Regulating Your Diet

The Obama regime is, once again, expanding its power at the expense of the personal liberty of each and every American citizen. They are of course doing this for our own good – or so they will continue to claim just as all titularly beneficent tyrants do, often even as the People place a well-earned noose around their necks.

The latest excess of Obama’s nanny state is his regime’s burgeoning war on what Americans are allowed to eat and drink – specifically how much salt we’re allowed to have ready access to.

Naturally Obama’s and his Liberals’ pet media stayed largely silent on this latest intrusion into Americans’ personal lives by the regime, which is why, almost a month after the announcement, I finally found out about it. A few outlets, mostly print, did report on it though.

As reported on April 20, 2010 by the Washington Post:

The Food and Drug Administration is planning an unprecedented effort to gradually reduce the salt consumed each day by Americans, saying that less sodium in everything from soup to nuts would prevent thousands of deaths from hypertension and heart disease. The initiative, to be launched this year, would eventually lead to the first legal limits on the amount of salt allowed in food products.
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The government intends to work with the food industry and health experts to reduce sodium gradually over a period of years to adjust the American palate to a less salty diet, according to FDA sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the initiative had not been formally announced.

Officials have not determined the salt limits. In a complicated undertaking, the FDA would analyze the salt in spaghetti sauces, breads and thousands of other products that make up the $600 billion food and beverage market, sources said. Working with food manufacturers, the government would set limits for salt in these categories, designed to gradually ratchet down sodium consumption. The changes would be calibrated so that consumers barely notice the modification.

The legal limits would be open to public comment, but administration officials do not think they need additional authority from Congress.

“This is a 10-year program,” one source said. “This is not rolling off a log. We’re talking about a comprehensive phase-down of a widely used ingredient. We’re talking about embedded tastes in a whole generation of people.”

The FDA, which regulates most processed foods, would be joined in the effort by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees meat and poultry.

Currently, manufacturers can use as much salt as they like in products because under federal standards, it falls into the category deemed “generally recognized as safe.” Foodmakers are merely required to report the amount on nutrition labels.

But for the past 30 years, health officials have grown increasingly alarmed as salt intake has increased with the explosion in processed foods and restaurant meals. Most adults consume about twice the government’s daily recommended limit, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Until now, the government has pushed the food industry to voluntarily reduce salt and tried to educate consumers about the dangers of excessive sodium. But in a study to be released Wednesday, an expert panel convened by the Institute of Medicine concludes that those measures have failed. The panel will recommend that the government take action, according to sources familiar with the findings.

Although the specifics of the government’s plans have not been made public, the food industry has been bracing for a federal initiative.

The facts of this report have also been independently confirmed on April 21, 2010 by the Los Angeles Times.

Such an action by Obama’s “Food Police” is in no way surprising. After lying, cheating, bribing, and bludgeoning their way into inflicting Obamacare unto a largely unwilling citizenry it became in the federal government’s interest to regulate and strictly control any and all actions that the formerly free citizens of our country might take which would affect their overall health index. The federal government’s doing so became, instantly upon Obamacare’s passage into law, an economic requirement.

Oh yes! You and I need not even bother being our brothers’ keeper; Big Brother will be the keeper of us all and ensure that we remain healthy and appropriately fed – if we let them do so.

To paraphrase from Charlton Heston’s character, George Taylor in Planet of the Apes, “Take your stinking paws off my food, you damn dirty apes!”

The question before the American people is whether or not we have the conviction and the will to do whatever is necessary to put a stop to them.

Keep your eyes open. Travel light but load heavy, and always put another round in the enemy after they’re down. ;-)

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