Post Editorial Board
February 27, 2016
New York Post
Doesn’t it just figure that the one part of the Bloomberg legacy Mayor de Blasio has embraced is the Big Nanny nonsense?
OK, little salt shakers by high-sodium items on restaurant menus isn’t the worst imposition — but it’s still a stupid, pseudo-scientific moralizing gesture.
A judge last week slapped down a restaurant group’s bid to derail the city rule that requires food chains to use the black-triangled salt-shaker symbols.
And oh, how proud de Blasio is of this epic helicopter-parenting of his adult citizens:
“If your meal has so much sodium that it merits a salt shaker on the menu, then — for the sake of your health — order something else,” the mayor tweeted.
If you didn’t get it yet, he added: “This salt shaker icon will help New Yorkers make better decisions about their diet.”
Except that study after study shows people overwhelmingly ignore nanny-driven menu information. Fat people, for example, ignore calorie counts — it’s the already-thin who love them.
And you just know somebody’s going to sue a few years down the road, claiming he thought the symbol meant “add salt.”
Plus, of course, the “salt is deadly” claim is about as obsolete as the old Food Pyramid (which wrongly told Americans to pig out on carbs).
In 2014, The New England Journal of Medicine published a major study smashing the anti-salt case. One study author, Andrew Mente of McMaster University, said: “There is no longer any valid basis for the current salt guidelines. So why are we still scaring people about salt?”
Apparently because de Blasio, like Bloomberg before him, just gets too much of a charge out of lecturing to even bother with the truth.
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