Despite Evidence That Salt Is Good For You, Politicians Want To Regulate Your Salt Intake
Remember, folks, fat is the new smoking.
Suppose you wanted to test the effects of halving the amount of salt in people’s diets. If you were an academic researcher, you’d have to persuade your institutional review board that you had considered the risks and obtained informed consent from the participants.
You might, for instance, take note of a recent clinical trial in which heart patients put on a restricted-sodium diet fared worse than those on a normal diet. In light of new research suggesting that eating salt improves mood and combats depression, you might be alert for psychological effects of the new diet. You might worry that people would react to less-salty food by eating more of it, a trend you could monitor by comparing them with a control group.
But if you are the mayor of New York, no such constraints apply. You can simply announce, as Michael Bloomberg did, that the city is starting a “nationwide initiative” to pressure the food industry and restaurant chains to cut salt intake by half over the next decade. Why bother with consent forms when you can automatically enroll everyone in the experiment?
Personally, I reject the premise that the government has any business managing the public’s health to begin with. If a given citizen wants to be a fat slob, shouldn’t he or she be free to do that? Is this not still a free country? And to the extent that our individual health choices impact the overall health insurance/health care industry, isn’t that a reason to make the individual more responsible for his/her own health care instead of an excuse for the government to step in and start telling us what to eat?
Six years ago I was writing, in opposition to smoking bans, that when the big government nanny staters were done going after the smokers they’d turn and go after other things. Like salt. I was right.
When the government is dictating our diets to us, we can thank the smoking ban proponents for setting a precedence whereby the government can dictate the way we live our lives to us for the sake of our own health.
