Bloomberg led the way on national trans fats ban
Artificial trans fats were as American as apple pie when New York City’s health-conscious mayor, Michael Bloomberg, pushed to ban them from restaurant food in his city in 2006.
By Thursday, though, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had announced that it would finish off the fats for good by phasing them out of all foodstuffs nationwide.
The news was another triumph for a public health strategy pioneered by Bloomberg and his first health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Frieden, who now leads the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Few municipalities anywhere have made such a habit of using local regulation to try and force major changes in public consumption of unhealthy products.