Tuesday, November 25, 2003

Reverse Colors

Get a Grip on the FDA

-by Leslie Johnson, Phoenix, AZ USA

It probably started out pretty innocently; the FDA wants restaurants that claim foods on their menus labeled as “heart healthy” to provide nutritional information that backs up the claim. Okay, I have no problem with that. The easy and cheap solution is to remove the words “heart healthy” from the menu. Done deal.

But now the FDA is concerned with obesity in this country and will release its plan in February to combat this problem. I’m so glad that after years of dieting and exercising that my government is going to step in and cure yet another problem for me. How they are going to stop me from lifting my hand to my month an excessive number of times a day will be a daunting tasks, since my own self control has been unable to do it for years resulting in a twenty pound weight gain over the last ten years. The fluctuations in my weight over the last ten years, makes the stock market look static and rivals the ten best roller coasters in the world.

One item under discussion with restaurant associations is requiring restaurants to specify the number of calories the menu item contains. I’m sure this will work about as well as their requirement to label my Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chuck. I do feel a tremendous amount of guilt when I take that little pint and a spoon, sit on the couch, and eat the whole thing in one sitting because of that label. I am forced to turn it away from me so I can enjoy each decadent bite. I can even justify this gluttony as needing the additional calories to combat the stress of the guilt that is being inflicted on me with the knowledge of the caloric content. But it doesn’t stop me because like Oscar Wilde, “I can resist anything but temptation.” So now I’m overweight and stressed with guilt. Now I need some comfort food. Cherry Garcia does nicely. Goes well with a glass of red wine also.

One of the few treats in our life is eating out. You are waited on, you didn’t have to cook it, and better yet-someone else will clean it up. I really don’t want to know how many calories my lobster tail dripping in butter, baked potato with everything on it, freshly baked bread with butter not margarine, and limp vegetables that I won’t eat contain. I don’t want to feel the guilt of that knowledge. But if the FDA insists, I will probably have to look into having dessert to make me feel better about it.

I could go on a tangent about the cost of these types of decisions on the restaurant industry and the financial failure rate of restaurants to begin with, the increased cost to consumers, the loss of jobs that will occur, blah, blah, blah which are all true. But there is something more important to occupy the FDA’s time and attention than my waistline. A terrorist attack on our food supply. Isn’t our tax dollar better spent trying to deter that rather than my own lack of self-control? Get a Grip FDA on priorities. I would rather suffer death by chocolate than arsenic.