Few Gotham restaurants paid much heed when city health commissioner Thomas Frieden announced supposedly voluntary curbs on the use of partially hydrogenated fats, so now the city is planning on making the restrictions mandatory. Among many, many foods that will apparently need to be either reformulated or bootlegged: Krispy Kreme “Hot Original Glaze” doughnuts. In the New York Sun, reporter Russell Berman quotes my reaction: “When is Nurse Bloomberg planning to let us fill up our own plates?”. (“City Wants to Ban Some Fatty Foods in Restaurants”, Sept. 27; “Freedom Fries” (editorial), Sept. 27).
Posts Tagged ‘Thomas Frieden’
NYC plans “interventions” with diabetics
More scary paternalism in the name of public health from the Bloomberg crew: the New York City government has begun “legally requiring laboratories that do medical testing to report to the Health Department the results of blood-sugar tests for city residents with diabetes — along with the names, ages, and contact information on those patients. City officials are not only analyzing these data to assess patterns and changes in diabetes prevalence in the city, but are planning ‘interventions.’ … If you wish to keep your medical data confidential, you cannot.” Coercive public-health techniques originally seen as needed to combat communicable and infectious disease will now be deployed in hopes of correcting less-than-healthy individual behavior. Where’s HIPAA, the manically overbroad federal patient-privacy law, now that it might actually do some good? (Elizabeth Whelan, “Big Brother Will See You Now”, National Review Online, Apr. 25).