City health departments do some useful work, on balance. <\/p>\n
They were mostly born of the \u201csanitary\u201d and \u201chygienic\u201d movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Appalled by the squalor and disease in the nation\u2019s crowded tenements, volunteers — at first — set about informing people about how diseases were transmitted, stressing the importance of sanitation, clean water, removing the garbage that drew rats and other vermin. <\/p>\n
They accomplished great good. Today, however, it\u2019s rarely considered enough to merely \u201cinform\u201d the public, nor are the forces of \u201cpublic health\u201d mere private volunteers whose advice we may decide whether or not to heed. <\/p>\n
Now they\u2019re backed by the force of law. <\/p>\n
Take New York\u2019s health department, and its activist standard bearer, millionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg. <\/p>\n
So far, neither the citizens nor the courts of the Big Apple have seen fit to rein in Mayor Bloomberg\u2019s campaigns to ban public smoking and the use of \u201ctrans fats\u201d in city restaurants. So, the mayor has decided to keep going in his efforts to save us from ourselves. <\/p>\n
The latest target? Salt. <\/p>\n
On Monday, the Bloomberg administration unveiled a broad new health initiative aimed at \u201cencouraging\u201d food manufacturers and restaurant chains across the country to curtail the amount of salt in their products. <\/p>\n
The plan, for which the city claims support from health agencies in other cities and states, sets a goal of reducing the amount of salt in packaged and restaurant food by 25 percent over the next five years. <\/p>\n
Public health experts say that would reduce the incidence of high blood pressure and should help prevent some of the strokes and heart attacks associated with that condition. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe all consume way too much salt, and most of the salt we consume is in the food when we buy it,\u201d said Dr. Thomas Farley, the city\u2019s health commissioner, whose department is leading the effort. Eighty percent of the salt in Americans\u2019 diets comes from packaged or restaurant food, Dr. Farley says. <\/p>\n
Needless to say, the New Yorkers insist corporate cooperation with the scheme will be entirely \u201cvoluntary.\u201d <\/p>\n
Those who were once asked to \u201cvoluntarily\u201d wear seat belts and motorcycle helmets, immunize their children, and limit their smoking in public places — not to mention those who keep asking just how low MADD would like to drive the permissible \u201cblood alcohol content\u201d for drivers — may be excused if they take their pencils and add to the end of such a sentence: \u201c… for now.\u201d <\/p>\n
It would indeed be healthier if most Americans ate less salt. But two things should be noted.<\/p>\n
First, if the \u201csave us from ourselves\u201d movement goes too far, and eventually triggers a pendulum swing in the other direction, mobs fed up with being told what to do may not stop till they\u2019ve also rebelled against and repealed much of the legitimate good the public health movement has achieved. <\/p>\n
And second, we should not allow the descendants of the \u201csanitary\u201d and \u201chygiene\u201d movements of a century ago to write the histories of their own movements without noting that they have been wrong before. <\/p>\n
Many among their number, a century ago, favored forced — or at least, far from fully informed — sterilization of the mentally disabled and of \u201cundesirable\u201d minorities. They also launched, about a century ago, what we now know as the \u201cWar on Drugs \u201c — though of course they swore up and down that they sought only \u201ctruth-in-labeling laws,\u201d that no one would EVER interfere with the right of a doctor to prescribe any analgesic he wished, or of adults to buy any drug they desired. <\/p>\n
Remind us how that one\u2019s working out — and how America\u2019s incarceration rate now ranks in the world — before you pass the salt. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
City health departments do some useful work, on balance. They were mostly born of the \u201csanitary\u201d and \u201chygienic\u201d movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Appalled by the squalor and disease in the nation\u2019s crowded tenements, volunteers — at first — set about informing people about how diseases were transmitted, stressing the importance of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[17,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-big-brother","category-medicine"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-6L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":420,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/419\/revisions\/420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}