Sans Trans Fats

After restaurants failed to satisfactorily comply with a voluntary ban on trans fats in New York City's restaurants, the city is planning legal enforcement of such a ban.

While I am a public health nut, I am not sure that this is a prudent move. Some are comparing it to the ban on indoor smoking in NYC, but this doesn't quite work. While the ban may have curbed overall smoking, its primary motivation was that smoking affects other people who don't smoke. This is not immediately the case with trans fat consumption.

NYC isn't banning trans fats altogether, e.g. from grocery story shelves. The ban in only restaurants seems arbitrary. NYC didn't ban cigarettes altogether, because we generally recognize that a rational person, knowing the risks, has the right to damage his own body. Why can we not say the same for eating trans fats?

The city's argument might be along the lines that when eating at a restaurant, consumers have no way of knowing what ingredients and nutrients are in the food they are eating. This could be easily solved. List nutrition info for each dish; this info is easy obtainable by establishments from nutrition info of ingredients and would be for the most part a one-time inconvenience. I would even go so far as to list a warning next to dishes containing trans fats, explaining the health risk their consumption entails. Using cigarettes as an example, foods containing trans fats could also be taxed. It is pretty well accepted that trans fats (and saturated, for that matter) contribute to cardiovascular disease. Don't remove the freedom to eat such foods, but make the consumer pay for the health care costs he is creating, costs which bear on private insurance rates and especially on Medicare budgets (the vast majority of health consequences of poor diet manifest as chronic disease later in life).

Every person has the right to harm himself. He just doesn't have the right to make the rest of us pay for it.