A year ago, I wrote a piece about Health Nuts and their futile attempts to regulate health. So now that 12 months have gone by, do you get a sense that the transfat ban has improved our national diet and health? Tough to measure for sure but I doubt it. What is it about this time of year that causes the media to give so much airtime to the nut job health activists? I am just guessing here, but I suspect it’s all the fat people walking around and the opportunity to sensationalize it during the gluttonous Thanksgiving to New Year’s period.

Today, I saw another piece on how McDonalds needs to do a better job to change its menu to suit healthy people (activists) that probably haven’t eaten in a fast food joint in years and let’s not kid ourselves, they probably never intend to. Now, if loyal customers asked Ronald McDonald to change their menu or display calorie counts, I’d really hope the redhead would listen to their suggestions. And on the off chance that customers vote with their wallet and don’t show up, that would be a good clue to try something different. As for regulation, all it does is make the company less profitable and encourages them to pass the increased costs of compliance onto the price of a burger and fries.

Repeatedly and increasingly, our country is moving towards socialism and this assault on fast food is just one small example. What happened to personal accountability? Instead of believing that a restaurant can make food and customers can buy what they want, the health nuts feel the customer is being taken advantage of and they need a lobbying group or regulator to protect them. That’s not only sad, but it’s ineffective. My perception is that McDonalds has been cooking with basically the same ingredients and the same methods (deep fat frying) since the 1940’s. Despite that consistency, Americans are a lot fatter now than they were then and they are getting fatter. So I struggle with the basic idea that fast food is responsible for the number of unhealthy Americans. Or that nutrition labeling will save us. We are getting fatter because we make many choices that have nothing to do with fast food.

For the record, I have eaten at McDonalds, Wendy’s, Carl’s/Hardees and Burger King et al probably less than a total of 5 times this year. Usually, I go there out of convenience or because others in my car want to, not because I make a choice to buy a Big Mac compared to the Big Mike I can make on my own grill. However, on the few times I have eaten fast food this year, I haven’t been disappointed with the choices I was offered. I didn’t wish for something healthier. I wasn’t confused about the calories. Despite my lack of fast food, I am about 240 pounds. I have been as low as 230 and as high as 250 for the past 10 years. When I gain weight, it’s not the fault of fast food. When I lose it, it’s not because I ate less fast food.

No amount of regulation on fast food will change the unhealthy trends in our country. I don’t see any identifiable positive results from those efforts during the past 10 years or so since they have become more prevalent. I am confident that removing all fast food restaurants from the planet would not solve the problem. When we focus our efforts on the wrong places, we run the risk of letting the real causes continue to go unchecked.