic ulcer disease is the result of stress; ST segment elevation myocardial infarction is always transmural in nature, and so on".



The Modern-day Red Indian Scare

I have deferred blogging on this issue because the whole thing is so wrongheraded that it was difficult to know where to start in saying anything about it. The use of "Indian" names by sporting teams clearly implies admiration of the strength, determination and bravery of the Indians concerned, so how can it be in any way demeaning to American Indians? Sporting teams don't call themselves "The Powderpuffs", "The Poofters" or "The Weaklings" do they? They want to convey by the name they use how admirable and formidable they are. So such names are in fact a great and generous tribute to the heroism and strength that America's native people showed in defence of their original way of life. How the sick minds of the Left can see it any other way continues to be beyond me. The article below from the Wall St Journal, however, covers a lot of the issues

European intellectuals have long complained of excessive moralism in American foreign policy, politics and attitudes toward sex--the lingering effect, as they see it, of our Puritan heritage. But if they want to spot the real Puritans among us, they should read our sports pages.

Last week, the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced that it would ban the use of Native American team names and mascots in all NCAA-sponsored postseason tournaments. If a team turns up wearing uniforms with words like "Indians," "Braves" or similar nicknames the association deems "hostile and abusive," that team will be shown the locker-room door. Surely I was not the only reader who noticed that this edict came out of the NCAA's headquarters in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Already, one university president, T.K. Weatherall of Florida State, one of 18 colleges and universities on the Association's blacklist, is threatening to take legal action--and I hope he does. Florida State's athletic teams are called the Seminoles, and the university says it has permission from that tribe in Florida to use that name. Not good enough, counters Charlotte Westerhaus, the NCAA's new vice president for "diversity and inclusion." "Other Seminole tribes," she claims, "are not supportive."

One might suppose that any organization with an Office of Diversity and Inclusion would welcome mascots and team names reflecting the Native Americans among us. But no, the NCAA is on a moral mission--the less sensitive might call it a warpath--to pressure colleges and universities to adopt its standards for iconic correctness. Cheered on by moralizing sportswriters like George Vecsey of the New York Times, Jon Saraceno of the USA Today and the entire sports department of the Portland Oregonian, which will not print "hostile" nicknames of teams (e.g., it calls the Washington Redskins "the football team from Washington"), several member schools have already caved in.

Stanford was the first major university to drop Indians as its athletic moniker; that was 30 years ago, when group identities and sensitivities were the most inflamed. Stanford's teams are now the Cardinal, presumably for the color of their jerseys. But who can tell?--it may have hidden ecclesiastical connotations. Marquette changed from Warriors to Golden Eagles, despite continuing complaints from alumni who find it as difficult as I do to imagine why the Warrior image would offend any Native American. After all, their forefathers weren't wimps.

Perhaps the most craven decision was that of St. John's University, which changed from the Red Men to the Red Storm. In both its former and current names, "Red" referred to the color of the St. John's uniforms--not to Native Americans, of which there are very few in Queens, N.Y. The change is reminiscent of a decision by Cincinnati's pro baseball team, which changed its name from Reds to Redlegs during the McCarthy hearings in the 1950s.

Interestingly, the NCAA has made an exception for the Braves of the University of North Carolina-Pembroke because the school has a tradition of enrolling Native American students. Maybe this will clear the way for Dartmouth's Big Green to restore its Indian mascot and team name, Indians, which the school dropped in 1969. After all, Dartmouth was founded by Eleazar Wheelock, a Puritan minister, for the purpose of providing "Christianization, instruction and education" for "Youth of the Indian Tribes of this Land. . .and also of English Youth and any others." The college still offers a major in Native American Studies and since 1970 has graduated some 500 American Indians.

The NCAA, thank God, has no control over pro sports teams and their chosen totems. But among sportswriters there are voices that echo the same faux moralizing by demanding name changes from the Atlanta Braves, Golden State Warriors, Kansas City Chiefs, Chicago Blackhawks and Cleveland Indians. In a typical column, Mr. Saraceno recently lamented the abject failure of "activists" to get Cleveland's baseball team to drop its logo, Chief Wahoo, which, he opined, "is probably the most outrageous, blatant symbol of racism in sports today."

I don't know where Mr. Saraceno was in the early '60s, when racism wore a human face. I was a civil-rights reporter in Nebraska then and remember visiting American Indian reservations where I saw kids wearing caps festooned with the Milwaukee Braves' logo and--yes--with Chief Wahoo. In 2002, Sports Illustrated published a survey of American Indians living on and off reservations. More than eight in 10 approved the use of Indian names and mascots for college and pro teams; a slight majority even approved of the clearly questionable "Redskins."

Moralistic sportswriters need to distinguish between Native American activists and paternalistic surrogates. In Cleveland, for example Mr. Saraceno's unnamed activists are primarily officials of the United Church of Christ, an ultra-liberal Protestant denomination that moved its national headquarters there from New York in 1990 and immediately began a campaign against the Indians and Chief Wahoo. As it happens, the church is the denominational descendent of the old New England Puritans, now committed to diversity and inclusion. I was raised in Cleveland, and these interlopers don't seem to know or care that the baseball team took its current name in 1915 to honor popular outfielder Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot Indian from Maine who batted .313 lifetime. His teammates called him "Chief."

As a matter of policy, the NCAA now encourages schools to imitate the University of Iowa, which won't allow its Hawkeyes to compete against nonconference schools that "use Native American nicknames, imagery or mascots," although "Iowa," itself, is a tribal name. Where does that leave the University of Illinois--a school in the same athletic conference, the Big 10--whose teams are called the Fighting Illini and whose gridiron mascot is Chief Illiniwek? Illiniwek--the word signifies "man"--was the name of an Indian confederation that the French called Illinois. If "the Fighting Illini" is "hostile and antagonistic" in the eyes of the NCAA, must the university, too, change its name? And the state as well? What about North and South Dakota? Or community colleges in Miami, Cheyenne, Pueblo and Peoria--Indian names all--not to mention a city named Sioux? Where do embedded history and folkloric iconography end and negative stereotyping begin?

Here's a suggestion: If the NCAA and other latter-day Puritans are concerned about social prejudice, they ought to investigate Notre Dame. Surely the name for its athletic teams, the Fighting Irish, is a slur on all Irish-Americans. The label derives from anti-Catholic nativists who reviled the poor and mostly uneducated Irish immigrants who came to these shores in the mid-19th century--a drunken, brawling breed, it was said, who espoused the wrong religion. When the fabled Four Horsemen played football for Notre Dame, the team was called the Ramblers. In 1927, the university officially adopted the Fighting Irish, thereby transforming a pejorative nickname into something to cheer about.

If there are Native Americans who feel that Indians or Warriors or Braves is somehow demeaning, they might reflect on the Notre Dame experience. And if the NCAA really cares about diversity and inclusion, it ought to establish an office of Indian Affairs to help Native American athletes with collegiate aspirations. Meanwhile, all paleface Puritan surrogates, beginning with the NCAA, should butt out.